Wow im shocked this thread is actually still going. Its quit simple actually, we purchased INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY. This sale included their domain name, templates, their domain reseller which still had a positive balance as well. Along with a few other licenses etc that they owned.
GeekRack,
I do not know you, do not know about this full topic, but I know a few things about the people that are buying the "hosting" companies with mindsets like this.
They never consider that someplace there are people that put contracts on the equipment, space, bandwidth and build out costs of a datacenter. Some of these hosting companies commit to long term contracts to get the cost of bandwidth, power and servers down. When a company like yours purchases these they leave those datacenters holding the bag. They do many other things from time to time as well. I can not comment about any specific incidents that I have been involved in recently, but will say they would shock most people of what these "buying" companies have done.
With that being said, most of these "purchasing" companies are doing fine because they move the customers to a lesser cost facility, lower the over head, lower bandwidth cost, and charge the same price. From what I have seen most of the customers stay because it is harder to move than to stay, but they don't realize that the quality of service has went down so much.
Some of these companies will continue to advertise that they are in the nice facility and give that nice facility a bad reputation when the new company fails to keep its uptime promises. We have even had people downgrade the network from our premium or custom blends(8 carriers available) to a single homed value network and then advertise all or some of our carriers on their website it makes the datacenter look bad when it isn't even the datacenter's fault.
Many datacenter's can not compete with the low cost facilities because their O&M costs are so high. For example just on a single UPS system this year I have spent about $65,000.00 to keep it up and running correctly. It had no problems but it was just time to do all of the maintenance. Would it have ran if I didn't spend that, probably. Would I have relied on it for life and limb, no. In our datacenter we literally deal with life and death issues on a daily basis. Every day of the week there is a Dr. connected to our facility monitoring surgeries and making brain surgeon recommendations, downtime and deferred maintenance is not an option. But some facilities that do not require true 24x7x365 uptime it is an option and they are much cheaper to run. I recently had someone ask why I couldn't match a $250.00/rack price with 20 amps of power, and I said there was no reason for me to even try, our electricity alone without any support or real estate costs are higher than that.
My last rant is when you order a rack in a datacenter such as ours it costs between $2500.00 and $5500.00 just to get your equipment in the rack and it started. We do not cheap out on a lot of things and it costs us money, I understand people have budgets, but you have to look at what you are getting. Price a Compaq rack compared to a good lockable metal tech rack and you will see about $2500 of what I am talking about when it is fully optioned out, then you have UPS/Generator/Routers etc.
Something Said,
-TD