Things didn’t quite pan out at Mt. Gox earlier this year, when the world’s oldest bitcoin exchange forcibly submerged and drowned, losing hundreds of thousands of client bitcoins in the process.
And while Mt. Gox CEO Mark Karpelès hasn’t made any friends in the ordeal, he and his company (Tibanne Co.,Ltd.) are desperately working to move on and forward, focusing their attention on a different project.
If you haven’t already guessed by the title of this post, it’s web hosting-related, and the newly-launched website is located at Forever.net.
A quick browse of the website shows that the website is providing customers with dedicated hosting, VoIP, and transit services. A short company profile reads:
[blockquote style=”2″]TIBANNE Co.Ltd. is a Tokyo, Japan-based corporation founded in 2009 by talented technopreneurs. TIBANNE specializes in web hosting, IP transit, VoIP, software development and network administration. We are currently engaged in the reserch and development of new and existing services to produce innovative solutions for our clients.[/blockquote]
We can’t say exactly when the service launched, but the last snapshot taken by the Wayback Machine is dated May 17th. A simple splash page (pictured above) was posted at the time.
And if there was any doubt about the domain’s ownership, Karpelès has his name listed as the registrant of the domain when doing a WHOIS lookup:
Interestingly enough, bitcoin does not appear as a payment option on the service, which may or may not be considered a good thing.
I asked Mr. Karpelès in an email correspondence to tell me about this project on Sunday evening.
“There’s quite a bit,” he told me. “First, Tibanne’s specialty is providing hosting services.
We’ve been doing this since 2009, and even before founding Tibanne I help founding a couple other hosting companies (one still has its site online, however the offers listed on there are far outdated, not sure what they are doing today.”
Karpelès continued:
“Now with what happened with [Mt. Gox], not only Tibanne has a loss of revenue (losing our biggest customer and all of Tibanne’s bitcoins) but also an increase in legal costs, not mentioning being able to do our part in the MtGox bankruptcy process. As such we are now controlling expenses and focusing on revenue generating in order to be able to do our part.”
“With Forever.net we make use of existing resources and provide services based on the technology we developed over the years. In this case, the VPS servers are cluster backed, with an equivalent of RAID1 over network cluster (GlusterFS with 2 replicas) on top of a RAID 5 physical storage with hot spare on standby. I could go in more technical details but I am not sure that is what you want,” he wrote.
On the topic of cryptocurrency payments, Karpelès said:
“We are also considering accepting payments in BTC/LTC/etc. For information[,] Tibanne’s other hosting service KalyHost.com has been accepting BTC since Sept. 2010 and generated since then a total revenue of over 13000 bitcoins (we will soon be releasing a new version of the KalyHost.com website too).”
Mr. Karpelès declined to speak about Mt. Gox-related matters, telling me “unlike other subjects I am able to discuss Forever.net.”