I'm not taking sides but I think all hosts should be straight up when answering these questions when contacted personally by a potential customer. I know making a sales pitch on the website is necessary to get customers and beat your competition but when someone starts asking specific questions about the data center, the network, ownership, etc.. I think the host should answer as truthfully as possible.
Most regular webmasters don't really know how to tell the quality of a web host by checking who they peer with, ASN's, traceroutes, and figuring out the location of the data center and if the datacenter is a neutral data center or privately owned one. Also, if the host is just reselling servers, bandwidth, or rack space, etc...
If what Snake is saying is 100% true about the first conversation, it does sound like PR thought they might be dealing with another dumb webmaster that couldn't tell the difference between hosts and couldn't do their own research, and made some minor false or at least misleading facts. I don't know why they couldn't have just said they are located in OC3networks privately owned datacenter, but own their own equipment in it.
Just like other companies are located in theplanet.com's data centers, or the NYIIX. If I ask do you own your datacenter, the answer should be no, we are located in the NYIIX but own our own equipment or leased space, etc.... Or we don't own the datacenter but we are located in theplanet's data center but own all our equipment, have our own techs, etc..... As long as the data center is known as being top-notch any webmaster shouldn't have a problem hosting with a company that just leases space in the data center.
Maybe I missed some of the facts, but if PR is not owned by OC3networks then they shouldn't say they own the datacenter.
