Neubix sells hosting, prepares to move east

The owner and co-founder of Neubix Studios LLC, 2101 W. Chesterfield Blvd., Ste. A-201, have accepted positions with www.purevolume.com, a Boston-based Web site that allows artists to upload original music to the site in MP3 format and fans to download the music to listen.

Neubix owner Brad Smith is selling 60 percent of Neubix for an undisclosed amount to UMI, the company that runs Pure Volume. Smith and Ryan Sims, who serves as lead designer, will Sept. 1 relocate to Boston.

“Neubix will still exist, but I guess you could say we’ll be a brother to Pure Volume,” Smith said, declining to share financial details of the transaction.

Neubix will work primarily on projects for Pure Volume and will accept independent projects as well.

Neubix designer Keegan Jones will cyber-commute from Springfield.

The relationship with Pure Volume began about a year and a half ago when Neubix designed www.purevolume.com, the current Web site of Pure Volume.

More than 130,000 bands have uploaded their music to the site in the last year, Smith said. “That’s busting out and growing faster than anyone could have imagined,” he added.

“What MTV is to the television industry, they want to be to the online industry,” Smith said.

Smith and Sims are excited about their new venture.

“They’ve built this amazing infrastructure and they’ve got some amazing programmers there in Boston,” Sims said, adding that Pure Volume is the technical side of the business and Neubix is the creative side. “Instead of just hiring us out for five years of our lives, they said, ‘Come up and let’s be a family and work side by side.’”

To prepare for the move, about 75 of Neubix’s Web hosting accounts are being sold to a new company, Sygna Technology LLC, 2101 W. Chesterfield Blvd., Ste. B-104. Jim Walton opened Sygna Technology’s doors Nov. 1, after having spent six years working as a network administrator for Butler, Rosenbury and Partners.

Walton, who has known Smith socially for several years, said the acquisition makes sense.

“I already have the equipment and I was already offering services for server co-location and I was actively pursuing new domains to add to my server, so it kind of worked out perfectly,” he said.

Both Smith and Walton declined to disclose the terms of the sale, which is still being negotiated, although Neubix has already started the process of transferring its Web hosting clients to Sygna’s server. Smith, who said the hosting clients account for just 15 percent of Neubix’s business, anticipates completing the task by the end of June.