Read the latest issue of WHIR Magazine or subscribe to receive it FREE!

CWIE Out, Alpha Red Done?

By Liam Eagle, October 10, 2008

October 10, 2008 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- CWIE Holdings (www.cwie.com), which reported on Monday that it would acquire hosting company Alpha Red (www.alphared.com), said Thursday that the deal would not go through as planned. Follow-up on message boards by Alpha Red customers and employees seems to suggest that the company is shutting down.

The company issued a statement on Thursday saying, "the purchase of Alpha Red's assets could not be consummated notwithstanding considerable effort."

According to the company, CWIE intends to make no further comment on the deal.

Earlier in the week, CWIE had stepped in to acquire Alpha Red amid concern that the company appeared to be close to closing down, after its chief executive was named in a lawsuit by Microsoft and the state of Washington.

Microsoft's suit claims Alpha Red CEO James McCreary was also involved in Branch Software, a company that built and distributed illegal "scareware."

Alpha Red representatives informed hosting message boards last week that the company was in talks to be acquired by CWIE, and on Monday, CWIE confirmed that it had agreed to acquire Alpha Red, and that McCreary would not be involved in the company following the deal.

The deal would have included Alpha Red's two data centers in Houston, Texas and 300Gps of Internet connectivity.

Late Thursday, an ongoing thread on WebHosting Talk became busy again with discussion of the Alpha Red situation, as customers reported their sites going offline, and difficulty reaching the company.

A user saying he was Jonathan Box, the company's president of sales made several posts offering to help customers move their servers out of Alpha Red's Houston facility, and saying "I can't give a statement with time frames on providers shutting down. I will however recommend you back everything up and start moving to a new host ASAP."

As of Friday Morning, Alpha Red's website was still online. Some changes appeared to have been made to the "contact us" page, including the removal of listings for McCreary, Dan Woods, Box and tech support manager Ayanna Ford.

  • (5) Comments

Comment anonymously or log into your WHIR account

Logging in allows enhanced commenting features (such as external linking) in news, features, blogs and more.

User:

Pass:

(reset password)

Don't have an account yet? Register now!


 

Comment by Anonymous on Friday, October 10, 2008

Hi everyone. This is a great spot to discuss your feelings on this story, if you choose. But it is not a good spot to advertise your hosting services. If you want to do that, we have many fine advertising spots all over this page, as you can see.

Comment by Anonymous on Friday, October 10, 2008

The site appears to be done as of this writing.

Comment by Anonymous on Friday, October 10, 2008

Alphared should be taking better care of their customers than they are. To just shut down your company and servers and wash your hands is unethical business practices.

Comment by Anonymous on Tuesday, October 14, 2008

well what can I say the past finally caught up with them, porn ties and scams, Chris Gotzman scammer, Michael Sanduval (Chris Gotzman renamed), screwing resellers by contating their customers directly in advance of billing, peeking on customer servers for no reason and sabotage of customer servers who complain the list goes on and I have been to their dc and seen their lies in person

what goes around comes around its too bad their bandwidth is amazing too bad the whole thing was a scam it could have been the best dc in the US

Comment by Anonymous on Wednesday, October 22, 2008

please don't generalize the behavior of Mr. McCreary and Woods to the employees that regularly delivered the impossible to the most difficult bunch of customers on Earth. Alphared is gone. Something better is coming. The scam was the sales department.

Sabotage?! that's insane. Sounds like salesman talk

Read Back Issues of WHIR Magazine

October 2009 - Web Hosting's All Star Team
This has been, for us, one of the most interesting, exciting and challenging build-ups to an issue of the magazine yet, Web Hosting's All Star Team. The balloting process was our first experiment with a kind of user participation we're planning to do a lot more with in the months to come. We had thousands of ballots submitted, with hundreds of write-in suggestions and a demonstration of user engagement that has us feeling super positive about the project.
About This Issue | Read Digital Edition

July 2009 - What am I Worth?
One of the interesting luxuries of working on a project like the printed WHIR magazine is that it allows us to play with things like our point of view from one issue to the next. In recent months we've been giving added attention to the kind of practical and applicable advice aimed at smaller hosts and resellers. This issue carries on with that point of view, asking, in our cover story, "what am I worth?" It's a complicated question without a clear-cut answer.
About This Issue | Read Digital Edition

May 2009 - The Blueprint for a Small Web Host
I was a little surprised by how difficult it became to see this idea through. We set out to assemble a blueprint for a small hosting business, but butted up pretty quickly against the general impossibility of covering all the territory that was out there to be covered. The basic constraints of a printed magazine, and the less-than-infinite amount of time we had available forced us to face the fact that we could never produce an exhaustive guide to starting a hosting company.
About This Issue | Read Digital Edition

Read more WHIR Magazine back issues