It took me a while this morning to dig up all of the relevant threads on WHT, but now I've found the links I needed to prove a couple theories that were floating around here on WHT.

The "new" dedicated hosting provider Managed.com was founded by the same person who founded eFreeServers and United.Colo and ended up selling them both to Sagonet in Florida.

For those of you who don't know the whole story and are considering buying hosting from Managed.com, please read this thread before you do so.

e.Continents was a company founded by Jacques Pham in 2001. Here is an archive of what their facilities page looked like in August 2001. (Keep this open... you'll want to look at it again in a few minutes.) e.Continents sold low-cost dedicated servers and was also well known as "eFreeServers."

According to this thread on WHT, eContinents was sold to Sago Networks (who has their own datacenter in Florida) in July 2002. Those of you who were involved in this website transfer will remember that Sago rented a jet to fly all of the servers to Florida with a few days' notice. (Here's the link on WHT that tells the story.)

In 2002, Pham again introduced a low-cost dedicated server company. This time, he called it United.Colo. Here is the archive of their website, dated November 2002. Does the design look familiar? If so, keep reading... it gets better!

In June 2003, United.Colo made up a story about their bandwidth provider being unreliable (they were located in a carrier-neutral facility, so one bandwidth provider being unreliable meant they could switch to others at any given time.) They decided to sell their operations to another company. That's right -- it was Sago in Florida -- and they rented a jet and flew all of their customers' servers to Florida with only a few days' notice. (As a side note, apparently they flew colocated servers there as well, which made several customers unhappy.) Again, the WHT archives come through, and we see a similar pattern emerge.

Fast-forward to November 2003. Pham once more starts up a low-cost dedicated server company in the Bay Area. Keep the archive page describing eFreeServers' network open, and then take a look at http://www.managed.com/network.htm. Notice any similarities? In fact, the design is also the same as United.Colo's design... probably because the same person [Jacques himself, perhaps?] designed it. Until last night, Jacques himself was listed as the technical contact on the WHOIS of Managed.com (he changed it once Dilhole from WHT figured out who he was.)

This is a classic instance of history being doomed to repeat itself. Here we have one guy who twice has started up low-cost dedicated server companies in the Bay Area, and twice has sold out to Sago in Florida. Twice he has rented a jet to fly all customer servers there, and twice he has made a killing by selling to Sago 7-8 months after the company was created.

You should know all of this before you lease any servers from Managed.com. If you do lease servers from Managed.com, beware -- they may end up in Florida next year.

-Erica