OSI Hosting.net: Deception in Texarkana. Newforge explains how they were duped into writing two stories about a hosting company that falsly claimed to have 12,000+ dedicated server customers, 16,000 new dedicated orders during a 3-4 week period, to have ordered 1,000 servers from Apple, 25,000 servers from IBM, planned to open 485,000 square feet of new data center space within 3 months, and most incredible of all, planned to “build a showroom data center facility stocked with 200,000 IBM Blade Servers.”
From a company supposedly founded in February of 2004…
Not a single one of those claims was plausible, most were flat-out ludicrous. For some comparison, my employer claimed 9,000 dedicated servers in it’s last SEC filing and The Planet (founded in ‘94) boasted of 23,000 in a recent press release. No dedicated hosting company is efficient enough to handle thousands of new servers per week. None, zero, zilch.
The fun part of this story, to me at least, is that a real newspaper journalist broke it.
<Insert rant against bloggers casually using the J-word to describe people who never verify sources and facts here />
