Now that Softlayer and The Planet have officially merged, what are your thoughts? Good, Bad or Ugly? I've seen mergers go both ways, so I'll take a wait and see attitude.

Communication with my sales rep at The Planet went to ZERO as of August last year (for that reason, and a few others, we pulled more then 300 machines from them). You'd think when you're spending the kind of money we were spending, an email every now and then might be something you'd do in order to not only keep a client but also keep the commission as a sales rep.

Anyway, thought the whole process, I have yet to receive ANY notice from The Planet on any of this. We still have 50+ servers with them but the only emails I receive are "your invoice is due" and "thank you for your payment"

Like yourself, I'm in a "wait and see" mode, and hopefully Softlayer does something positive in order to at least retain the servers that I have with them without losing even more. Time will tell!

Problem with some sales plans is that you only receive commission on the first sale and not renewals. Have no clue what The Planet does though. Regardless, losing 300 machines and not folllowing up with you - that's crazy.

Received a call from some guy of SL. What he told me: they will increase bandwidth from 2000Gb to 3000Gb for all servers for free and they will have another data center location added. So nothing impressive here

Well, that'a certainly a positive step forward. I'd take an extra 1000GB bandwidth FREE with NO argument.

Looks like they've finally flipped the switch on the main page for www.theplanet.com too.

As extensive as their new site is, I can't find their VPS pricing. It looks like they've gone away from Support oriented marketing to technical marketing. I actually liked The Planet's old site better.

Yeah, I liked the old site for The Planet also - fairly easy to navigate.

Softlayer doesn't appear to be doing anything with VPS at all. Had a look for "vps" on their sitemap and nothing shows - http://www.softlayer.com/sitemap/

I'm not a fan of Softlayer's site - just seems too busy and no real separation of information. My eyes hurt when I go to the site

Like all mergers there is going to be some sour moments - I think using Softlayer as the flagship will benefit the Company and GI Partners greater than if it was the other way round.

SL are like Apple - Modern, Innovative and appealing to the market with it's services. Whilst The Planet - Like Microsoft have yet moved with the times and is failing to attract new clients and barely clinging on to the old.

300 Machines to loose for any company is a large slice, if a provider failed to spot that.. It says something about the Sales Standard and the Sales Analysis reports they are using. There loss.


I can imagine Lance & Team are probably working on a new site. A Big company like this will most defiantly unleash a new corporate identity. I was recently in involved in the merger between 2 companies with a Annual Turnover of £280 million each (outside of the hosting industry). It takes someone on the front line to spot mistakes then from someone from HQ so I can imagine the service offerings will change quite imminently.

I'm intrigued to see how the new "Group" will handle the big clients that The Planet had i.e. HostGator and TailorMadeServers. My Guess is I'm sure "Special treatment" will certainly be supplied for these 2 big clients.

Well, SL didn't incise my Servers space - so I'm upset. anyway..