December 3rd, 2001:

I suspect we were as surprised as most other folks by the Kudosnet "we are ceasing operations" message on Monday night.

Kudosnet Technologies Inc. and BareMetal.com Inc had some extensive discussions about BareMetal buying Kudosnet (mostly after Paul's death, but some before it). As the financial picture clarified, it became clear that the Kudosnet debt load was so high that we could not buy Kudosnet without putting our own business at risk. We declined to buy Kudosnet's shares, and left an offer to discuss buying Kudosnet's assets on the table. We never heard back....

Which brings us to the current state of events. Most Kudosnet clients have 2 business days to arrange alternate hosting services. This is not a desirable situation for them to be in.

We find ourselves in the uncomfortable position of being able quickly arrange hosting for those clients, and thus to "steal" the accounts from the business of a family friend, associate, and reseller. So here is the "I don't want to feel guilty" deal:

For every web hosting account coming across from Kudosnet, and paying for 3 months or longer, we will donate 1 months invoicing to the 'Evad Children' trust fund.

So, the plan is to mirror as many of the Kudosnet hosted web-sites as we can find, set them up here, and invite the contacts that we can identify to shift their hosting to BareMetal.

Time for the sales pitch. Why move to BareMetal? Lots of reasons, but they can probably be summarized as "similarity" to what you are used to. Kudosnet started out as a reseller for baremetal, so most of their hosting packages are mirrors of ours. They use similar equipment and software. I believe they ran the business in a similar manner. Our goal can be summarized as being the "friendly, competent sys-admins" that run the equipment hosting your web-site. We are more flexible on payment terms, have generous volume discounts, and probably have a higher level of technical expertise. We are more focused on hosting than Kudosnet was, which means we use newer equipment and better Internet connectivity. It also means we don't generally do custom programming.

The 26 Kudosnet accounts currently hosted on BareMetal machines will be invited to convert to BareMetal accounts (which is just a matter of changing the billing contact), and given until the end of the month in any case.

We do _not_ currently know what will happen to the domain management facilities hosted by Kudosnet for the domains they helped clients register. (The .CA domains should be fine, they were registered through us.)

December 13 Update:

This is old news, but the paperwork has only just been finished. As of Friday (Dec 7th) we have had the two main kudosnet web servers in our development office, and we have become the registered owner of the kudosnet.com and kudosnet.net domain names. This means we are well positioned to "carry on" the kudosnet business. Unfortunately, we haven't had time to get as many of the kudosnet accounts (which haven't contacted us, the ones who have are online) back into service.

One of the stumbling blocks has been updating the IP addresses for blackhole.kudosnet.com and ns.kudosnet.net ... something that INWW doesn't support. The domain registrations should be at OpenSRS soon, and then the update will be trivial.

December 14 Update:

The kudosnet.com and kudosnet.net transfers to opensrs completed today. Nameserver updates should be in place and active tomorrow, meaning that we can have the kudosnet.net site back online too.

For anything which is unclear, please contact support@baremetal.com.