April 25, 2005 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — NewsForge (newsforge.com), an online newspaper for Linux and open source, reported on Monday that it had been unable to find any substantiation for the claims of Web hosting company OSI Hosting (osihosting.net), which, over the past year painted itself as a large Web hosting company when in fact it is merely reselling on a few colocated servers.
OSI Hosting incorporated last year in Texarcana, Texas. The company’s owner, Jason Macer, told NewsForge in October 2004 that it had 6,000 dedicated servers customers signed up and was going to open a data center facility and employ hundreds of employees. In a second story a week later, Macer claimed his company had 8,428 customers using a total of 12,175 servers on its dedicated hosting side in addition to 380 colocation customers. He also claimed an additional 485,000 square feet of data center space would be opened in December 2004.
NewsForge contacted Dmitri Eroshenko, a Web hosting industry expert, and asked him to traceroute OSI?s servers. According to Eroshenko, Macer?s claims could not possibly be true. He says Macer is reselling space on a few boxes housed at EV1Servers, which declined NewsForge requests for comment.
Specific details about the large hosting company Macer claimed to operate are nowhere to be found. NewsForge says it could not uncover any significant assets, income or employees that could be tied to OSI Hosting. When asked by NewsForge, Macer said, “Well, we were just incorporated last year. We haven’t even announced… last year we had no income. Therefore, we had nothing to announce. Nothing to file taxes, no earnings to report. Our first earnings report will go on the end of this quarter, which ends in June.”
The Dallas-based data center facility Macer claimed the company operated was revealed by police to be an abandoned, locked-up building. And Novell, which Macer claims provided financial backing, denied the claim in a conversation with NewsForge. According to the publication, Macer would not provide the identity of any hosting client or details about relationships he claimed to have with other companies such as IBM. He cited non-disclosure agreements.
In his interview with NewsForge, Macer says his claims that the company had 800 employees were ?misspoken.? He blamed problems with Card Service International for setting the company back and even claims that the company ?would have? had 800 employees had it not encountered the problem.
Macer also told NewsForge that his company was going to make three acquisitions next month after which time it would give its “full story.” He claimed the acquisitions would be made with cash, but provided no details about how he attained the financing, citing further non-disclosure agreements.
On its Web site, OSI Hosting says it is entering the market with a $79 dedicated server, offering several dedicated hosting, virtual private server and colocation plans.
