The Planet Blog

You’re wrapping up a successful trip to the electronics store: You escaped the television section without submitting to the “need” for a 76″ LCD with no interest financing until 2144, you convinced yourself that if you bought Rock Band 2, you would officially be dead to the outside world for at least 2 weeks, and you made sure to stay away from the computer peripheral aisle after you reminded yourself that it took seven months to pay off the credit card debt amassed the last time you walked through to “browse.” You’re a pillar of self control as you wait in line to check out with an 8-pack of Double-A batteries and the two-disc special edition Iron Man DVD.

Then it happens.

A flash of red immediately draws your eye away from the queue of four customers in front of you. Instinctively, your head turns to see your nemesis … the bargain bin. Relatively unassuming in stature, the chaotically-piled merchandise strikes a deep chord in your soul. You know the checkout line isn’t going anywhere, so you nonchalantly meander over to the bin. All 8 seasons of Full House on 40 convenient VHS tapes, Richard Simmons: 80’s Blast Off on limited-edition DVD, a keyboard with Russian characters, a circa-1997 Giga Pet … could you get any luckier?!

Your sub-$30 mission may have hit your wallet a little harder than anticipated, and you’re not sure how long it’ll take to recover the pride you lost as you sheepishly dragged the entire bin into the checkout line, but you are victorious: When you compare the price you paid with the retail cost of all of your goods, you averaged an 86% savings!

While I can’t say that scenario was entirely fictitious, I can explain its significance to the world of hosting and hope no one questions me further about which aspects I’ve experienced personally.

Today, Planet Alpha announces our own Bargain Bin!

The Planet Alpha Bargain Bin is our new real-time searchable repository that features overstocked and clearance dedicated servers in a variety of configurations. The servers are available on a revolving basis, with prices starting at $45 per month.

Bargain Bin servers are selected from the Planet Alpha dedicated server fleet, and they continuously rotate based on availability, demand and data center space. When you visit the Bargain Bin, you can search for servers by processor and drive-controller type, hard disk space, memory capacity and price. The servers come with The Planet’s full range of software options, including operating system and control panel choices, though the server’s hardware must be purchased as it is configured and displayed. New servers are constantly added and others run out of stock. Think of it like Woot! for your server needs.

Bargain Bin servers are backed by The Planet’s Service Level Agreement, 24/7 support, and world-class network and data centers … the only distinction from our normal product catalog is that changes cannot be made to existing hardware for the life of the server.

The key purpose of the bargain bin is to provide you with super-affordable servers while extending the server life of hardware. The primary difference between changes cannot be made to existing hardware for the life of the server.

Buying from the Bargain Bin is a great way to add to your server portfolio at The Planet, and with the money you save, you’ll still be able to afford that pink silicone first-generation iPod case when you go back to the electronics store.

- Kevin

You’ve just rolled out a new version of your software for download, and the announcement hits the front page of Digg. You added a few new products, and they’re flying off your Web site’s virtual shelves. Your forums have reached record numbers of visitors the last four days straight. You are living the dream: You’re an Internet success. You treat yourself to a celebratory dinner and fall into a deep, contented sleep.

When you wake up, the sun isn’t shining and the birds aren’t chirping — your cell phone pierces the serenity of the night, and you answer, only to be treated to an exasperated monologue from your CEO, who says something to the effect of, “The Internet on our site is broken.”

Your site crashed an hour after your head hit the pillow, and the fields of green you painted in your dreams are immediately transformed into desolate wastelands of headache and heartache. You lost sales and visitors, and your online reputation took a hit … it’s all too much to think about. You wonder how this could have happened. You wonder why you didn’t get any alerts about the IP address not responding to pings. You wonder why your other sites and servers on the same rack were not affected. You wonder what you could have done differently.

If you’ve been in a similar position before, you can vividly recall the pain. If you haven’t been in a similar position, trust me … it’s not any fun. I ran a Web hosting company in college and occasionally the server would go down at 4 a.m. I’d wake up the next day to find a slew of angry customer e-mails. I desperately needed to monitor individual services on our servers, beyond whether or not the server is still responding to pings. So as I began to specialize in server management and support, I made sure my team focused on creating and maintaining a monitoring service to keep the horror story you just read from ever happening to our customers. The Planet Alpha Server Monitoring service was born.

Why AS Monitoring?

What are the advantages of Alpha Server Monitoring over standard server monitoring like IPAlert? IPAlert only provides e-mail and SMS notifications for down servers. Alpha Server Monitoring checks individual services on machines to make sure they are responding to requests and opening sockets, and it generally verifies service performance rather than its existence. Then, a highly trained Advanced Services administrator investigates the issue and takes corrective action.

We have a dedicated staff of 11 Systems Administrators who keep a vigilant eye on servers 24×7x365. Many of these SysAdmins have been in the hosting industry since before you could really consider hosting an industry, so our Advanced Services team has an exceptional amount of experience, from answering straightforward technical support requests to researching and solving complex problems.

How Does AS Monitoring Work?

Our custom monitoring system will check up to 15 services on your machine every five minutes. If there are any unresponsive services, your server will be flagged on our system. Our Systems Administrators will respond promptly with a service restart, server reboot, or we can follow a custom response procedure as you request or as needed.

