The Planet Blog

If you weren’t able to attend the cPanel Conference 2009 last week in Houston, you missed out on a great show. With all the networking events, educational sessions and vendor booths to visit, it was pretty tough to keep up as a participant, so the cPanel team deserves a high-five or two —physical or virtual — for having everything so well prepared.

As you may have heard, I led a session about “Disruptive Technologies: The Road from Disruptive to Sustaining.” Instead of copying the bullet points from my presentation into this blog post, we recorded the whole session on a Flip MinoHD. If you’ve got a little time and you’re interested to hear my take on the effects of the Cloud and Virtualization on hosting, go grab a bag of popcorn, turn up your computer speakers, sit back and enjoy:

I opened the floor for Q&A in the session and for additional follow-up after the session after we ran out of time, so I want to do the same for you: When you watch the video, if you’ve got any questions, please post them in a comment below and I’ll be happy to respond.

-Todd

The Planet has five core values. We are quizzed about them at companywide meetings, and they permeate our daily operations. I recently came across a passage when rereading “The Art of War” that may serve as a secondary set of core values for the team that handles The Planet’s new Alpha Professional Managed Dedicated Servers offering:

Now there are five matters to which a general must pay strict heed. The first of these is administration; the second, preparedness; the third, determination; the fourth, prudence; and the fifth, economy.
– Wu Ch’i (430 – 381 BC)

Each one of the elements Wu mentions can be interpreted differently depending on the situation. Given that I work with the team that recently launched Alpha Professional, I can’t help but draw parallels. If you missed our press release on January 12, let me recap this new service offering:

Staffed around the clock (24×7) by dedicated and certified (RHCE, MCSE, CCNA) system administrators, The Planet has created a new business-class service offering that our clients have been asking for. The Alpha Professional feature set includes:

• First-call resolution: When you need a certified team of experts to take personal ownership of support incidents for your most important servers, Alpha Professional is ready to respond. You make one call, and the issue is resolved.
• One-hour hardware replacement Service Level Agreement (SLA): The Planet’s one-hour hardware replacement SLA provides you with peace of mind. If your server or any of its hardware components fail, we will replace them within one hour.
• Managed Backup: If you require a restore or you’d like to modify your backup scheduling, our team is available to assist you around the clock. Twenty GBs of high-availability redundant storage is included with Alpha Professional, and plug-ins for MySQL, Microsoft SQL, Exchange and SharePoint are available at no additional cost.
• Server Monitoring and Reaction: Our team of monitoring engineers is constantly on standby, watching for service notifications from your server. If a critical fault is detected any time of day, they immediately jump into action to resolve the service issue. In the event the service issue is lasting longer than anticipated, our team will reach out to your designated contact(s) to provide updates and guidance on a correct course of action and ETA on a resolution.

The Alpha Professional service package is available on virtual and private racks or on a per-server basis at $125 per server per month, so you can buy the service for the servers that are critical to your business. Other hosting providers require this kind of coverage on your entire installation, but we understand that you might not need us to monitor or run regular backups on your sandbox environments or your development servers, so you shouldn’t be required to add the service to those servers if it doesn’t fit your needs.

Managed Dedicated Servers or Managed Hosting?

So now we have Alpha Professional Managed Dedicated Servers and Managed Hosting. They are two very distinct offerings linked by the generic-yet-fitting-in-both-cases term “managed” in their names. Managed Dedicated Servers is focused on your infrastructure. Managed Hosting is focused on your environment.

Managed Dedicated Servers ensure the uptime of your critical hosting infrastructure — including servers, firewalls, load balancers, etc. — and we allow you to manage everything from the operating system up.

Managed Hosting is a complete soup-to-nuts service offering in which your dedicated team has an intimate knowledge of your applications and databases. The Planet’s team will maintain a continuous conversation with you to tweak your systems, scale your installation and plan for the future. If you have database issues or you find your application is loading slowly, the Managed Hosting team will work through these issues with you. For a complete side-by-side breakdown of features by service type, visit http://www.theplanet.com/hosting-services/.

If you haven’t done so already, you can find complete information on Alpha Professional Managed Dedicated Servers at http://www.theplanet.com/managed-dedicated-server/.

-Todd

Are you a shared or dedicated hosting reseller? If I told you about a reseller program with increasing monthly discounts, easy account management and a free month to start, would you be interested? If you’ve screamed “Yes!” at the top of your lungs in response to any of these questions, I’m excited to share the launch of The Planet’s brand new Reseller Program … and I’d also recommend speaking with someone about that whole “yelling while reading a blog post on the Internet” problem you’ve got.

If you know The Planet, you know that we’re the largest privately held dedicated server hosting company in the world. What you might not know is that more than half of our business is made up of Web hosting resellers of various shapes and sizes … from garage-based operations reselling a few servers to close friends to multi-million dollar companies seeking market share in the global shared hosting arena. We provide the back-end network, hardware infrastructure and support to keep those businesses online and thriving. To accommodate the unique needs of these customers, we reinvigorated our reseller program to feature a customized control portal, enhanced discount structure and a free month of service for our charter members on all new server orders.

What Participating Resellers Get

• Monthly discount on already competitive prices
• A dedicated sales team with extended hours
• A custom portal with reseller-specific functions
• Ability to order online with discounts 24×7
• The Planet’s enterprise-level data centers and network
• The freedom to focus on your core competencies without worrying about your infrastucture

How the Program Works

When you join the program, you are eligible for a free month of service on every new server order, and as you grow your business, you will be eligible for our three tiers of membership: Tier 1 ($500-$2,500 per month), Tier 2 ($2,501-$5,000) and Tier 3 ($5,001+) levels each entitle you to larger monthly discounts on your server orders. Every member of the program will have full access to The Planet’s marketing resources, frequently asked questions, and account management staff to be sure that you have all the information needed to help ensure your business can to grow quickly.

After you sign up (hint, hint), we’ll fill you in on all of the details. We are excited to offer you an enterprise-level program at small business prices!

-Todd