Heritage Internet Technologies

» see heritagewebsolutions.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

David Aitken started Heritage Web Solutions in Provo, Utah in 2001 with a thousand dollars put up by the owners of the mortgage refinancing company where he worked as a manager. It sold websites to small businesses. By 2005 it had gone from one part time employee to sixty five, and at its height it ran about two hundred people in house and another five hundred on contract, many of them working remotely because Provo did not have enough developers to go around.

The numbers it published were very good. Revenue of $11.6 million in 2007. That year Inc. ranked it first in Utah for growth and twenty second in the country overall, and it came back on the list in 2008 at number 392. The company was not strictly a hosting company at all: it resold somebody else's servers, a detail nobody considered when buying a website and the one that shaped the ending.

This one is American at the level of its business model. A firm in Utah sold websites by telephone to small businesses in other states, under terms of service that a later television investigation found were long enough that almost nobody read them. I would never have been a customer. Writing a five page site was an evening's work for me by then, and the entire value of what Heritage sold was that its buyers could not tell whether the work had been done well.

Some of the visibility was bought outright. Heritage appeared in a segment of The Economic Report, a program that looked like business television and was in fact an infomercial, hosted by the sports anchor Greg Gumbel. Later investigations found it charged companies twenty to thirty thousand dollars for five minutes of airtime.

~ the chronicle ~

~ nine hundred and seventy two ~

Between 2007 and 2010 the Better Business Bureau logged 804 complaints about Heritage. The total at closure was 972, and they had come from every state except Maine and South Dakota. Most of them said the same two things: the work was late, and the refund never came. The bureau recorded 793 as resolved. On one consumer complaints site the company held the tenth worst rating on the whole service.

KSL, the NBC station in Salt Lake City, ran an investigation in May 2010 built around four unhappy customers from outside Utah and an interview with Mark Strong, one of the owners. The report's finding was about the paperwork rather than the websites: the terms of service were very long, and most customers never read them. Heritage kept trading for another ten months after it aired.

~ the eighth of march ~

On Tuesday 8 March 2011 the company stopped, without telling its customers or its staff. People who called got a recording that never identified the business and said that all current customers were now hosted by Fibernet, a company in Orem. Fibernet had been Heritage's own hosting supplier and a reputable one, and it had not bought anything; it simply woke up responsible for thirty thousand websites it had no customer relationship with.

What was left behind was large. More than $17.1 million was owed to the Internal Revenue Service, with work unfinished on hundreds of customer sites and money still owed to vendors and staff. The Utah County Attorney's office opened a fraud investigation. The following week, in a report aired on 14 March, KSL said several former Heritage employees had opened a company called ISO Webworks on 8 March, the day Heritage closed. Heritage's former marketing director said the new site was the same, down to the code. The attorney for Heritage and the people behind ISO Webworks both denied any connection.

Aitken was back in the business within eighteen months, with a new web design company in Pleasant Grove, a few towns up the road. heritagewebsolutions.com is gone. The sites it built are mostly gone too, which for a decade of work sold to people who could not check it is roughly the expected survival rate.

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