"In addition to Texas.Net and Data Foundry, Ron and Carolyn established a Usenet company, Giganews, and an Internet security solutions company, Golden Frog, which provides one of the world’s leading VPN services, VyprVpn."
How extremely curious -- they are & have been a major seller of Usenet access & "privacy"/VPN services for the past few decades; hmm.
No particular technical expertise is involved in running these sorts of companies, those staff are hired. The top-level executive management is more reminiscent of commercial real estate than anything technical---it's buying land, building buildings, and putting tenants in them.
That the owners of the company have been involved in Usenet and VPN services is quite unsurprising---these are both industries that are technically simple, easy to get into, and can show a pretty quick profit. The up-front capital involved to get into them is having rack space and connectivity... things that, as owners of a colo outfit, they already had on hand. VPN services also have a high degree of customer overlap and can share infrastructure with usenet, so there is a VERY high degree of overlap between usenet providers and VPN providers---to the extent that it's more suspicious if a Usenet provider doesn't share owners with a VPN provider.
That some random hosting company Netsential, not even a Microsoft Partner was chosen, makes both me and apparently the NSA suspicious.
More than likely DataFoundry is a front company. DataFoundry, which definitely is a real company, was ultimately hosting the Nestential sites. Their founders are former Peace Corps [1] recruits from the 1970's. They look like nice people but definitely not engineering experts. Also everyone at the company has been in place for nearly its entire existence. That is a tell-tale sign of fraud, a tech company should have massive movement within its executive ranks during these last two decade boom years. Also no one I know has done business with them, and even their customer list seems pretty thin when you realized almost all of them have the same one or two Private Equity owners...
[1] - https://www.datafoundry.com/blog/meet-founders-ron-carolyn-y...