As we recently mentioned, Johnny Nguyen of GreenValueHost fame agreed to do an interview with us.

We collected and consolidated community questions and presented them to Mr. Nguyen, and now we’ve got his responses.

The full interview will appear tomorrow, May 16.

In the meantime, for those who don’t remember the saga or need a refresher, here’s a quick history.

GVH burst onto the LowEnd scene 2013ish and published all kinds of crazy deals.  They were very fond of offering multi-year pre-paid deals at steep discounts.  During this same era, there were other providers on LET practicing a very “in-your-face”, insult-slinging style of marketing and GVH picked up on that, making outrageous promises and shouting down anyone who dared criticize.

Naturally, it blew up, and by early 2015 it was all over.  Arguably it was over long before that because performance was hideous and the network unusable.  I believe there was also a WHMCS or other PII breach in there somewhere.

Johnny Nguyen posted multiple times saying he’d had a change of heart, was going to reform, etc. Those would come out on, say, Saturday and by Wednesday he’d be back to “we’re the best in industry, here’s another crazy deal”.

At one point he announced he was stepping down, and that “Jaroslav” was taking over.  Note the “FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE” header – a GVH hallmark.  Anyway, there was quite a bit of “executive reshuffling”, always following “executing management meetings” etc.  Who knows who was meeting with who, but some of the new executives were real and some were Johnny.

Of course I’m skipping over all the complaint threads and angry customers but that was a lot of noise in the community for a while.

Finally, it melted down, and Johnny Nguyen he bailed out and transferred the whole thing to XFuse Solutions (@XFS_Duke).  Duke may have been trying to make the best of a bad situation, perhaps figuring that if he delivered what people were promised, enough of them would become long-term customers to make it worthwhile.

However, the basic math just did not work.  People were signed up on unsustainable offers and XFuse doubled down by trying to square all datacenter accounts and make customers happy.

Things did not last long.  Angry customers opened more threads.  Duke made some apology and status update videos and his wife at one point got into a spat with the community.  In the end, it was doomed.  I see Xfuse got the GVH customer base in February 2015. And the last tweet from XFuse Solutions was in September 2015.  Ouch.

After this, JN vanished for a while.  I recall he had one or two other short-lived business ventures and then word broke that he’d been arrested, and eventually convicted of identity theft and fraud.  He served time in prison and is now back in society.

So why interview Johnny Nguyen?  To be clear, no one is condoning either the fraud he was convicted of nor the fraud he committed via GreenValueHost’s unfulfillable promises.  Providers fail all the time, but the classy ones make refunds and, most importantly, don’t grab as much prepaid cash as they can and drain it out of the company prior to dumping it.

Our interest in the interview is chiefly because the community will enjoy it.  GVH is part of community history.  Also, we were interested to get answers to some questions the community wanted to ask from that time.   And finally, we wanted to see what Johnny took from that experience and from his prison experience.  Will he go straight?  Does he have a plan?  Is he going back into hosting?

Find out tomorrow!

raindog308

Raindog308 is a longtime LowEndTalk community administrator, technical writer, and self-described techno polymath. With deep roots in the *nix world, he has a passion for systems both modern and vintage, ranging from Unix, Perl, Python, and Golang to shell scripting and mainframe-era operating systems like MVS. He’s equally comfortable with relational database systems, having spent years working with Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

As an avid user of LowEndBox providers, Raindog runs an empire of LEBs, from tiny boxes for VPNs, to mid-sized instances for application hosting, and heavyweight servers for data storage and complex databases. He brings both technical rigor and real-world experience to every piece he writes.

Beyond the command line, Raindog is a lover of German Shepherds, high-quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop RPGs, and hiking in deep, quiet forests.

His goal with every article is to help users, from beginners to seasoned sysadmins, get more value, performance, and enjoyment out of their infrastructure.

You can find him daily in the forums at LowEndTalk under the handle @raindog308.