What’s happening is the focus of shared hosting is changing. Bandwidth is cheaper than ever, hard drives cost almost nothing. These days, real usage is measured on power. Raw processing power needed for a certain site. Customers are now being issued to servers, and measured on servers by their resource usage.

However, it’s unfortunate that most current hosts hide this fact under a large and confusing Terms of Service agreement where they state and impose various, confusing resource limiters. The simple fact is: any site that will actually use all the bandwidth and space they offer should be running on it’s own server. But of course, these hosts still want their money and customers, so they happily take them on, and simply suspend them for breaking one of the various TOS statements.

When choosing a web host, make sure you read the Terms of Serivce in full.

At the 16 page point, there was still no conclusion. No reply from any Pacific Rack representatives, and no statement from any WHT mods. Finally, further down page 16, a representative from OC3 and Pacific Rack, the president, Milan Mishan spoke up:

Hello, my name is Milan (Ilan Mishan), and I am the owner and President of OC3 Networks and Pacific Rack. This will be my only post on this subject. We DO NOT engage in shady business practices and I would like to focus on the TRUTH. There have been many exaggerations and complete untruths stated which have been assumed to be facts, which need to be addressed.

Alex Ferrier IS Chris Gotzmann

When I hired Chris a year ago solely as a sales rep for Pacific Rack, he explained two things to me, what actually happened 5 years ago, and what the WHT perception of what happened was.

Before I hired Chris, I looked all through Google and Web Hosting Talk for instances of him being a scammer. I simply could not find anyone who got scammed and I made the choice to let him operate from an alias rather than try to explain the entire issues to WHT which as I can see now is fed by mob mentality.

Chris definitely made some mistakes when he was 16, but after listening to what actually happened and doing my own research, I decided to trust him and give him his second chance. We have all made mistakes in business, I for example grew too quickly in 2003 without paying attention to who my customers were and what customers a company I purchased had, and ended up hosting some spammers through a corporate acquisition. Upon learning about this, I spent the next year cleaning the base from spammers and I in no way support or host spammers.

When I hired Chris it was under very specific rules and guidelines. Chris knows his employment (as with all of my staff) is dependent on his continual adherence to our ethical guidelines. We absolutely do not condone unethical business practices, and for his entire time with me he has not shown any deviation from my guidelines.

There have been many ASSUMPTIONS and RUMORS that have been perceived as truth! We need to clear these up and prevent false information from spreading.

When Chris was 15 years old, he attempted to run his first internet venture “racksmart”, his partner - a 30 something year old had some shady business dealings with Tina before he and Chris were involved and are completely unrelated to Chris. The company didn’t succeed and folded after just a few months.

This is where Foundry NAP started. FNAP eventually made its way to be colocated with Karl at Steadfast, and was hosted on a single rack.

FNAP’s History:
FNAP was started by Chris when he was 15/16, when he was 17 he suddenly dropped off the internet as he was hospitalized for radiation therapy and surgery related to colon cancer. During this time he was unable to pay his colo bill and manage FNAP. Karl shut off service upon non-payment, thus resulting in the end of FNAP. FNAP was nothing more than a very small kiddy host that went under.

From all the research I did, I concluded that there were no scams!

There are only a few unsubstantiated internet claims I could find of him being a “scammer:”

1) A customer hosting Warez had his account terminated with no refund as per ToS. Just like any other host.

2) A package bought from EBAY shipped via UPS. The package was never received and as such a paypal complaint was filed and awarded in Chris’s favor. There was never a delivery confirmation or signature – the sellers “friend” chose to spam the internet rather than file the paperwork with UPS for insurance reimbursement.

3) A host by the name of Visionary who attempted to scam Racksmart and who’s thread was jumped in (http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=200062&page=2) by Poundhost confirming that this Visionary person had pulled the same scam on them and attempted to sully their name.

