I thought it would be great to start a thread at HD since it is a calmer forum. Since the acquisition and merger by GI Partners of The Planet & Ev1 and the rise of Softlayer it's reputation has degraded.

I've never used either providers so I am neutral in this matter and we do have our very own Brooke from The Planet to make points regarding this and hopefully (I use that term lightly) won't be slated.

Can The Planet recover from very tough competition from both Softlayer & Liquidweb and even Layered Technologies? They have invested alot in advertisement on WebHostingTalk and other associated forums but is their Marketing Capital eating away at their Capital to provide customer service and performance (After all that was what originally launched them as a leading provider for this industry)

Doug has been criticised and blamed for the downfall but from what I see is that I think he is what I call a "Puppet CEO" meaning too many decisions are made from above and he is the face infront of the camera to take the praise or the blame.

Unless The Planet can recover from the last 12 months I foresee GI Partners selling up very soon because 3/4 of their datacenters are cages when you went from 25,000 to 22,000 servers in 12 months from dispersed data centres it will be very difficult to finance and manage this and I’m guessing this is what is also eating away at their capital.

You bring up some great points. I used severmatrix a couple of years ago and everything was awesome. Since the take over I have heard a lot of bad things happening at theplanet like support hopefully for there sake they do recover.

We have used theplanet for one of our clients managed server ..we have never faced a problem with there server or service.

I know GI Partners will have something to fall back on because they own Digital Realty Trust and they have a huge carrier hotel in Dallas, Texas so if Servers are dropping like hot-cakes then they would probably house the servers in their own building.

Something which is not good for ThePlanet is that if you see a drive failing and show them the errors they will still want to schedule a 4 hour time frame to test the drive before replacing it -- unnecessary downtime.

I would say Planet had its time. They would have hard time competing with providers such as SL or LT. SL offers a great service still at a affordable price while LT offers considerably good network for a very affordable price. I guess The Planet has nothing to boast about anymore or not even worth considering

We have several servers at ThePlanet and LT, we never had problems with those servers.

You know what? ThePlanet sucks... I have a windows server with them. See my post on their forum which I started after several tickets to their support without a proper reply.
http://forums.theplanet.com/index.php?showtopic=88670&

I suppose the planet is pretty good? Doesn't vBulletin use them for their servers? If so, then I can say their pretty good. I never knew they were bought out though?? since when??

I bought a server from EV1, then EV1 merged with ThePlanet and I was sold to them without my intension.

I still regret

I think the planet will be fine. quite frankly the management team that overextended them financially with silly pricing and growth exceeding their capitalization and cash flow is gone to another start up and the new managment from what I have seen is fixing things that were broken by the pervious team in my opinion.

I see a lot of similar things going on at the new company where the old management team went and I wonder how long it will be able to continue before someone has to start paying the piper so to speak.

the planet is also moving into colocation and customers outside of the webhosting market which will allow it to perform better as well.

as you stated in your opening post that this forum is a lot more calm than another one - the other forum is where a lot of companies built their marketing and that also puts them at risk.

I think there is plenty of room in the market - however I have seen a good bit of consolidation due to financial problems that I consider to be self inflicted in the past 2 years.

I think some more is going to happen. the users in this market will have to be smart unless they want to concentrate all the business to the hands of a few - then you will see the same thing that occurred in the pat 2 years continuing - the recycling of providers - service problems - price increases - other providers throwing their hands up and moving to different markets because this one is silly etc etc.

I have seen all of it going on.

I think the planet will be ok since I see them doing some of the right things now that are very painful to them and their customers to clean up the mess that was there before the last managment team left.

they are also well backed now and they own their own real estate - so they will be fine.

my 2 cents.

Out of their 4 buildings only 1 is solely owned by The Planet however their owners GI Partners do also own Digital Realty Trust.

even if it is owned by a parent company - it gives them a huge latitude and a very friendly landlord. its a huge advantage.

I don't see any issues with ThePlanet either they seem to be fine in my opinion. Sure we don't rent or house servers there anymore but I have friends who's company's continue to have racks of co-located hardware there. I've asked them why they haven't moved or anything from ThePlanet and it's pretty simple they're very pleased with the service. They've never had an issue can always reach someone and are treated with a lot of respect.

I bet the people ThePlanet is losing are the people with 1 machine which frankly aren't where the big bucks are anyways. The people with lots of machines or lots of co-located hardware seem to have nothing but great things to say. It's probably since when there is an issue for them there is someone right there instantly trying to help. Also with them having their own personal rep to speak to about the current contract and things helps also.


Just my thoughts anyways

Many of the people paying them the big bucks now were at one point customers with only a couple of servers. That's worth a thought.