C I Host

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.
Advertising
In March 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 Nelson not grow any hair for a month, his tattoo generated over 800 new customers for C I Host. 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, Chicago in 2008, consolidated offices and moved offices out of the main datacenter in Bedford to an office plaza closer to the Dallas Airport.
Chicago Data Center Closure
In August 2008, C I Host sent a mass e-mail to customers co-locating in the Chicago data center indicating the location would close on September 30, 2008, and that customers had to pick up their equipment by September 22, 2008.
Chicago Data Center Robberies
In October 2007, C I Host Chicago was subject to a burglary. 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 blamed the outage on a router issue.
The data center was robbed three prior times going back to 2006. 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.

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