4) A single managed customer was put on the webserver for FNAP as Chris, 16 or 17 at the time, had a failing business and couldn’t afford to buy another server. THIS WAS WRONG AND UNACCEPTABLE ACTION OF A 16 YEAR OLD.

Chris DOES owe Karl a past due hosting bill accrued as his company went out of business, same as any other host. While normally these are normally thrown out while the LLC is dissolved, in the interest of doing what is right, I would personally like to work with Karl on resolving any past due balance.

Alpha Red:
Chris, needing a job and wanting to utilize his skills in the industry went to work for Alpha Red. WHT simply continued to snowball his tiny companies closure and without the ability to defend himself (he was banned from WHT) the issue just continued on from a small host going out of business with Steadfast taking over all the equipment on the rack, to the COMPLETELY false claim that he “scammed people” stealing “hundreds of thousands of dollars”.
Because of his inability to defend him self and the mass amount of rumors and assumptions that were perceived as facts, I assume the decision was made to use an alias. Chris was never an executive at AlphaRed and was only a sales rep.

To reiterate:

Chris HAS NEVER scammed people out of “hundreds of thousands of dollars”. The claims you see today have grown over a period of FIVE years that have gone from a small kiddy host going out of business to a “notorious” internet legend that now belongs on Snopes.

IT IS IMPORTANT TO NOTE; NO ONE ON THIS THREAD OTHER THAN KARL HAD ANY INVOLVEMENT OR HAD ANY DAMAGES TO THEM OR THEIR COMPANIES BY THE SHUTTING DOWN OF HIS ONE RACK. THE MAJORITY OF THE POSTERS IN THIS THREAD ARE SIMPLY LOOKING FOR A BIT OF FUN AND DRAMA AS MOST HAVE ADMITTED.

Chris is simply a sales rep for Pacific Rack, and has provided fantastic service to all the customers he has worked with. He has been stand up, and an asset to our company. He is NOT going to be let go, and he will continue to be one of the sales reps here. We have 2 other sales reps (Jordan and Adam), that work with Pacific Rack clients that you can speak with if you’d rather.

I am willing to back Chris fully, and will cover any past due bill that he has with Karl/Steadfast in order to ensure a fair resolution.

In Conclusion:
Look though webhosting talk, look at our reviews, we provide fantastic service to our customers and everyone has been very happy. We have absolutely nothing to hide and the only reason it was chosen to use the name Alex was to avoid the completely untrue allegations by this community and the stigma that follows him from self-admitted drama seekers.
Not only has Chris been attacked in this thread, but you have also attacked a bystander (Kate) and made some borderline sexually harassing statements regarding her transition from Kevin to Kate. This in itself is disturbing to me and you should be ashamed.

Chris did break the rules of WHT by having another account. Because of this, we fully respect WHT’s choice to disable his account.

Ilan Mishan
President
OC3 Networks and Web Solutions, LLC

Finally the truth has come out, but what does this mean for Pacific Rack? The general opinion in posts following the above is that Pacific Rack were trying to give someone a second chance, but that they did this is the wrong way. More shocking is the fact that Milan seems to dismiss the serious-ness of the 5 figure sum which Alex/Chris actually still owes SteadFast Networks. However, he did agree to work out any issues. Finally, it also seems strange that it’s OK to not refund people if he was simply admited to hospital: those people are still owed their money!

I expect this will result in a hugely decreased sales for Pacific Rack, despite their otherwise glowing reviews.

1. Firstly, the fact that Skylar (owner of Crissic), was holding the customers domain name hostage, despite it not having anything to do with the design issue
2. Secondly, and more shockingly, the language Skylar used towards his own customers! “HELLLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO stupid”, “it is perfectly legal you dipshit”, “milky milky time little man”, “go cry to mommy”.

Is this really how you treat your customers Skylar? Wow, it’s quite baffling, how can you run a business in this manner. Yes, clients can get annoying, and they can be bad clients, but there is never any reason to act like that. After heated discussion (and Skylar claiming the entire thing was a lie), the domain was finally returned to the owner, and they parted ways.

