C I Host
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C I Host is a medium sized web hosting company based out of Bedford, Texas. Started in 1995 by Christopher Faulkner, the company was originally run out of his dorm room as a small web design and internet consulting firm. However, in 1999, Faulkner opened C I Host's first data center in Bedford, Texas (CDC-01). Other data centers soon followed with Los Angeles, California (CDC-02) in 2001, Chicago, Illinois (CDC-03) in 2003, and Newark, New Jersey (CDC-04) in 2005.
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[edit] Advertising
In March of 2003, C I Host started a promotion where they bought billboard space on the back of Jim Nelson's head where their logo was permanently tattooed. Although the only requirement was that Mr. Nelson not grow any hair for a month, his tattoo generated over 800 new customers for C I Host.[citation needed] Since then, other companies have tried the human billboard approach with similar success.
CI host also tried to offer retail type of sales and un-successfully opened a retail store, cobranded with CompUSA at the Galleria mall in Dallas, Texas in November 2002. The store quickly closed. CI host also failed to open a London UK office and has retrenched its "International" ambitions as the costs have cut so deep into CI Host they recently closed down their Newark data center in 2007 and consolidated offices and moved offices out of the main datacenter in Bedford to an office plaza closer to the Dallas Airport.
[edit] Chicago Data Center Robberies
In October 2007, C I Host Chicago was subject to burglary[1]. Not only did the company lose some extremely expensive routing equipment, but their customers were target of the robbery as well. The night time manager was repeatedly tased during the incident. It was estimated that over $50,000 worth of servers and networking equipment was stolen affecting at least 12 customers and causing the entire data center to go offline for at least 36 hours. The company quickly went into battle mode and blamed the outage on a router issue.[citation needed] However, when clients continued to ask why there was an outage and even threatening to remove their servers from the facility, the truth about the robberies came out.
Many clients that were housed in the Chicago data center were surprised to learn that this robbery wasn't the first of such an attack. The data center was robbed three prior times going back to 2006.[citation needed] Knowledge of these robberies only surfacing after users of the Web Hosting Talk forum site asked the Chicago police about it and obtained the prior reports as well. It was also surprising to learn that the facility does not have 24/7 armed guards as previously stated on the C I Host company web site which may have indeed stopped these robberies had such a service been provided. CI Host didn't have a valid Chicago business license at the time of the robberies, and didn't have a business license for ten months where they received one in November 2007.
[edit] Lawsuits
C I Host has also been the subject of many lawsuits, both against the company and initiated by the company.[citation needed] Most recent has been the lawsuit initiated by former employees of C I Host Chicago's facility for wrongful termination, hazard pay, overtime, and workmen's compensation. They have a lien against them due to excessive water damage, estimated at least $200k from leaking HVAC units into the 900 N. Franklin main airduct, as well as problems with billing with Tower Stream and various vendors they failed to pay.
They failed to pay Comed and the power went down in May of 2007 for 24 hours.
