Apparently Caro.net has gone out of business. According to two posters on WHT they got the following email earlier this week.
"U_nfortunately the company is closing. We have made arrangements at the last minute to have another company come pickup the servers and they will attempt to install them in their network. They are going to use the same IP addresses and hopefully the servers will be back online some time tomorrow._
Caronet Engineered Hosting Technical Support Team"
I used to run into the Caro.net guys at HostingCons back in the day. I thought they were respectable dudes. Either I was wrong or there is some part of the story I am missing. I hope I am wrong because if they left their customers high and dry and gave them basically zero notice to the reality the owners knew was coming likely months in advance, they are without a conscience.
I don’t know how many people they employed, but I always wonder if health/family issues impact these small hosts that disappear without clearly negative intent. If you have no backup plan and it’s just you, you’re one life event away from shutting down.
I’m actually very curious about how long a host could last entirely on autopilot, at least before something breaks or someone finds a security vulnerability and wipes all the servers.
I never got the impression they were a very small operation. I know a guy who used to work at Sago and left there to take a job at Caro…this is back around 2010 probably. When I ran into him at a HostingCon he had no problem boasting about how big and awesome they were. Now he could have just been puffing out his chest because that is what we all used to do at HostingCon OR they were actually not a small operation. What’s done is done so no need for me to raise any further stink about it. I just feel bad for the customers.
I would hope if anyone acquired another company which required downtime due to a migration of some sort they would realize that the best way to ensure those customers they just acquired stick around, is to let them know well in advance of the migration and coordinate a strategy that ensures as little pain as possible.
For the record, we are not migrating anyone at Incero and no one should anticipate any downtime due to our acquisition. We acquired Incero specifically for their data centers in markets we were not in but wanted to be, so moving customers out of Dallas for instance, would be self defeating. As a matter of fact, we walked away from acquisition opportunities we were looking at because the acquisition would have required a migration. We want no part of that.