The Planet Blog

Over the past few months, several thousand customers have already started using The Planet’s new customer portal – Orbit 2.0. Orbit 2.0 consolidates and improves upon our legacy ServerCommand and Orbit 1.0 portals by providing a functional superset of features and controls, along with an improved user interface. Thanks to the continued testing and valuable feedback from our Orbit 2.0 beta customers, we are ready to release the new customer portal to our entire user base.

Today, ALL CUSTOMERS have full access to Orbit 2.0.

Because we want to ensure you have plenty of time to get acclimated to the new portal, the transition to Orbit 2.0 will span two months. During this time, you can access both Orbit 2.0 and the legacy portals.

On August 17, 2009, we will terminate access to Orbit 1.0 and ServerCommand.

We are committed to making this transition as painless as possible and to ensuring that it will not impact your servers hosted at The Planet. If you’re interested in learning a little more about the transition to Orbit 2.0, here are the answers to the common questions we expect.

What is Orbit 2.0?

Orbit 2.0 is a new version of our customer portal. Orbit 2.0 features an improved navigation structure and layout, allowing easier access to commonly used features:

• Home Tab: By default, this page contains your current account balance, a view of recently opened tickets and any announcements from The Planet.
• Account Management Tab: Provides detailed views of statements, current billable services and payment methods, along with a full interface for managing users and sub-users within Orbit.
• Hardware Tab: Accesses all of the critical management features for your hosted servers, as well as products and services like load balancers, backup and Storage Cloud.
• Domains Tab: Manages your domains, SSL certificates and DNS.
• Network Tab: Allows you to view the health of our overall network, along with bandwidth utilization graphs for your individual servers.
• Tickets Tab: Provides an interface to manage all of your sales and support tickets.
• Orders Tab: Serves as the launch point for you to order additional products and services

How do I log into Orbit 2.0?

You can access Orbit 2.0 at https://orbit2.theplanet.com with your current username and password.

How long will I be able to access my current portal (Orbit 1 and ServerCommand)?

You will be able to access Orbit 1 and ServerCommand through August 17, 2009. On that date, we will terminate access to the legacy portals.

How do I get support for Orbit 2.0?

Orbit 2.0 is our production portal. Support is available through all standard support channels (phone, ticket and chat).

What do I do if I find an issue or have a suggestion for Orbit 2.0?

If you find a bug or have a suggestion, you can contact support or simply press the “Report Portal Issue” link at the top of every page of Orbit 2.

I am an Orbit 1 user, how will I migrate?

No migration is required. Simply log into Orbit 2.0 and use it. You can use both portals interchangeably through August 17, 2009.

I am a ServerCommand user, how will I migrate?

All features, except DNS management, are available in both portals simultaneously. No migration is required for those features, and you can use both portals interchangeably through August 17, 2009. DNS administration is available either through ServerCommand or Orbit 2.0, but not both. Our support team will help you migrate your DNS zones to Orbit 2.0 to allow for the exclusive use of Orbit 2.0. Migrations are not expected to have any DNS downtime, and access to the portal should not be interrupted.

If you have any more questions about the transition to Orbit 2.0, please visit our Orbit 2 Launch Announcement.

Welcome to Orbit 2.0!

-Urvish

Today, we’re excited about launching The Planet’s Ready-To-Go servers. These are servers that we can provision and activate for customers in under an hour.

We’re able to commit to such fast delivery times in part because we limit the customizations, but mostly because we keep servers pre-provisioned in the HOPPER. Believe it or not, this stands for Hardware Object Pre-ProvisionER. This is a specialized function of our Auto-Provisioning system which essentially matches orders for servers to our available inventory of servers.

Once we’ve picked the configurations for the HOPPER — and for now we’re sticking with just three of our more popular configurations — the HOPPER is kept full. What this essentially boils down to is that the HOPPER takes servers and pre-installs the OS (RedHat) and the control panel (cPanel). Once that’s done, the Web site is ready to start taking customer orders. When the HOPPER runs low, we simply “refill” it. It really is just that simple.

The Planet’s goal is to add additional server configurations into the Ready-To-Go family. Which is why you’ll find that we’re not charging extra for these servers.

However, for now, we just need to figure out how we prioritize which servers should be brought into the Ready-To-Go family next. I’d love to hear your suggestions.

Happy instant gratification …

- Urvish

I was interested in the recent acquisition of Postini by Google for $625m. Congrats to the team from Postini. I know a few of the guys that are out counting their money right now.

People can argue back and forth all day as to whether this was a reasonable valuation or how much of a strategic fit Postini is for Google. I for one was really surprised by the price, until I saw that it was an all-cash deal. All of my economics profs would always tell me there is no difference in how you choose to fund an acquisition, whether it be cash off the balance sheet, or financed through debt or through stock. However, it seems time and time again companies that generate huge cash balances on their balance sheet are eager to go out and buy with the cash they have.