Instead of losing sleep at night, worried about getting another frantic call from your CEO, you can rest assured knowing that the Alpha Advanced Services team is watching your server. With Alpha Server Monitoring, your night might look like this:

2 a.m. You finish coding and post your new update after a 22-hour marathon session. You go to bed.
3 a.m. The server starts to slow down and becomes unresponsive following a huge surge of traffic when you hit the front page of Digg.
3:03 a.m. Your server is checked by the Alpha Server Monitoring system, and an “HTTP down” alert is created because services are not responding as expected.
3:08 a.m. An Advanced Services Systems Administrator investigates an “HTTP down” alert.
3:12 a.m. The administrator finds that your MySQL database server and Apache have crashed so he restarts them both.
3:13 a.m. Your site is back online and responsive.
10 a.m. You wake up from your coding-induced coma to find a whole bucket of new orders to process and an Orbit ticket telling you what happened and what the Advanced Services team did about it.

Alpha Server Monitoring: Guaranteeing your uptime, sleep and sanity.

-Sean

P.S. We’re running a great promotion on Advanced Services right now: try any service on your servers for FREE for the first month.

Welcome To The Planet!

We pride ourselves on welcoming new faces to the team. We’re a tight-knit group here but we always do what we can to make sure that all the newbies feel welcome . Right now, we‘re gearing up to welcome our newest team members from Indiana. With the addition of the Touch Support — building our new Planet Alpha Advanced Services — we’ve gained some new folks who are eager to move to Houston and start their careers with The Planet. A few have already settled in, and we’re busy building cubes and making space for the rest. We’ll have this place in tip-top shape when they get here — desks, chairs, computers and white boards (oh, how we love our white boards) all ready to go.

The new Alpha Advanced Services staff seem to be in a state of shock-and-awe from the red-carpet welcome going on here (as shown here by Tim).

Before you know it, they’ll be joining in on our daily sing-a-long, Kumbaya-style. Hold hands, everyone!

We. Are. Fam-i-ly. I got all my cube-mates with me…

For a bit more insight on Planet Alpha and Planet Northstar, check out the video below by Anastasia Tubanos of The WHIR and The Planet’s Director of Product Management Urvish Vashi.

Today, we’re excited to announce a few big changes at The Planet!

Planet Northstar Managed Hosting

First, we’d like to tell you about Planet Northstar Managed Hosting, the first and only managed hosting service to leave behind the reactive support attitudes of the past and present a proactive vision of the future.

Our goal with Planet Northstar Managed Hosting is to turn your current perception of reactive support in managed hosting on its head. By introducing you to the Anticipation Advantage — a visionary way to help you grow and leverage technology — that utilizes a proactive, best practices methodology for everything from architecting systems to change management, security by design, to reporting results and more. Executed by a designated team of certified and seasoned professionals who know your name and your business, you’ll always know who you’re working with because they are all personally accountable for your success.

Here’s what Mark Schmulen, co-founder of Nutshell Mail says about our new service: “Our Planet Northstar support team has been incredibly proactive managing our IT systems so we can focus on growing our business. I would recommend Planet Northstar to anyone looking for managed hosting services.”

Planet Alpha Dedicated Servers

Along with the introduction to our managed hosting division, we’ve been working so hard on our dedicated server business that it has become a new entity: Planet Alpha Dedicated Servers.

There’s a powerful force behind the birth of our Planet Alpha Dedicated Servers division: it’s the power to choose. Your dedicated hosting provider fits the needs of your business model instead of the other way around, and we agree. You’ll see that Planet Alpha has added new Ready To Go server choices, Virtual Racks with Gigabit connectivity — and most important — a new set of “a’ la carte” Alpha Advanced Services for monitoring and security that you can use either solo or bundled in any combination.

See for yourself by visiting our transformed Web site and be sure to check out our new shopping cart, along with lots of new dedicated server specials.

Special Launch Promotions

We are celebrating this new era in IT hosting with a constellation of great offers, and it starts with a Big Bang of Savings. Try our new Alpha Advanced Services server monitoring for only $12.50 for your first month or add our server security module for only $20 for your first month. Save 25% off our latest dedicated servers. Get incredible deals on our Data Protection Servers (formerly “Dedicated Backup Servers”). Check out our Planet Alpha Server Specials to see how much you can save.

What About “The Planet”?

Keep in mind that our new stars — Planet Northstar and Planet Alpha — still orbit around The Planet, our corporate core of management and infrastructure that powers and sustains our success as a world leader in IT hosting. Our core infrastructure and processes have been designated as SAS 70 Type II certified: this includes in-depth studies in each of our six data centers, our network, provisioning systems, operations, physical and environmental security, and problem management through our customer portal. Visit the The Planet Corporate section of our Web site to learn more.

Join us on this unique journey through a new universe of IT hosting. Remember that you can contact us at any time through Live Chat on our Web site at www.theplanet.com or call us at 866-325-0045.

Welcome to the new world of IT hosting. It’s made possible by your input, your loyalty and your energy.