Has VPSlink been bought?

[lucth]

Did you fellows get the announcement in the mail?

What do they mean by "transition to new ownership"? Have they been bought by another company?

What do they mean by "aggressively pursuing our commitment to providing you with the best value in hosting"? Have they been in financial difficulty, therefore struggling to maintain quality levels?

What do they mean by "Partnerships with industry leaders, including Google, Yahoo! and Facebook"? What kind of partnership can a Web hosting company have with ad mongers and social networks?

What do they mean by "we will be working very hard to make this transition a successful one"? Why not just tell us what is going on? I assume this is bad news, or else it would have been announced with a lot of pride and a lot more clearly.

What do they mean by "walk you through the migration process"? What kind of disruptive migration is this that we have to be walked through it?

VPSlink, I am a professional writer. Don't give me corporate upbeat spin bullshit. I can see right through it. Please tell us exactly what is going on so we can plan OUR transitions if need be. It's the only DECENT thing to do. If you keep communicating in corporate bullshit code, I will assume you have no respect for the fact that we too, have a lot at stake and the right to be prepared, consequently I will also assume you have been bought by a large corporation because that's the kind of underhand and inconsiderate attitude I have learned to expect from large corporations.

[tgk]

I'd like to know too...

[Matt@VPSLink]

What do they mean by "transition to new ownership"? Have they been bought by another company?

Yes, VPSLink (and Spry) have been purchased by a new management team, who will run things after the transition.

What do they mean by "aggressively pursuing our commitment to providing you with the best value in hosting"? Have they been in financial difficulty, therefore struggling to maintain quality levels?

No, VPSLink has not been in financial difficulty. However, we think we can bring more value to VPSLink by offering some new things into the mix. Domain registration and renewal, SSL certificates, integrations with other services. More practically, you'll start by moving to new hardware, and you'll have a bigger support and sysadmin team keeping an eye on things.

What do they mean by "Partnerships with industry leaders, including Google, Yahoo! and Facebook"? What kind of partnership can a Web hosting company have with ad mongers and social networks?

Yes, these partnerships will provide you with advertising credits, allowing you to advertise on these networks for free, up to a certain limit. That's only if you choose to use them.

If you have success, you can continue your campaigns once the credit runs out; if you don't, you can discontinue them.

We do anticipate some folks taking advantage of these ad credits, depending on their type of business. We will also offer an integration with Google Webmaster Tools, and we have plans to potentially offer even more services with Google down the road.

On top of that, there's an integration with eNom (for domain registration) and VeriSign (for easy provisioning of SSL certificates) on the horizon. There are other integrations as well.

Will everyone need them? No. But there are certainly some folks who'll want to take advantage of these things as they fit their business.

What do they mean by "we will be working very hard to make this transition a successful one"? Why not just tell us what is going on? I assume this is bad news, or else it would have been announced with a lot of pride and a lot more clearly.

The goal was to not overwhelm people with lots of news at once. This is the introduction. You'll get a series of emails over the next few weeks (leading up to your particular transition) that will detail what you need to do.

It'll let you know when you are scheduled to move, give you an opportunity to move your date (if you need to), and exactly what you need to do.

What do they mean by "walk you through the migration process"? What kind of disruptive migration is this that we have to be walked through it?

It shouldn't be disruptive. We'll copy your data across (while your container is running), then shut it down for a small period of time to copy over the final files, and then start it up again on the new server.

You'll keep your IP, keep your OS template, keep whatever you've done to your container. You'll just be on new hardware, in a new data center.

VPSlink, I am a professional writer. Don't give me corporate upbeat spin bullshit. I can see right through it. Please tell us exactly what is going on so we can plan OUR transitions if need be. It's the only DECENT thing to do. If you keep communicating in corporate bullshit code, I will assume you have no respect for the fact that we too, have a lot at stake and the right to be prepared, consequently I will also assume you have been bought by a large corporation because that's the kind of underhand and inconsiderate attitude I have learned to expect from large corporations.

Our plan is to be completely transparent about what we're doing and how we're doing it. We're really sorry if the message came across as spin; we were concerned that we'd overwhelm people by inundating them with too much information at once. With today's message, we wanted to give everyone a heads up about what was happening. We have every intention of providing each of you with more information -- specific to your container(s) -- about when the move will take place, and how it will work.

For what it is worth, believe me, we know you have a lot at stake. For this to be successful for us, it has to be successful for you.

[chriss]

Thanks for the update Matt.
Whatever happens, don't let DanL slip through the net.

[dairiki]

I was about to provision a new VPS this morning when The Email came
through. Now I'm going to wait a bit until the smoke clears. For now, here are a few more questions.


Is the Seattle data center going to be going away at some point? After the "transition" are we all going to be running out of the Massachussetts data center?

(One of the reasons we chose vpslink was the Seattle data center. Our user base is all located in the PNW. I guess it's not a show-stopper, but the low ping times are a big plus for us.)


Can you give a rough idea for the time-scale of this transition. Do you expect the transition to be completed in weeks? Months?


