The basics of web hosting are simple: The Planet provides knowledgeable tech support, data centers, servers, power and bandwidth. Our customers have businesses, Web sites and ideas that require quality IT infrastructure — from colo to dedicated to partially managed to fully managed solutions (check out The Power to Choose for a look at that spectrum). The most surprising dynamic is how customers build from our services. It’s not uncommon to see two customers with identical hardware configurations running completely different businesses … One might be hosting a 5,000-attendee conference call while the other is consolidating information from social networks and personal e-mail accounts to deliver regular updates to 150,000 users.

If you’ve got a few minutes, I highly recommend you read a few of our Planet Alpha customer success stories and Planet Northstar customer success stories or check out our video testimonials to get a sense of the broad spectrum of business we host every day.

Because this blog is a great avenue to share with you what is going on inside The Planet, it is also a perfect place to share what’s happening on The Planet’s servers on a day-to-day basis. Enter “The Planet Customer Spotlight” series. Every other week, we plan to feature a different customer who is using our service to change the face of the Internet. I’ve got the first few “Spotlights” planned, and I’m looking for nominations to continue the series indefinitely. If you’re interested in getting a little face time on The Planet blog (and some Page Rank link juice), drop a comment at the bottom of this post or shoot me a quick e-mail (khazard AT theplanet.com), and I’ll be in touch.

All Customer Spotlights will be approved by the featured customer prior to posting. We want to use this venue to share your message with the rest of The Planet’s community, so you can be as involved in the process of drafting as you’d like.