Some Research Into IHSystems
Some Research Into IHSystems
I originally posted this on the forums at doorhost.net, but I've copied here too. It concerns my (former) webhost Doorhost.net and the people who bought the business, IHSystem.com
I've been doing a bit of research, and thought you might like to hear the results and a little bit of speculation.
The research is incomplete, as I've a limited amount of time, but interesting nevertheless.
I thought (as you probably did) that when Atiq arrived on the forums, he was going to take over the role that Eric had, as the solver of all our problems. Well that may not be so.
Well Atiq's full name is Atiq Siddiqui, and his online name is cib3r_guy. At IHSystem he is listed as Project Co - ordinator.
Atiq likes to make some posts on this forum (there may be others)....
http://www.webhostingtalk.com
He does not make posts in threads about (say) server configurations, or resolving DNS issues. The only threads he posts in are threads where people are selling all or part of their hosting company, and Atiq, as a representative of IHSystem, is generally there ready and willing to put in an offer.
So, I'm making the assumption that he is not a techie, but an administrator.
Now when Eric was around, we all had the confidence that the person we posted our problems to would be the same person that sorted them out. This is no longer the case.
Atiq is probably (at best) a phone call away from whoever actually sorts out problems, with all the potential for mistranslation and misunderstandings that chinese whispers seem to result in.
It seemed strange to me (and probably to you too,) that someone would lay out all the money and effort to buy a previously existing webhost, and then go out of their way to annoy the clients that came with the business.
Changes are inevitable when something like this happens. even hardware problems are understandable and will be accepted as a fact of life by most of the clients. But this is only if they are kept informed of the proceedings.
And the complete refusal by IHsystem to keep the clients informed is disasterous for the clients.But it's going to be damaging to IHSystem too. And it's especially damaging to the reputation of Doorhost - which must pain Eric, considering the amount of time and effort he put into building it up.
Now the speculation.
It seems that IHSystem has been aggressively buying up small webhosting companies.
Perhaps they have overextended themselves, and no longer have the money or manpower to service everything that they now own. That would mean that Doorhost (and perhaps their other recent purchases) may well be going to be sold on again so IHSystem can get their business back under control.
Another possibility.
IHSystem is trying to build up a portfolio of seemingly healthy looking webhosting services, so that they themselves can sell the business on to a third party at some future date - and not too far in the future if their reputation suffers with others as it has at Doorhost.
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As I say this is just speculation, and there may well be other more accurate reasons.If you've got any, I'm sure we'd all be glad to hear them.
posted by ShirtBloke @ 3:17 PM
2 Comments:
I am impressed on your search and assumptions; you are almost right on track except we are NOT planning to sell our business.
When we got DoorHost we retained Eric, actually he is still supporting DoorHost clients, though it added cost but we wanted to retain and add more clients to DoorHost and keep on providing excellent service DoorHost customers are accustomed to.
Just to give you a brief introduction. IHSYSTEM.COM core business is dedicated servers and complex hosting for small to mrdium size enterprises and we own our own data centers. In 2003 we wanted to add a shared hosting platform on Linux & Windows as an added product, and we added few companies by acquiring them and one of the companies is DoorHost.
I hate to say this; but it is mainly upper management fault, the way we handled it and setup the migration strategy and did not consider couple of things. Atiq has worked very hard and he is excellent technical & dedicated person, he did his best and still doing a marvelous job to keep it up and running but he lacked the skill in cPanel and there were some vulnerabilities which effected too while migrating and he is working with Eric to provide support to DoorHost clients, Eric also learned over the period by dedicating his time. There were many customize configuration were done for individual clients which I think should not have been done on first place which effects other clients as you very well know this is a shared hosting and a standard must be follow. It is not an excuse for not responding and failed to make it better, but I promise one thing you will see a tremendous change in support and services.
I just wanted to add one more thing DoorHost was hosted another data center which buys cheapest bandwidth where our backbone is high end provider and we could not afford to provide an unlimited bandwidth for this price again this is not an excuse and we should be more proactive. Most of the clients were not abuser but there were few accounts who setup to use this just to spam or misuse which we could not allow and most of our efforts went to fight fires every day by identifying and cleaning/terminating such accounts.
As of today it is very clean and we will provide a great less expensive web hosting for clients like you we do not want people to abuse a great service offered by DoorHost.net
I'm sure all this is true.
But it's been too long and I really can't be bothered arguing the toss after all this time.
Especially not to Anonymous!
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