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anyNode is back - and acquires Hostigation, ServerCrate, VortexUnit
Hi folks,
Those of you who have been around LET for some time may recognize my brand anyNode - we previously offered KVM services in Southfield, MI between 2013 and 2016. In May of 2016 I was forced to announce the imminent closure of the company due to a lack of time available to properly manage services, and in the first week of July we officially closed our doors.
As the new year rolled around, I left my position at my previous job and decided to focus on freelance work for a while. In March, Tim - the previous owner of Hostigation - contacted me in need of some assistance with an issue. After a brief discussion I joined the company full time to help offload some of the support and administration workload. As many of you may know, Tim suffered a stroke late last year (don't worry - he's doing much better now). The stress of support was detrimental to his health, so over the course of the year I took on additional roles at the company, leaving Tim to focus on recovery and well-deserved relaxation after 20 years of working in the industry.
Within a few months I was managing essentially all daily operations of Hostigation. It was at this point that Tim offered to pass the torch officially and we eventually worked out the logistics of the deal. With Hostigation now under my management I got started on giving the company a much-needed refresh - new hardware in both locations, major network upgrades, new KVM plans - the works. After completing three separate upgrade windows, it became clear that we were in need of not only additional IP addresses but some additional diversity in our offerings.
Browsing through WHT one day I found a sales thread for a company with very promising assets and quickly opened a discussion with the seller. Turns out, it's none other than Robert Clarke, and the brands for sale were ServerCrate, VortexUnit and his Minecraft brand NetherBox. We negotiated the deal for a while and eventually came to an agreement with all three brands, the physical infrastructure and IP assets included in the acquisition. The next logical step was a full merger of the brands under my ownership and bring back the anyNode brand. As of October 16th (this past Monday) we've completed this merger process, so today I'm officially announcing that anyNode is back in business!
With this merger complete, we now offer service in three US locations:
- Los Angeles, California
- Winston-Salem, North Carolina
- Seattle, Washington
We are currently working on upgrades in Seattle to bring it in line with our other locations - a full network overhaul is planned for the coming weeks, including new routing and switching as well as new 10Gbps uplinks, including 10Gbps directly connected to the Seattle Internet Exchange! Our SSD KVM service will also be expanding to Seattle, offering the same great platform our existing CA and NC locations currently provide.
In addition to the merger, we have also added additional support staff to help with the transition and assisting customers. I'd like to welcome Keaton to the anyNode team - he will be taking up Level 1 support and training on more advanced operational tasks as well. In approximately two weeks we will also be on-boarding a new sysadmin who will be taking on Level 2 support as well as server management roles, leaving me with some additional time to work on our next major project - a brand new, fully featured management portal to replace SolusVM (as well as WHMCS later on).
The original anyNode launched with a custom management portal from day one, and as much as I would like to use the old portal immediately, the existing SolusVM infrastructure complicates matters. Previous users may also remember that our control panel was rather basic, only offering the essential features for KVM VPS service. This time around, we have much bigger plans and will be including a wide range of features, including unique functionality not available at any other low end VPS provider. With the merger complete, we will be starting work on this new system very soon, so keep your eyes open for updates on our progress.
We'll be announcing general availability of Seattle KVM service in the near future, once our network upgrades have been completed. In the interim, we have slots open in both of our other locations ready to serve you, so please visit our new site at https://anynode.net/ and take a look at the offerings.
~ Seamus
Operations Manager
anyNode.net
Comments
Thanks for helping me over at Hostigation, and congrats!
Will there be a restocking for Dedicated Servers soon?
We have stock coming online in NC likely tomorrow. The available servers will be listed on the dedicated ordering page, so stay tuned.
Any sales to celebrate your brand coming back online again? It looks like you took over four brands and made them into one. Must have spent a lot of money doing that, good luck on your business!
Congratulations @scaveney!
Congrats to @scaveney and wish you luck.
We'll have a special once Seattle is available - I wanted to do a sale with the announcement but getting stock online there has been slightly delayed.
Thanks for the kind words everybody!
Good luck @scaveney -- wish you the best success for your company.
It's five yeas since I start using hostigation 128MB box. I already forgot the IP, Port and login method, just got it back from VNC. It's still runing, much like picking up old toy or meeting with an old friend.
Now maybe it's time to migrate to newer plans.
I can smell the Seattle hosts sharting themselves from here.
Francisco
Seamus got me setup with a dedicated server at launch and the service has been excellent (just over a month now). Support has been quick when I needed it and just keeping me in the loop on delivery (I pre-ordered well before official launch).
Congrats on the acquisitions @scaveney - looking forward to picking up more services in LA and Seattle
Congrats @scaveney :-)
Congrats @scaveney! Gonna wait the special deals
Good luck with your new business! @scaveney Now looking forward to your first offer on LET.
Any idea when Hostigation clients will be informed of this change? I personally hate having to read this kind of news on a public forum before my host informs the actual clients.
@KuJoe - The message is actually working its way through the email queue now, you should see it soon. There was a separate message for each brand, so it's taking quite some time.
Indeed, post on forums then tell existing clients. Dick move but I am not surprised.
