The Planet Blog

What defines “value” in hosting for you? Is it all about price? The quality of the server? The quality of the network? Is it an intangible peace of mind? Where do great service and support fit in?

In 2010, The Planet is raising the bar. We are on a quest to bring our customers the best hosting value, and we’ve started making some big changes. We’ve lowered many of our regular server prices and added new server lines to our product catalog, including a low-end model with Intel’s newest Pentium G6950 processor.

You shouldn’t need a special deal to get a great server at the best price, and our new approach to pricing guarantees that for you.

While lowering prices is a good first step in becoming a leading provider of value hosting, it’s just that — the first step. We know that you want to run and maintain your server with as little interference as possible, so we just launched a value bundle program to empower you with the tools you need: With every new server you purchase from The Planet, we’re going to provide a free control panel, 10 GB of free cloud storage and free Symantec antivirus software. That’s not for a limited time — it’s a permanent value-add.

Thus far, we’ve only talked about a few of the server-side changes we’ve made, and that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Value hosting is not defined by bottom lines and add-ons. The most valuable hosting offering is the one that provides the best data centers, network and support for a given budget, so we’re investing in those areas of our business.

Since value is perceived on a customer-by-customer basis, your experience is our focus. In the coming weeks and months, you’ll hear about some of the huge investments we’re making to increase your satisfaction. The Planet has always been known for the quality of our service, and we’re not resting on our laurels. We want your experience to be even better.

If you’re interested in learning more about our new offerings and Twitter-exclusive deals, be sure to follow @ThePlanetSales.

2010 is already an exciting year at The Planet!

-Kevin

A month ago, Urvish posted that Orbit 2.0 was live and available for all customers. As we reach the halfway point in the roll-out and transition process, it’s rewarding to look back at all the great feedback we’ve gotten from customers and the improvements we’ve been able to incorporate as a result.

With recommendations touching on everything from design and layout changes to functionality and feature requests, the portal’s social web “2.0″ suffix is well deserved. Comparing the portal release from 30 days ago with the current release is like night and day … or maybe more like dawn and noon. With the hard work of our development team, we’ve been squashing bugs and tweaking the system to be the extremely fast and easily usable resource our customers expect it to be.

That being said, we still want your feedback as we head down the home stretch of this transition. On August 17, we’ll be closing our legacy Orbit 1 and ServerCommand portals, and we want to make sure every one of our customers is comfortable with Orbit 2.0 before we get there.

If you’re a customer and you haven’t had an opportunity to visit https://orbit2.theplanet.com, take a few minutes and click around to get familiar with the new system. Imagine you’ve got to create a new ticket on one of your hardware objects … Is it clear to you how to get to the screen below?

What about if you need to change your credit card? How do you add a new user to your account? Can you check the bandwidth usage on one of your servers?

By clicking through the portal to execute these common tasks, you’re bringing a new set of eyes and a different perspective … and you’ll have great feedback that we want to hear. Are the sections logically laid out? Are additional descriptions or explanations required to make the portal more usable? Do our legacy portals offer better handling of a given task?

If you’ve got any ideas for improvements or you note any inconsistent performance, don’t be bashful in using the “Report Portal Issue” link at the top-right of the header. We want to hear from you so we can make Orbit 2.0 feel like home for you.

-Nadja

If you’ve ever seen Enter The Dragon, you know how dangerous a house of mirrors can be. Last week, our team had a great opportunity to chat with a handful of our customers to hear first-hand what we can do better to deliver a world-class customer experience. We also shared some details about where The Planet is heading in the coming months.

The primary topics of conversation in this self-assessment and evaluation centered on our support structure and performance, product pipeline, customer portal and account management processes. While the breadth and depth of these topics could fill several weeks of discussion, we were able to touch on them all in our focused two-day session.

Our goal? We want to be able to look at ourselves as Ranier Maria Rilke poetically describes in Letters on Cézanne:

He reproduced himself with so much humble objectivity, with the unquestioning, matter of fact interest of a dog who sees himself in a mirror and thinks: there’s another dog.

At HostingCon, I noticed a common pulse coursing through the veins of most companies: “Listen to your customers and provide them the services they want and need.” That business mentality is fantastic, especially if you are looking at it from a customer perspective, but the difficulty in approaching that broad goal lies in its immediate practical execution.

While there are hundreds of ways to gather information on those wants and needs virtually, we relished in the opportunity to break the “remote relationship” with a cross-section of customers visiting and brainstorming with us in person (and we could hear the Internet screaming in horror). This group came together with the understanding that we wanted to conduct an open dialogue about where we can improve to deliver a world-class customer experience.

From broad suggestions about adding general server configuration options to specific requests for our future consolidated control panel, we have reams of notes to reference in the continuous pursuit of providing a world-class customer experience, but those notes don’t mean anything until we execute on them.

We created a long list of action items we’ll complete in the coming days, weeks and months. We hope to continue the discussion by culling all of the suggestions and comments YOU can muster.

I am always excited to talk to our customers about what changes we should be making as a company. Does that sound cliché? Send me an email with your thoughts to test whether or not I’m really interested (and/or excited): khazard (at) theplanet (dot) com

-Kevin

P.S. YouTube has the final “House of Mirrors” fight scene from Enter The Dragon if you are in need of your daily Classic Kung Fu fix.