Founded in 1997 by Matt Camblin, Bellanet.com started out much like it is today.  A small ColdFusion web hosting and development company run by ColdFusion developers for ColdFusion developers.  Our niche has always been supporting the ColdFusion scripting language and supporting other developers that write in ColdFusion.  In addition to starting and running the company Matt was still a developer, and at the same time he was starting Bellanet, he was also developing a website utilizing job board software he had written in ColdFusion to compete with the likes of Monster.com.  His software was quite successful, so successful in fact, that he used it to find himself a very nice position with Sprint.  At that point the business was purchased by another ColdFusion developer and co-worker of Matt´s, William Gibson.  William and Matt had both been working for a ColdFusion development house in Virginia where Matt had been working on the job board software.  William was eager to get the small company built up to it´s potential so he replaced the start up servers with the latest dual processor servers available at the time.

During the second week of William´s ownership Bellanet.com received a letter from Bell Atlantic, one of the east coast´s larger telco´s.  Bell Atlantic is one of the original 7 Baby Bell telephone companies, as a result of a 1984 Anti-Trust suit the federal government settled with AT&T.  The letter plainly stated that anything in the telco industry (web hosting and domain names, for instance) with the word "bell" in it belonged to Bell Atlantic.  Bellanet.com was grouped in with many other internet domains in a law suit Bell Atlantic brought against cyber pirates, slanders, and honest working companies like ours.  It seemed obvious that our domain shouldn´t be counted together with the lot, as some of the names like BellAtlanticSucks.com and BellAlantic.com obviously should have been.  Nevertheless, we sent our attorney to Washington DC, as the case was brought in federal court, to plead our case and attempt to state the before mentioned obvious.  Our attorney returned with a long face and advised us that Bell Atlantic had retained the largest law firm in the United States, Arnold & Porter LLP. This alone, in our attorneys opinion, meant that he could not win and we would be forced to give them the domain name.  The best we could hope for would be a settlement where we kept the domain name for a period of time to be established.  At this point, we established a new domain name for the company, Gibsonet.com, named after the new owner.  All existing Bellanet.com customers were transferred to Gibsonet.com while we were awaiting the settlement with Bell Atlantic. We finally did reach a settlement, but before the conclusion of the settlement Bell Atlantic had changed their name to Verizon and no longer had any interest in our domain name. We continued to operate as Gibsonet.com but retained the Bellanet.com domain and re-directed web signup traffic to Gibsonet.com.

Seven years and hundreds of customers later Bellanet.com is back.  In a move from Virginia to Florida we have revived the Bellanet.com domain to ease the DNS migration of all of our customers.  So the switch is on, all Gibsonet.com customers have been moved to Bellanet.com´s servers on a much faster network with updated hardware. The new network features the same great redundancy and up-time that Gibsonet.com´s customers have come to expect and to further compliment the services Gibsonet.com´s customers have always enjoyed.  The new network also features more bandwidth and personnel dedicated solely to network security.