Who is the new owner? Do they have experience (and a track record) in the web/vps-hosting market? How much of the current Spry/VPSlink management and staff are staying on? (And for how long?)


I have been through a couple web host buy-outs before. Neither one went particularly smoothly, and both resulted in a long-term degradation in quality of service and support. I hope this time will be different.

[Cwewmpz]

WOW. I had that same email but all I read was that there was new Boston, Massachusetts data center. Talk about missing the entire email.

I second the dan statement. My experience with support has been less than stella so I feel this migration in a very negative way.

[chall]

Hmmm. VPSLink in the past has been so open and forthcoming, that this sudden news does seems a bit out of character.

One the one hand, congratulations to "Cameron Jones ... and the VPSLink Team", since I am sure the deal was very much to their benefit!

But I, too, am concerned about "migration ... to the new Boston datacenter", since I selected VPSLink in no small part specifically because of the location.

If that location changes, then VPSLink becomes less "different", and more like "all the others". And thus more of a commodity, so they will need to compete rather more effectively on other features if they are to continue to receive our business.

And why is a larger network support staff even necessary? Reading between the lines (and having been in the biz) sounds more to me like a certain network support staff is about to take on all of VPSLink and Spry's support, in addition to what they are already handling, hmmmm?

we were concerned that we'd overwhelm people by inundating them with too much information at once

Oh, please. Was that handed to you by the new PR flak? Are we wittle babies that can't handle too much information about THE SERVERS WE SETUP, ADMINISTER AND RELY ON?

Far more likely is that the "new management team" probably have very valid concerns about what will happen when we do find out the real deal. Bad strategy, bad tactic on the new team's part. Not a particularly good start, in my view. STEEErike ONE!

See, we are your _customers_. We send you money under a previously agreed deal. Without any notice to us, you change the deal, but want to tell us only a little bit about the new deal. Hmmm. How do you think that looks from here? I mean, maybe we have customers we'd like to keep informed, just in case things (heaven forbid!) start to go south under the new regime? Like maybe by suddenly not being very upfront with important information?

All this babble about "integrations on the horizon" with oh goody goody goody DOMAIN REGISTRATIONS and SSL CERTIFICATES! Oh boy!

WTF? STEEErike TWO!

Sounds like VPSLink was bought by GoDaddy? Am I warm?

So, I await further news with interest, and am suddenly kind of glad I recently switched to quarterly (versus annual) billing. (Which occurred, btw, *very* smoothly thanks to VPSLink's wonderful policies and staff.)

P.S. As a wild guess, here is my take: a hosting company with maybe some extra datacenter capacity in Boston, and with some extra cash it needed to do something with, goes shopping, finds Spry/VPSLink, and makes Cameron and team a sweet offer that makes all the years of risk and hard work finally pay off -- this is the moment entrepreneurs live for, so good on them.

In return, the hosting company gets a bunch of captive accounts, a.k.a "revenue streams". When they speak about "added value", they almost certainly mean that they already have deals with Google, eNom, etc. already in place, and that they (the hosting company) make money in addition to our rental fees everytime we register a domain, conduct an ad campaign, etc. I.e., they are adding value -to- the accounts we represent, not so much -for- us as customers.

The "transition" to the "new datacenter" is because renting/running the Seattle datacenter isn't "cost-effective", never mind the ping times, etc. we signed up for originally.

This is what global "business" seems to have become. *sigh*

P.P.S. I wonder what the odds are of the new hosting company having an internal "cloud" that they plan to use to host our "machines"? If so, that puppy had better be -fast-, or thanks, but no thanks.

P.P.P.S. FYI, I'm already researching alternatives. Not that I think I'll really be needing them, or anything. But if there *are* any hiccups, I'd like to be ready. You'd do the same thing, right?

[Das Capitolin]

When I first received the notice yesterday, my first reaction was not positive. VPSLink failed to offer any relevant information aside from 'You're moving, and that's that'. Like many of you, I kept my datacenter in Washington for a reason, and decided against the voluntary move to Boston last year. Now that move is forced, and we're given nearly no information to work from.

This isn't GoDaddy or 1&1 we've partnered with! We manage our own servers, and rely on you for nothing more than to keep them running (which has been spotty for the past year). If we're capable of managing through console, then I'm certain we can handle more than a light fluff letter that lacked critical answers.

If that notice was anything, it was VPSLink's attempt to disguise a hard sale in soft sale text. How about you come clean and tell us what we're getting at the other datacenter, so we can jump ship before you sink our existing datacenter?

[kenji]

I would also like to know about the data center move. I chose your company because of the current location. All of my clients are in West Coast or Japan. If it's moved to East Coast. The latency is a big problem.

The renewal of my yearly subscription is coming up tomorrow. If the move is true, I need to switch to the monthly so that I can move out. I asked them about it by creating a support ticket yesterday morning but the ticket is not answered yet as of now. I am sure they're really overwhelmed by negative responses by customers. But, would you please get someone to respond to my ticket(Ticket #1767031)?

[Siberiano]

And what is going to happen with the NY datacenter?