(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Following its eviction this week that sent a number of web hosting clients out in the cold, Ann Arbor, Michigan, web hosting provider IAS.net (www.ias.net), which is back online with a new office location, said it withheld some rent payment because of poor maintenance and the presence of black mold in the building, according to a report from the Ann Arbor News.
Losing its office space due to “chronic late-payment of rent,” according to a landlord representative as reported by the Ann Arbor Business Review, however, the Ann Arbor News reports that the building had ongoing maintenance and mold issues, which the property owners neglected to address, according to IAS co-owner Arthur Talbot .
IAS’s website lists dozens of popular local websites including those of the Ann Arbor Transportation Authority, Eastern Michigan University Foundation, Zingerman’s and Michigan Radio – most of which are back online.
Following costly legal battles with the landlord, the company had planned to move its offices this week. This plan, however, fell short when IAS found some of its office’s contents had already been moved to the curb by the landlord.
“We’re just really disappointed about the whole outcome,” Talbot told the Ann Arbor News. “We had to pay pretty significant legal costs to get the building taken care of and make it healthy for our staff. This has been the single largest disruption in our services.”
IAS’s operations are now located in the Michigan Information Technology Center. Completed in early 2005, the MITC features next generation conferencing multimedia technologies and high speed Internet connectivity, according to its website.
This dispute, causing customer frustration and downtime, one of many recent cautionary tales warning web hosts about the risk of appearing untrustworthy to clients. WHIR editor Liam Eagle offered some tips for smaller web hosts to avoiding being mistaken for a company like IAS in a blog entry last week.
The outage left local businesses scrambling for web hosting, which other hosting providers including HDL and Online Technologies rushed to provide services to the list of affected clients. Part goodwill and part opportunism, both offered several weeks of free hosting to affected clients.
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