[Coda]

Coda doesn't know EVERYTHING, but Coda was heavily involved with figuring out Trisphee's legal/tax status, so Coda is well-acquainted with the relevant stuff.

It's ENTIRELY possible that things shut down abruptly BECAUSE of legal status limbo. While it's possible to operate a sole proprietorship with a minimum of legal documentation, a business acting as a partnership has to have legal documents on file, including getting an employer ID / tax permit. If the Ernya administration never formalized anything, it's likely that the law treated it as a sole proprietorship in the name of whoever was responsible for filing their joint tax return.

You can imagine how the divorce proceedings would bring up a lot of icky legal matters of ownership at that point -- ownership is already a messy matter in divorce cases, and now you've got everything that the business itself owns legally belonging to whoever the law said was the official sole proprietor. If they asserted that they were actually independent assets belonging to a business they never actually filed to create... well... their lawyers very well might have said to shut things down before they get in real legal trouble, or there might have been a threat of a lawsuit between the two parties.

If the business was a properly-filed partnership, then its existence would have survived the divorce with no ill effects (legally speaking). This doesn't result in the icky lawyer-says-that's-illegal what-do-you-mean-the-business-never-existed scenario, but if the business itself were dissolved at the same time as the marriage was, that would require the business to divest of its assets (since it can't own anything if it doesn't exist anymore), and a shutdown would have been the easiest way to liquidate any ownership interest in the site's hosting contract.

A final option would have been one party unilaterally leaving the business ("I quit, and you can't stop me!") and the remaining owner would be saddled with all further liability for the assets. I don't know just how legal this actually is if it was a partnership, but it's a pretty ugly mess.