The Planet Internet Services

The Planet

Type	Private
Founded	1998
Headquarters	315 Capitol Avenue, Suite 205, Houston , Texas 77002
Key people	Douglas J. Erwin Chairman & Chief Executive Officer
Industry	Hosting
Products	Dedicated Hosting, Managed Services
Website	http://www.theplanet.com

The Planet is the world's largest privately held dedicated server company . In May 2006, the company merged with Everyones Internet, which previously ran the EV1servers brand. Now all services provided by both companies have moved to The Planet. The combined operation has over 22,000 customers and host over 2.8 million websites.

The Planet's support system is called Orbit and is located at orbit.theplanet.com. Prior to the completed merger, The Planet operated under several different brands. They include: Server Matrix, which served the low-price end of the market; Total Control, which featured servers with complete remote control, such as DRAC and Remote Console capabilities;

Orbit was the main way customers knew they were dealing with The Planet as a company rather than with one of the different brands they operated. The Planet now sells servers almost exclusively through their website rather than different brands which had been unified into their website.

Everyone's Internet merger

Everyone's Internet, commonly known as EV1, was originally a Houston, Texas-based internet service provider. It was formed on October 6, 1998 by Robert Marsh, Roy Marsh III, and Randy Williams. Its service was available nationwide.

Since 2000, Everyone's Internet's focus has shifted toward Web hosting through its EV1 Servers subsidiary. This company was a dedicated server hosting market. At its peak in September 2006, EV1 Servers hosted about 40,000 servers.

In May 2006, private equity firm GI Partners bought a controlling investment in Everyone's Internet. At the same time, Everyone's Internet announced that it was merging with The Planet, another dedicated hosting company in which GI Partners had invested.

The CEO of EV1 Servers was Doug Erwin, from GI Partners, after they gained control of EV1 Servers.

In October 2006, Everyone's Internet announced that it would stop providing dialup internet starting November 12 and sold their dialup portion of the company to PeoplePC, another dialup internet service provider. Some users were upset because PeoplePC requires a dialer, which does not work on all operating systems, and therefore opted to move to other internet service providers.

As of January 2007 the EV1 name was dropped and is now named The Planet due to the merge of The Planet and EV1.

EV1 and SCO licensing controversy

Main article: SCO-Linux controversies

On March 1, 2004, EV1Servers.Net announced it had licensed SCO's alleged intellectual property, saying that it was looking to offer its customers stability in the wake of SCO's protracted battle with the open source community. However, the deal was perceived by Linux users as using licensing deal to support SCO Group's lawsuit against Linux. On March 25, 2004, Netcraft reported EV1 had lost 1,080 Web sites in the previous 30 days. Robert Marsh, CEO of Everyones Internet, said that although EV1 had lost some hosting business since the deal, it was not out of line with the number of sites EV1 loses in a typical month.

A Utah court document[1] filed on April 5, 2006, revealed that Robert Marsh, co-founder and CEO of EV1, was misled by SCO's Philip Langer's claims when making the deal, and that EV1 paid $800,000 for the licence.

May 2008 Fire

At approximately 6:30pm (CDT) on May 31, 2008, an electrical transformer in the equipment room at the "H1" data center in Houston short circuited, causing a fire and explosion which resulted in extensive damage to the equipment room. All remaining power to the facility was shut down on orders from the local fire department. The incident resulted in approximately 9,000 servers being taken off line. Most of the 7,500 affected customers services were restored by June 2, 2008, however servers located in the ground level "Phase One" of the datacenter were not brought online until June 5, 2008. There has been severe damage to some customers' hard drives as a result of the power loss in the H1 data center.^{[citation needed]}

DDoS

During the night (GMT) on April 6, 2009, the nameservers of The Planet were attacked in a DDoS making any servers using their namesevers unreachable except when using a direct IP.