The Planet Blog

To the tune of The Clash’s classic with the same name:

London calling via Internet routes
The Planet’s connected, and you shouldn’t have doubts
London calling to the hosting world
Come check out our servers, all you boys and girls
London calling, now come look at us
Our new data center is causing a fuss
London calling, and it ain’t just a fling
Our network’s a ring on the international scene

CHORUS
The Planet is coming, yes we’re moving in
A D.C. in England, now watch all Europe grin
A 10-gig connection, so you have no fear
London’s connected – and you have a computer

London calling, but not on the phone
Don’t worry, brother, your site can have a new home
London calling and it speaks like Macbeth
A Queen’s English accent accompanies each breath
London calling – and I don’t wanna shout
But you started reading – and I saw you nodding out
London calling, and this ain’t no guise
So go get the attention of someone who buys (servers)

CHORUS (x2)
The Planet is coming, yes we’re moving in
A D.C. in England, now watch all Europe grin
A ten-gig connection, so you have no fear
London’s connected – and you have a computer

Now get this
London calling, yes, you’ll be there, too
An’ you know what I said? Well, all of it was true!
London calling at the top of the dial
So after all this, won’t you give me a smile?
London calling

We think this is new you’ll like … you’ll like … you’ll like

Yes. The song is true. The Planet just announced a new data center in London. It features up to 20kW of power per rack, backed by N+1 redundancy on generators, transformers and UPS systems. Customers gain access to a 10GB private fiber interconnect to The Planet’s core network through our Ashburn, Va., data center, as well as local connectivity to Tier-1 providers and the major European peering exchanges.

We’ll be offering virtual racks in the space starting in April, and we’ve already begun preleasing servers there! This announcement is made possible by the colocation agreement we made with London-headquartered TelecityGroup, which operates 20 network-independent data centers across seven European countries.

Check out our London Data Center Expansion press release for more details!

-Kevin

P.S. I bet that tune will be stuck in your head for at least an hour.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the kitchen … we’ve got a new installment of our adventures in microwaveable cuisine.

Given the lapse in vending-free content since Clayton Spivey’s cheeseburger, you may have feared the worst, but all is well … Clayton is still working hard in development for our managed hosting group, and we still have plenty of cheeseburgers in the vending machine.

In this episode, you’ll meet Arnold Ybanez and his meal of choice: hot wings. Arnold is a senior manager in our call center, and he’s been very involved in improving our customer-facing departments. We discuss our support organization’s desire for continuous improvement, and he explains several of the ways we’ve built and changed processes to improve The Planet’s customer experience .

Because the introduction to this video would not be complete without a ridiculous pun, I’d like you to observe that the video is split into two bite-sized portions to best satiate your hunger to learn. You may notice a few anachronisms in our discussion because this video was actually recorded around six months ago … archaeologists recently recovered the original footage, and it has been faithfully restored to its initial glory for your viewing pleasure.

-Kevin

The Planet hosts more than 25,000 customers worldwide. Right now, I am looking through an abridged customer list — with about 5,000 of the thirteen million-plus Web sites we host — and I am blown away by the diversity of our customer base, both geographically and functionally. We’ve got customers from Houston to Dubai selling web hosting, running video game leagues, offering online marketing solutions, hosting high-traffic forums, and building new social media platforms.

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.

Technology permeates our lives. We rely on GPS to take us to Grandma’s house; we stay up-to-date on friends we haven’t seen since high school via Facebook; and we are far more connected to the world around us than we ever thought possible. The fact that you are reading this blog, in one form or another, means you’re a part of this technology revolution. But it begs the question: Do you know how you are interacting with the world through the Internet?

I’m utterly unqualified to discuss an answer to that question metaphysically or philosophically, but I can take a crack at a crash course in hosting that will begin to answer the question literally. It’s the elephant in the room: In the simplest terms, how does the Internet work?

I’ve seen that there is steep learning curve for people outside the hosting industry when it comes to a general understanding of the technical answer to that question. The answer is not overly complicated or obscure … The sentiment is that by the time someone needs hosting, they’ll know how hosting works. The fact that you are reading this entry on The Planet’s blog would suggest you already know a fair amount about what hosting is and how the Internet works. So please bookmark this blog post as a resource to reference when your less-technically-savvy friends ask you to explain what you mean when you say you work online and host your own website.

I’m suggesting all of my friends read this post, so when anyone happens to mention Web sites, e-mail or computers, they can amaze their associates with their stellar understanding of the infrastructure and the behind-the-scenes goings-on of the Internet. Trust me: When you pass along this explanation as your own in the “real world,” everyone in earshot will be in awe.

If, as a rule, you don’t associate with non-technically-savvy people, please feel free to stop reading this post here.

The Internet: Under the Hood

1. You access a device connected in some way to the Internet. This device can be a cell phone, a computer or even a refrigerator. You are connected to the Internet through an Internet Service Provider (ISP) which recognizes that you will be accessing various sites and services hosted remotely. Your ISP is a network connected to the other networks on the planet (which is where we get the term “Internet” or “inter” “network”: Activity travels across multiple networks).
2. You enter a domain name or click a URL (for this example, we’ll use http://www.google.com).

3. Your ISP will see that you want to access “www.google.com” and will immediately try to find someone/something that knows what “www.google.com” means … this search is known as an NS (name server) lookup. In this case, it will find that “www.google.com” is associated with several name servers.