The thread also ended up being a discussion around the “younger hosts”. Teenagers running web hosts (Skylar is only 15). I know some teenage web hosts, and they run a good ship. Its a real shame that certain teens act in such a disgusting way, because it shames the rest of the teenagers too, which is wrong.

Throughout the thread, further research was conducted into Skylar Macminn, and whether he is actually legally allowed to own an “LLC” at the age of 15. The conclusion in general was that the LLC status was illegal. Skylar also seems to show a severe lack of knowledge when it comes to the law, he believes his TOS and LLC status protects him personally from any liabilities and potential sueings.

Skylar’s blog (containing posts explaining that he runs Crissic while in class at college, where the IT admin’s are “too stupid” for his clever tactics for getting past the proxies) was also located, here (surprise surprise, some posts have gone “missing” since they were linked on WHT).

What’s going on Skylar, are you out of your depth with the legal issues? Have you any customer service skills?

I have requested a comment from Skylar, but have yet to recieve a response as of now.

According to Jon Watson, the origional owner of HP, the company was passed over to Rama Media Group on the 31st March this year, yet none of the customers seemed to acually know this. Why? Because they weren’t notified, the only notification was on the HP company forums. When signing up for a hosting account, you don’t expect to have to read their forums/register at their forums just to see whats going on, this is what email is designed for!

The story gets stranger, firstly, in the whois record for hostingpuppy.com, the contact name is still “Jon Watson”, after three months? Secondly, Jon Watson has continued to post offers on WHT in relation to Hosting Puppy’s buck-a-gig hosting. Has the company really been sold?

Good luck to all Hosting Puppy customers, sites seem to be bouncing offline and online, hopefully you have backups because it looks like it might be time to move hosts. Good luck!

This really only applies to people looking for either colocation services or dedicated servers. Most people simply don’t look at the datacenter location/size/quality when purchasing shared/reseller or vps hosting. Anyway, the following is a list of key factors in choosing the right datacenter:

1. Network. Obviously a strong network is a requirement, multiple bandwidth providers and DC entry points increase reliability hugely. Be sure also to check out which providers the DC uses and what hardware they have managing it all (routers, ports, etc). Certain bandwidth providers have better networks in different places, and you might want to look for a specific network in a DC depending on your target audience’s main location. As well as provider/reliability/location, you should run some speed tests against other DC’s, ask for a 100MB test file from the provider and compare to others. Also do this during peak hours and off-peak hours, a DC might have multiple providers, but if their capacity is small, you may experience slow speeds during peak hours.
2. Power. Recently I’ve seen a couple of power outages. They happen, and a good DC should have a UPS system which will kick in, keeping everything online off a battery while they fire up the onside generator (which they should have, multiple generators for redundancy). If a DC doesn’t have either UPS or a dedicated generator, a simply power outage could potentially cause hours of unwanted downtime.
3. Support. When choosing a DC, you are obviously looking for one with excellent support or at least, a knowledgeable tech team incase you screw up or hardware fails. Testing this before purchase is pretty difficult, but you could try emailing them a couple of tech-y questions, perhaps about hardware configs or the nitty gritty details of their internal routing system. The response should give some kind of indicator of level of knowledge.
4. Reviews. This is one of the most useful indicators of a top notch solution for your dedicated servers/colocation/etc. Customer reviews. Finding reviews couldn’t be easier, here at Host Scout we have lots, some from other websites and some submitted directly. This means we have the most reviews available. Of course, there are other good websites too, try out some of the links in the sidebar to hunt down the reviews.
5. Research. I cannot stress this enough, but do your research! You may have just finished developing your latest application or website, and be so eager to launch you’ll buy anything from anyone! Don’t, slow down, wait, look at reviews, submit sales requests, ask questions, build a list of potential hosts, but do not rush into a purchase (nor be hassled by sales teams and their “one time” offers).

Good luck finding a good provider!