The Planet Blog

A few weeks ago, I received an interesting email. The sender claimed to be from CNN, and he wanted to chat about The Planet’s #showmemyserver experiment. Before I filtered the seemingly surreal opportunity into a folder typically reserved for emails that say, “Dear Sir, I will send you $1million dollars if you send me $25.93 for postage,” I did a little snooping around. To my very pleasant surprise, this John D. Sutter guy is not only a real person, he actually writes and produces for CNN!

We exchanged a few phone calls, and I learned that he spoke with Rich Miller at Data Center Knowledge for a CNN Tech article about “The Cloud.” As they discussed the mechanics of the cloud in terms of data centers and servers, Rich pointed out the juxtaposition of this hyped demand of virtualized products with an old-school desire to have the data in a visible, tangible location. Enter The Planet’s #showmemyserver project.

John was very interested in our take on the social media experiment’s success, so it was great to share a little of what we heard from our customers … and we were even able put him in touch with Nate Tallman at HealthTeacher.com to give him a direct customer perspective. Thanks for your help, Nate!

Long story short: John posts A trip into the secret, online ‘cloud’ to quite a bit of fanfare … which isn’t surprising, given its great introductory video:

From the heart of that article, he links to a “Behind the Scenes” blog about The world of ’server huggers’ and investigates his subconscious desire to find the “real” location of his digital data. As any customer who visits one of our data centers can attest, he’s not alone.

If you’re interested in “hugging” your server, stay tuned to The Planet Blog over the next few weeks, and keep your keyboard at the ready. We’ll offer another opportunity just in time for the holidays.

-Kevin

Drum roll, please … it’s a momentous day for The Planet!

This morning we’ve launched an awesome new Web site that will make it far easier for you – our customer – to learn about and purchase The Planet’s products and services. We’ve made the site easier to navigate, backed by a wealth of new features for visitors who aren’t certain which services are best for their business.

Prominently featured is our messaging based on “The Power to Choose.” We offer the broadest range of options in the industry. Whether you’re looking for dedicated servers, management services, fully managed hosting or colocation, you’ll find a solution that meets your needs.

You may have noticed advertising from The Planet on many new properties, as well as a new campaign that has The Planet ads showing up many places you have never seen us before, based on your having visited our site in the past … and this is just the beginning.

Go ahead and take a test drive through the new site and let us know what you think!

-Steve

On May 14, 2007, The Planet’s Chairman and CEO Doug Erwin inaugurated the company’s first public blog, and over the past 441 days, we’ve come a long way. Today marks our 100^th blog post, so I thought I’d wax nostalgic about some of the key posts and changes that have kept this blog interesting, informative, entertaining and (sometimes) just plain crazy.

How do our 100 posts break down? I thought you’d never ask: 30 authors, 12 categories, 315 tags, 416 comments, 14 videos, loads of pictures, and according to WordPress 2.6’s “word count” feature, about 46,346 words (including this post). We’ve given technical tips, introduced crazy new team members, led photo tours of our offices and data centers, raced Dodge Vipers, welcomed you to our new HQ, and even launched new planets … all conveniently from one little URL: http://blog.theplanet.com.

What can you Expect in the Next 100 Posts?

We’re lining up several new contributors from all around The Planet who can give you even more insight into the day-to-day operations of our company. We’ve got a few surprises up our sleeves, so keep an eye out and enjoy!

-Kevin

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