The Planet Blog

I was reading Thanh Tran’s blog post the other night and I realized that I had the other side of that story to tell. I joined Everyone’s Internet in 2001, as the original RAQ 4i servers were just starting to be deployed and most data centers were demanding a huge setup fee to go along with a monthly service charge of $600 or more. At the time, our core business was providing dial-up internet access and this “new hosting thing” was an experiment that the owners had decided to try out.

Our support started out with a focus on control panel guidance (who here remembers the Cobalt web interface?) and reboots (offered within 24 hours, when our sysadmin, Patrick Smith, would drive from the call center to the collocation facility and process a batch of requests). At the time, my primary job responsibility was to visit customer Web sites and make sure they did not contain any adult content, which they often did when you got beyond the home page. How’s that for a job description?

Things went along at a moderate pace until two things changed at roughly the same time. First, Sun purchased Cobalt and stopped playing nice, forcing us to expand our offering to white box dedicated servers. Second, we launched our first $1 setup fee sale. I remember that I had just taken over the Web Sales team, which was then part of our dial-up sales department.

All of a sudden our little six-person team was buried in inquiries, new orders and demands for upgrades. Heady time, especially when you consider how the rest of the “tech bubble” was in the middle of a serious meltdown, and all the economy pundits could talk about was the downturn in business and a growing recession.

Now that I think about it, the ride that started that day has never really ended. 1Ghz servers became 2.0GHz+; white box systems turned into all-Dell data centers; unmanaged dedicated hosting gave way to Custom Self-Managed Servers or Private Racks; and now EV1 has joined with The Planet.

What strikes me most about that last milestone is how we all thought we would be dealing with an alien race, and instead we found we were working with the same people we had always been working with. Sometimes literally, and yes I’m talking about you, Keith.

So here we are, just over a year later, and the company known for having the best data centers has joined forces with the company known for having the best network. We also have several new members of the family on board, determined to make sure we become known for having the best support ever. I only hope the next six years are exciting as the last six were. Then again, with a company like this, how could they be anything else?

- Aaron

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 17th, 2007 at 5:00 am and is filed under Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.