I haven't had the time to really research this however these are a few points to note in regards to the products itself after doing a bit of poking around late last night.
Dropmyemail
1. I found the website to be lacking any real functionality. It was only able to backup mail directly from my primary inbox, no folders were transferred. This is a problem for most people right there who like to sort their mail.
2. The site is very slow even though latency to the website is very low/good. It appears to go to Amazon in Sydney ( they will no doubt use a CDN to reroute the traffic to the real location ) This could have something to do with the code and or underlying functionality of the website. Possibly the database backend not being able to cope.
3. I get the feeling the code and design of the website seems old, it doesnt "feel" like there is anyone actively working on the design / layout and functionality to make you think its an active evolving product given that its some 3 years old?
4. An email backup solution is a great idea, but i think this could be done alot better. I did not like the fact that i could view my emails and attachments via the web interface once i had backed up my inbox, this gave me a feeling of insecurity towards there encryption methods in the back end, if any? Sure the website uses SSL. But how is the data protected once it is stored on there infrastructure? Flat files ? database ? etc..
Dropmywebsite
1. Once again i thought this was quite limiting in terms of functionality. The mechanisms used are very basic in terms of coding to do the job its designed for. Backup websites and databases.
2. Most tier one providers for email and websites usually have an in house solution which they fully control to backup this kind of information, right down to the hardware level. I have worked for many. I can say this would not be a product any of them would use.
3. Most folk who pay a provider to host there email or website would expect that this is part of the package. Surely as a provider you cant just loose my website and email and have nothing to restore from ?
4. I cant vouch for ALL, but pretty much all third party control panel software have designed there own backup solution into the product which is very easy to use and easy for you to access your backups at any time, download a copy to your local PC if you so desire, you can then store it in dropbox or similar. Its now "in the cloud"...
5. As a web services provider we use R1soft to backup databases and websites, the way the product is designed is very efficient. It backs up your data at the block level of the file system instead of actually doing a tcp transfer of your data files one by one, which can be VERY slow if you have alot of data.
For both products i get the feeling there as been a real lack of development since its original design 3 years back. There are alot of open source products for free that can do the same stuff. Obviously this is not going to be as user friendly to your average joe wanting to backup there website or email... But really who should be worrying about that anyways, isnt your provider doing that for you already???
Integration with service providers.
1. I have not had the time to sign up to one of there service providers to see if i can figure out how they are integrated into an environment like ozhosting or control panels such as plesk or cpanel. I am reasonably familiar with cpanel and more so plesk. And i dont ever remember seeing this feature or addon. Probably because the built in backup solution was more than sufficient to do the same job.
I currently have a working instance of WHCMS so i will spend some time to see how there products work together.
This is not a down ramp on the acquisition, but just a few points i thought were worth noting after some research last night.
I do have some question marks regarding other parts of the company as well. But i will leave that to some others as i would prefer my opinion to be based solely on the technology as that is where my expertise lies.
Disclosure : I do not hold as i exited this morning. Will I trade it? most likely if the opportunity presents itself. In terms of an investment i think there are better options out there with more of wow factor in the tech sector.
(20min delay)