Public companies that amass a large cash position face enormous pressure to spend the cash. All of that cash on the balance sheet is just dead weight from a valuation perspective. The obvious outs are invest in your company, but that leads to dilution of margin/EPS and hits to market cap; issue a dividend, but that means you’re admitting to the market that you aren’t a growth play; buy back stock, but that is useless unless you use a HUGE amount of cash; or go out an acquire with cash. I’ve talked to numerous executives who feel absolutely handcuffed by these forces. It’s even more frustrating to the guys working at the company who want to do something entrepreneurial from the inside. Having worked at public companies, I’ve personally had proposals shot down since executives would rather acquire than invest internally simply because they hated the alternative uses of cash.

Here is the opportunity and why the cards are stacked in the favor of aggressive startups and entrepreneurs. Simply put, startups and smaller companies provide a pressure valve for these cash-rich public companies that are looking for a growth engine for their businesses. It’s why these guys have VP’s of Corp Dev that are always out scouring the market looking for ways to spend money. These guys are often measured on how many deals they get done. All the more reason to take the jump with the next great SaaS company or media or content service.

Anyone who has worked for a company that’s been acquired knows how tough it can be. I’ve been through it a number of times. The old faithful from The Planet and EV1Servers know this as well as anyone. I know we’re all glad to be able to just focus on growing the business…

- Urvish

I was recently reminded of an old friend from India who moved to California a year back or so for a new gig as the networking guy at a mid-sized company. For simplicity’s sake, let’s just call him Raj (note: names have been changed to protect the innocent). As are most people starting a new job, he was eager to make a strong first impression by doing all the standard stuff really well, and he wanted to be responsive to any end-user request, especially anything coming from his new boss. On his first day, he was invited to a senior staff meeting and took detailed notes of all the stuff that was going on. Raj wanted to figure out how he could help — from a networking perspective. Now my friend is not like Apu from The Simpsons or anything, but English is his second language.

He heard exec after exec talk about how they didn’t have enough “bandwidth” to finish some project or another, and if they just had more “bandwidth” they’d be so far ahead of the game. Raj decided this was his opportunity to spring into action. He dutifully began analyzing RTG charts and even started installing network response testing agents. He definitely found some bottlenecks with some congested segments. Raj began building a plan to move from a number of shared segments to switched fabric to the edge for some of these apparent power users that needed more “bandwidth.”

He took the proposal to his boss, who reviewed it and complimented him on a thorough job and well articulated argument. Raj’s boss then proceeded to calmly and very politely explain to him what the execs meant when they referred to “bandwidth.” His boss was just happy that Raj didn’t have signing authority for that much gear. Needless to say, Raj now calls me a fair bit to make sure he’s got English vernacular down.

It just struck me as funny because the story came up as we were launching our unmetered bandwidth by Cogent. We were going through the same discussions to figure out how much capacity we needed relative to demand from our customers. There has also been conversations about which of our multiple data centers we’d provision to accommodate growth. English is my second language, and let’s just say I chose my words carefully after talking with Raj.

- Urvish

Despite having traveled a fair bit and having been born in India, I’ve never been to China. I’ve always really wanted to go. Heck, my wife and I even considered getting married at the Forbidden Gardens here in Texas. As cool as that place is, I have to believe that the real deal is much more impressive.

While no one ever really needs one, it seems to me that the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing might just give me the perfect excuse to go. If going to Beijing by itself wouldn’t be cool enough, its even more interesting when you hear about the preparation the city is going through, whether that be far fetched attempts at weather modification to stamping out bad translations on street signs all the way to mass education on etiquette in preparation for a global flock of visitors.

As ridiculous as this might sound, the work of the Olympics organizing committee reminds me a lot about my work here at The Planet. In preparation for the Olympics, this group has analyzed and anticipated the needs of their visitors/customers, built out solutions to meet those needs and ultimately are in the process of building out a scalable infrastructure that can accommodate a glut of demand.

Now, you’ve heard Will and Jeff talk about meeting our customer needs through building scalable networks or having N+1 redundancy within our data centers. While I’m always interested in what those guys are up to, my job is really about identifying needs and helping build solutions, which may sound pretty unbelievable when I say that I work in Marketing. In any case, many of you may remember we did a customer satisfaction survey and followed up to get a better view of what products and services our customers. Remember the banners in the customer portal?

First of all, I want to thank the thousands of you that took time to respond. There were a lot of quick hits that we learned and responded to. For instance 49% of you said that you were concerned about bandwidth prices and overages and we launched a promotion on unmetered bandwidth, or that 70% of you rated increased storage capacity as Important or Very Important, which led us to release our Managed Dedicated SAN offering . We heard you loud and clear on a number of others products and services, but some of them will take a bit longer before we can rollout, so stay tuned.

In the meantime, I wish we could get a little weather modification here before the summer heat really sets in.

- Urvish