.. did you just dodge the reply straight above yours and go straight to dickhead mode?
Rush to defend all you like little lamb, i am an individual with his own views/ideas. If you don’t like it fine, no fucks given here.
Lee,
As soon as I started the Hostigation mail queue I went to go write this post. I've already spent about four hours contacting other existing customers and wanted to finish up posting notices. Are you suggesting I should wait several hours for this mail queue to finish before submitting this post just for the sake of less than 1% of our client base (the LET users that I am aware of, maybe more)?
I don't see the issue here nor do I understand the hostility. I'm not sure I've even spoken to you before, so your lack of surprise is rather confusing to me. Of course, you're allowed to feel how you like about the situation - doesn't affect anybody with a reasonable interpretation of the situation.
Either way it's not like many of the acquisitions that are mentioned here, when a customer who was never informed of an acquisition and simply received an invoice from a new company has to go to a public forum to ask others about the changes. Customers have an email in their inbox, and if you are lucky enough to be one of the two or maybe three dozen LET users that also have service with me currently, you get a second announcement with more backstory to read.
Most ex moderators here suffer from some odd form of PTSD.
I used Anynode in the past, OK service from what I remember... but if memory servers some unusual limitations on the VPS, like quite a low thread limit for an OpenVZ container.
Ah, I didn't know he was a moderator. I have only infrequently used the site over the last few years, so shame on me. The 'surprise' comment makes a lot more sense now as I agree, it is a common trend.
such reasonableness, much wow! lol
curious about Seattle network - looking forward to see that offer when it is ready to go
Just bought your product
Hope special can go as low as 30$ p/m! Couldn't it? ;-)
Good news!
congratz @scaveney good story
I'm in ;-)
I'm with @KuJoe and @Lee on this one. Well noted, I do not even know you (and certainly am no enemy) and wish you good luck, but...
For a start: How many trillion customers do those companies have? Because if it's just a couple of thousands or even tens of thousands, there is no "working its way through the email queue"; it's not like your poor email server would work on overload for the next 3 days.
More importantly, though, I strongly dislike the attitude behind your way of going about it. Informing your customers is in their interest; putting you message here at LET is in your interest. In other words: You are more interested in creating new business than in caring about existing customers.
Take that as an important lesson. @Clouvider, for instance, sent some chocolate to some customer (I guess not his biggest or most important one). He has understood that treating existing customers well and keeping them is no less important than creating new ones.
What I read here boils down to "I! I! I! I have that new company conglomerate. I want new business. I want the world to know" and some "existing customers? Huh? Fuck them, those are already in my pocket. They'll get some email sometimes".
The queue is part of WHMCS. It sends each email individually in batches, with a delay between each. It's not like I blasted out all of them in a single big BCC. There is little I can do to make it go faster outside of completely skipping WHMCS in the future - perhaps I will do so. Thanks for the suggestion. Regardless, all emails finished sending a few hours ago now. Most customers will be waking up soon to find the notice in their inbox.
I'm sorry to hear you dislike my opinion on the matter. OK, sure, I invited sales at the bottom of my post - but the primary intention of this notice was to spread awareness of the merger of the firms, by no means is this a sales post. If it was, it would be in the wrong category (Providers, not Offers). I did not include any sort of special sale or coupon code here - that's not the sort of company I'm trying to run.
An example of what I mean when I say that my intention is not sales - I do have plenty of capacity available in Seattle, but I have sales closed there currently because I am not pleased with the condition of the environment, and would rather not introduce new customers to a sub-optimal or mediocre product. Another example - I have had sales open in two other locations for months now, but I have not posted any offers - why? Because I had not officially acquired the business yet. The previous website was of very low quality. I also have some issues with the datacenter in one location. Nothing really stopping me from making a post to "let the world know" but it didn't happen - why? Because people going to purchase would not received the intended service.
There are things I did not include in this original post. Most of my work leading up to this merger has been massive upgrades to all existing clients. I have replaced every single node that I originally purchased from Hostigation and replaced them with much more powerful machines, moved everybody from spindle HDDs to SSD storage, and how much more did I charge? Not a dime. This was all done to bring the existing customers into the modern year, not have them stuck back in 2012 running E5639s and slow HDDs. How many low end hosts upgrade their customers without blinking twice?
I would also appreciate if you could indicate what makes this post so blatantly reflect the idea that "I want new business". To me, the post was supposed to indicate backstory on what happened in the last few months detailing how and why it happened, and to provide some insight on what I am doing in the future - things that directly benefit the existing customers just as much as they benefit new customers.
Anyway, I'm not going to argue, everybody is entitled to their own opinion, no matter how much of the situation they're aware of or their interpretation of my words. But if you would, please look at the larger picture here. Any dime-a-dozen host can go around and brag about their acquisitions and spend all their time scraping up new customers - they absolutely have to when their existing customer base is bleeding out at the same rate, because they get ignored and mistreated.
If I was of the same mindset, I would've left all of my existing users on their previous shitty Westmere chips running 3ware controllers older than some schoolchildren and spindles reporting 6 year power times - but I didn't. Why? That's up to you.
I miss Tim / mitgib. Is he still around?