The Planet Blog

It’s been a whirlwind of a month already. We released several new server promotions, launched Alpha Professional “managed dedicated” services for private and virtual racks, had company-wide kickoff meetings in Houston and Dallas, and to top it all off, we pushed out a brand new Web site.

Just writing down the rundown of the first 23 days at The Planet this year makes me yearn for a George Costanza-inspirednap-friendly desk. A few weeks ago, I could have caught some shut-eye in my “seasonal office,” but now that my area is unwrapped, I’ll just power through this blog post … full pot of coffee in tow.

Avid blog readers will have already seen and loved Steve’s post about the new Web site, so I’m going to ride his coattails and focus on the message we built our site around: “The Power to Choose.”

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but I’ll try to boil it down to a few: The Planet offers an unrivaled hosting product and service continuum. If you are in the market for any flavor of hosting, you can find it at The Planet. In that service spectrum, you see our primary lines of business: colocation, dedicated servers, managed services (monitoring, security, backup, migration) and fully managed hosting. With that foundation, we are able to incorporate new products and services like our Content Delivery Network and Storage Cloud offerings.

Now for a fun little interactive game: Click on the above image to get to our Hosting Solutions page where you can go through our “Which hosting solution is right for you?” wizard … Don’t worry, I’ll be here when you get back …

See. I told you I’d still be here. If you’re in the market for a specific kind of hosting, the wizard probably told you exactly what you already knew … unless you just clicked through it with a few “what if” answers to see what our super-secret, proprietary and complex artificial intelligence would suggest for you. Maybe that was just me.

The power to choose is central to our hosting message, so if you can think of anything we should add or change to include in that message, let us know!

-Kevin

P.S. If you’re interested in learning more about our continuum of products and services, head to our Hosting Services page to get a detailed comparison of our colocation, dedicated servers, managed dedicated servers and managed hosting offerings.

Robots in disguise … Transformers … More than meets the eye! Unfortunately, I couldn’t get all of the attendees at the Tier 1 Hosting Transformation Summit to belt out the Transformers theme song last week. In fact, I didn’t hear any references to Optimus Prime, Autobots or Decepticons; people were too busy talking about the future of the hosting industry. As you can imagine, my face was quite red when I showed up wearing my “hosting transformation helmet,” but luckily, no one could see it. It was hidden by the helmet’s awesomeness.

The event was packed with information sessions, keynotes and panel discussions focusing on everything from enterprise managed hosting techniques to private equity involvement in the hosting market. I found the first day’s panel discussion especially interesting. The topic covered how Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) can compliment and benefit by partnering with hosting companies to best leverage core competencies. Prior to the conference, I only had a general understanding of how CDNs really worked.

The grid/utility computing panel was a popular conversation topic during the networking events since several companies are unveiling new grid technologies and programs. Surprisingly, I didn’t see any competitors throwing punches.

If you haven’t had the opportunity to read The Whir’s Anastasia Tubanos’ summary of the event sessions, check out her Day 1 and Day 2 recap.

I’m sure the question weighing on everyone’s mind is “Where can I sign up for underwater hosting?” Sadly, I must report that I didn’t overhear anyone discussing efforts to retrofit their information delivery platforms to homing pigeons nor did anyone take too kindly to my “Hooked On A Feeling” on-hold music audition tape.

Either they are working on those industry-shaking developments under wraps or The Planet will have a monopoly on those innovations.

-Kevin