[netsentialuser]

None of this is really that surprising. DataFoundry is a real company and pretty typical for the industry, I don't see any particular reason to suspect that they're a front. They're on the small side for the datacenter/colo sector but similar to something like PheonixNAP. While I can't say I know any of their customers personally I have gotten quotes from them in the past which were competitive but not quite the best available.

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.