4. The first of these four name servers to respond with additional information about “google.com” will be used. Domains are typically required to be associated with two or three name servers to ensure if one is unreachable, requests for that domain name can be processed by another.
5. The name server has Domain Name System (DNS) information that essentially maps “www.google.com” to an Internet Protocol (IP) address. When a domain name is purchased and provisioned, the owner will associate that domain name with a specific IP address by creating DNS records. Think of DNS as a phone book that translates a name into a phone number for you.

6. When the IP address you reach sees that you requested “www.google.com,” it will find the files/content associated with that request. Multiple domains can be hosted on the same IP address, just as multiple people can live at the same street address and answer the phone. Each IP address only exists in a single place. (There are some complex network tricks that can negate that statement, but in the interest of simplicity, we’ll ignore them.)
7. Depending on what content you are accessing, the response from the server can be very simple or very complex. In some cases, the request will return a single HTML document. In other cases, the content you access may require additional information from other servers (database servers, storage servers, etc.) before the request can be completely fulfilled. This process is typically transparent to you as the end user, but it’s important to note when you are trying to understand the complexity of what seems like such a simple request.
8. When the requested content is located (and generated by other servers if necessary), it is returned to your browser in HTML code.

9. Your browser takes that code and translates the formatting and content to be displayed on your screen. Often, formatting and styling of pages will be generated from a Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) referenced in the HTML code. The purpose of the style sheet is to streamline a given page’s code and consolidate the formatting to be used and referenced by multiple pages of a given website.

10. The HTML code will reference sources for media that may be hosted on other servers, so the browser will perform the necessary additional requests to get all of the media the website is trying to show. In this case, it needs to pull in the Google logo from this location: http://www.google.com/intl/en_ALL/images/logo.gif

When the HTML is rendered and the media is loaded, your browser will probably note that it is “Done,” and you will have successfully navigated to “www.google.com” in 10 easy steps! I know it seems like a daunting and complex process, but it happens in a matter of milliseconds each time you use the Internet.

Pretty crazy, huh?

-Kevin

After a long summer break, your favorite television shows are finally starting new seasons, and you are prepared: You have a 15-gallon bucket full of Kettle Corn ready for your prime time couch-potato enjoyment; you’ve made space on your Tivo by deleting old episodes since you’ve got them neatly stored on the last season’s DVDs you just bought; and you’ve set recurring calendar appointments to remind you of your “commitments” (Yes, we know that “Go to the gym” means “Call in an order at Domino’s and watch the pizza tracker like a hawk.”).

As your incessant withdrawal symptoms are approaching unbearable levels, I’ve got a treat for you that will temporarily satiate your desire for entertaining content: The Return of This Week* in Vending.

It’s been almost six months since you joined Christian and I on our taste-test of the vending machine chili cheese dogs, so your mouth is either watering for more or your stomach has finally settled … either way, you’ll enjoy this installment.

This week’s victim participant is Planet Northstar’s Development Manager Clayton Spivey, and he is forced gets to try a vending machine cheeseburger. Making a cameo in the episode: our first vending survivor, Todd Mitchell. (Editor’s Note: Make sure you watch Todd’s reaction when Clayton takes the burger out of the wrapper.)

When we finally get down to the meat of the interview (very punny, I know), you’ll have a chance to learn about Planet Northstar — The Planet’s Managed Hosting division — and the development work required to create systems to accommodate the division’s ambitious goals.

April 1^st can be a crazy time around any office. The street smart crowd knows to be wary of “Free Donut” signs; thinks twice before borrowing a pen from a coworker; and answers every phone call with a veil of disbelief. It’s a conspiracy: everyone else on the planet is entitled to be crazy for the day.

Apparently, someone noticed the fear of impending doom in the eyes of a group of coworkers and decided to help them prepare for April Fools’ Day by providing an age-old tool from a conspiracy theorist’s toolbox … The tin foil hat. Apparently, the pranksters helpers ran into a problem: they didn’t have hat sizes for everyone. All hope was not lost, though. A communal hat was created over eight full cubes (with a perimeter of about 125′) to protect the inhabitants from the crazy lurking outside.

Todd and I have been accused of pranking helping from the moment we walked into the office this morning.

For good reason:

P.S. Irene has yet to retroactively grant her permission to us.

The Planet is widely recognized as an industry leader in network performance, reliability and capacity, so for our loyal customers (and soon-to-be customers), we wanted to give you a behind-the-scenes look at what makes our network great.

Terms like “Tier 1 bandwidth” and “fully redundant” are tossed around in networking circles, but to the uninformed, those terms may make about as much sense as “dual layer lunar module connections” and “space-time transfer warps.”

Have no fear, though. The video below should give you a good education on The Planet’s network, and you’ll avoid the typical Network Engineer initiation (which typically involves multiple pairs of socks and a gallon of peanut butter … I’ll spare you the details).

Stan Barber, our vice president of network operations, gave me a great network walkthrough, and because I think everyone could benefit from his tutorial, I did my best to transcribe the simplistic overview on video a la the UPS Whiteboard commercials.

Video Disclaimer: We are continuing to build our network, so the final schematic is forward-looking and will be fully realized shortly. The connections and their explanations have been simplified to best communicate a high-level understanding of the network … Oh, and I am not an actor nor a Network Engineer.

Right about now, you’re probably expecting me to say something like “The Planet: It’s the Network,” but I doubt Verizon would find that message very original.

We take a lot of pride in our hosting network, so if you have any questions, please let us know and we’ll be happy to answer them for you.

-Kevin

The YouTube link: The Planet Network