Hi,

You are receiving this email because you are currently a customer of Front Drive Hosting.

This is Jeremy, co-founder and currently the sole leader of Front Drive.

It is my unfortunate duty to inform you that Front Drive will be ceasing operations in 30 days.

The reason for this is my personal health. I was recently diagnosed with a serious medical condition that will prevent me from being able to run a business 24 hours a day as Front Drive requires.

Before shutting down, Front Drive was up for sale. Many offers came in but all fell through. As much as I would like to continue to pursue the sale of Front Drive, I have simply run out of time between doctor visits.

Effective immediately, all new billing to your credit card has ceased. Your monthly contract with Front Drive will not be up for renewal once the current monthly billing contract runs out. Even though some of you have less than 30 days left on your contract with Front Drive, all accounts will remain active for the next 30 days. Front Drive will be operating at a loss to ensure that everyone has been given at least a full 30 days to find a new host and retrieve their data.

30 days should be plenty of time for you to log in to your control panel to download your backups and find a new host. Your site data as well as MySQL databases can be downloaded from your control panel at http://www.yourdomain.com:2082/frontend/bluelagoon/backup/index.html Alternately, you can run mysqldump via SSH to retrieve the databases. If you are having trouble, then you can always send in a Help Desk ticket from http://www.frontdrive.com/support/helpdesk/

Technical support will still be available via the Help Desk during the 30 days which your sites remain active.

Your websites will remain up for 30 days, but once this period is over (on December 1st, 2002) the servers will be terminated.

I apologize for the inconvenience that this will undoubtedly cause and I wish there was another way, but my health has made it impossible for operations to continue.

Best of luck with your future ventures

Sincerely,

Jeremy
Front Drive

This really sucks... Now I have to find ANOTHER host :(

I liked FrontDrive.

I hope that you get to feeling better Jeremy, and appreciate the 30 day notice for backups etc for a smooth transition to another host.

It was good while it lasted!

Yes that does suck...personally i'm more concerned about

The reason for this is my personal health. I was recently diagnosed with a serious medical condition that will prevent me from being able to run a business 24 hours a day as Front Drive requires.

Any word on how serious it is?

Ya know... I realize that my post made me sound like a real dick. Thats not how it was supposed to come across.

I too am hopefull that Jeremy makes a speedy recovery and that all is well. I know how taxing running a business can be, even at peak health etc. Being extremely ill and trying to do it is a real stretch.

I am sad to see FrontDrive go. While I have not been with them more then a few months, I can safely say that they were a great host to deal with. All of my querries were handled quickly and professionally. The package I got was awsome for the money. It was everything that I hoped it would be.

I am worried that my next host won't live up to what I have come to expect from FrontDrive.

Thats more along the lines of what I was trying to say.

This doesn't suprise me at all even though it's still a sad situation.

Jeremy hasn't posted in this thread you two =)

That's too bad. Good luck Jeremy. I hope your health improves.

PS. Isn't this the second time Jeremy has closed a web hosting business?

Wow, this is a real shock. All the best to you Jeremy if you read this. I hope you can wade back into the industry after you have pulled through.

Not surprising really.
Get well soon Jeremy. :confused:

Who are you guys going to switch to? I have become pretty enamored with having 10 subdomains/virtual hosts, cpanel and spamassassin, all for $10 a month.
I don't mind spending more, but I'd like to see the same features if possible.

Well, I was up LATE last night shopping for a new host.

I hit the other forums here at WHT and read up on some special offers and posted in the Hosting Requests section. I got a pretty decent response, considering the time of day this all took place... (late last night pacific time).

I ended up signing with Dixiesys who was running a 2 for 1 special until midnight last night. Their $10 package was much lower then what I was getting with FrontDrive because I got in on their SUMMER SPECIAL which was sweet! 600mb disk space and 20 gigs of bandwith.

With the 2 for 1 at Dixie I got almost back to that point because they would double everything in your package for the same price. So now I have 800mb disk space and 15 gigs of bandwith.

Not to mention that Dixiesys seems to have a very strong/positive reputation here.

I want to wish Jeremy the best and hope for a fast and complete recovery.

I also want to say thank you for a great month of service. I really liked what you provided and was just getting the handle on the Cpanel and all that stuff. My users liked the speed.

The rest that I am about to say is in no way directed to you and your unfortunate unavoidable circumstance.

I am seriously considering changing my hobbies. I have enjoyed running a BS type board for people who like to talk about things and just have a good time. I started with Netfirms but there was a large amount of downtime, then I went to Powweb, I will not get into that again as it has been resolved. Now after one month, I have to change again. Every time I change, I lose users. People get tired of starting over and quite frankly, so do I. I was not able to move the YaBB board I had on the other sites when I moved to Frontdrive, so I started over with PhpBB. I know I can take all files with me so that now is a minor issue.

One of my users has offered to host my board on her corporate site, so I might give that a shot, but if that does not work out, I doubt I will go with another "fly-by-night" host and just give it up. It is no longer fun to try to keep up and researching a new host every couple months is just too time consuming and aggravating.

Keep in mnd that this is just me venting frustrations here, I am not blaming anyone as this is a business and businesses come and go.

Jeremy, take care and I will keep you in my thoughts and prayers. Good luck.

Hopefully Jeremy will be okay. Get well soon.

Best wishes to Jeremy for a speedy recovery too.

Nice to see a host give their customers a period of time to transition to a new host though. The amount of times you see people post here mentioning their host just falling off the face of the planet with no explanation, makes this a pleasant change - though no host going out of business is especially 'pleasant' of course.

Greg Moore

I don't know folks. At school, we used to call it "my grandma passed away and could not study".

Sorry but I'm a doubting Thomas by nature and given the first failure of Jay/Jeremy with Avail Hosting this second one comes at the nick of time.

Well, Jeremy doesn't seem to be profiting from this - even if he is lying, he isn't reaping any benefit. He did provide good service (from what I can gather), and he has also promised to maintain hosting for 30 days.

Peter

IMHO, Front Drive has handled it's closing in a professional and fair manner. They've given fair notice and they're not just disappearing. In these times of the disappearing host, that's pretty refreshing.

Best wishes Jeremy. Hope things work out for you. :)

I didn't realise this was the second time it had happened. Still, I see no reason to doubt Jeremy's story. And as Andrew pointed out, he is closing shop in a decent way and no-one is being stitched up in the slightest.

Is he dying?

Kyle, I don't think any of us would know.

You can email Jeremy to find out.

Peter

That's tough. It really sucks when medical conditions get in the way of business. I wish the owner and all clients affects the best of luck