“I made it happen when nobody said I could”
Michael Yablonowitz is the CEO of UplinkEarth, the company that, until recently, I happily used to host this site. Until about six months ago, when service and up-time took a dive. But, in his own words, “I took ingenuity and penny-pinching to a new level.” It shouldn’t surprise anyone then, that support was out-sourced to people that don’t know the system, and eventually the customer base is sold.
Two weeks ago, Mr. Yablonowitz started sending customers e-mail talking about “platform upgrades” and “new features”. What he was really talking about is selling the customers to another company. The “upgrade” was shoddy migration to a new data center with an entirely different (and from what I could tell, quite inferior) platform. They didn’t even bother to copy e-mail messages over.
This company has given me a lot of trouble over the last five months, and I’m not the only one that’s unhappy. And that’s not to mention the happy employees he bragged about. They’re unemployed now. But after all, firing everyone is the ultimate act of penny-pinching.