(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Soon after the Washington state attorney general named James McCreary IV and his businesses, Branch Software and web host Alpha Red in a civil suit for marketing “scareware” in September, McCreary fled, leaving web hosting customers high and dry.
This week, as several former Alpha Red employees, Ben Pannel and Costa N. Galazios, worked to launch a new dedicated hosting firm, Dedico (www.dedico.com), they also worked to distance themselves from the negative associations held by former customers of Alpha Red, confronting the impact that episode may have had on their reputations.
“Ben [Pannel] and I, we were just employees at that company and we were, in many ways, equally victims to the misdeeds of James,” said Galazios said in a telephone interview with the WHIR. “He did wield single handed authority in what went on there, a lot of which was really kept out of the eyes of all the employees.”
When the WHIR ran a story on Dedico’s launch earlier this week, Alpha Red customers, whose hosting services and data went down in late 2008, recognized the names, and some suggested a nefarious connection between Alpha Red and Dedico. Galazios, Dedico’s chief marketing officer and sales vice president, said the lawsuit against McCreary had nothing to do with him or Pannel.
“The issue of the software company that James owned was wholly disconnected from Alpha Red’s operations,” Galazios said.
Galazios says he had actually left Alpha Red months before the lawsuit because the company had failed to consistently pay him. However, he volunteered to help former clients migrate their servers when Alpha Red’s servers shut down with relatively little warning.
“I was working for another hosting company at the time and I was practically working around the clock trying to assist people, not as an [Alpha Red] employee, but actually as an employee for another company to help them migrate their sites and their data away,” Galazios said.
Ordered to appear in court and facing $1 million in fees, restitution and penalties, McCreary is assumed to have left the country along with Alpha Red’s CMO, leaving Pannel as the only high-level employee at Alpha Red. “Just after the Alpha Red collapse,” Galazios said, “CWIE Holdings became involved in a potential bid to acquire their assets and that was a large reason for Ben sticking around.”
The deal with CWIE Holdings, however, was not completed, and Alpha Red employees were forced to look for work elsewhere.
Facing potential bitterness from former Alpha Red customers, Galazios realizes that he continues to work in the industry at a disadvantage. He and Pannel, however, intend to continue in the hosting business with Dedico, where he says they will concentrate on meeting the highest possible ethical standards.
“I would like everyone to know that I very much want to build and earn the trust and business of anyone considering the type of services we offer and I am absolutely open and willing to do everything in my power to earn that trust,” Galazios said. “If anybody has any questions as to either our ethics or our service, I would very much like the chance to prove my own and Dedico’s commitment to them, and truly earn their business, because we truly believe business does have to be earned.”
