The Planet Blog

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.

Pass out the cigars. Raise your champagne glass. Make some room in the car. The Planet’s family just got a little bigger. Today, we’ve announced the addition of Touch Support to our team!

Welcome, Touch Support!

Because this news may be a surprise to some, I thought I’d answer a few of the most common questions we expect to hear.

What is Touch Support?

Touch Support is a leading provider of server administration management services. Those “Advanced Services” perfectly compliment The Planet’s unmanaged dedicated hosting solutions by providing our customers with specific server management options like 24/7 monitoring, managed backups, and outsourced technical support, so the inclusion of Touch Support’s team is a natural progression in The Planet’s evolution as the best, most complete hosting provider in the industry.

Why Touch Support?

We’ve seen an incredible demand for additional hosting services from our customers via our forums, at conferences and in regular ticket/call correspondence. Touch Support’s services are based on proven practices and processes, so their expertise can be leveraged to scale those services to our entire customer base.

The complexity of IT infrastructure continues to grow, as does the cost for small- and medium-sized businesses to use these services to maximize their businesses. With this acquisition, we expect to provide our customers with the ability to select from a comprehensive portfolio of advanced services to help them better manage their dedicated servers.

What’s Next?

We plan to make an announcement about our Advanced Services portfolio during the third quarter of this year. It will take a little time to integrate our two companies, so stay tuned. We’ll let you know when we’re ready to announce these offerings.

One more time … Welcome, Touch Support!