How The Planet Has Transformed the World of IT Hosting
In 2006, GI Partners, a leading equity capital firm, acquired and merged two of the world's leading dedicated server hosting providers: The Planet and EV1Servers. According to Netcraft's Hosting Provider Switching Analysis, at the time of the merger The Planet and EV1Servers were the fourth and seventh largest hosting providers in the world, respectively.
Keeping The Planet name for the newly merged Web hosting company, it has grown into the largest dedicated hosting provider in the world under the direction of an experienced management team. With more than 22,000 customers hosting 6.7 million web sites on more than 50,000 servers in six SAS 70 Type II data centers, The Planet has brought a new era of leadership and innovation to the IT hosting industry.
Most recently, The Planet has branded its dedicated server business as Planet Alpha and introduced a new managed hosting brand called Planet Northstar. Today, The Planet - encompassing Planet Alpha and Planet Northstar - offers the most comprehensive selection of IT hosting products and services on the market, giving customers worldwide the power to choose the IT hosting solution that best fits their specific needs.
The Planet/EV1Servers - Legacy
At the time of the merger with EV1Servers, The Planet was a leading hosting provider in Dallas, Texas, founded in 1994. Growing to three data center locations in the Dallas area, The Planet was a consistent innovator, introducing its Server Matrix line of entry-level dedicated servers and colocation hosting, as well as Red Hat Enterprise Linux in a hosted environment in 2003. The next year, The Planet introduced DiskSync, an automated disk-to-disk data recovery and protection solution that enables customers to securely backup their data to remote servers over existing network connections.
At the beginning of 2006, The Planet was operating an additional Tier-1 data center at Infomart in Dallas. The new facility brought the company's total data center capacity to more than 150,000 square feet, housing more than 25,000 servers.
EV1Servers was a leading dial-up service and hosting provider in Houston, Texas from the late 1990s through 2006. By the time it was acquired in 2006, the company's data centers were home to over 1 million Web sites and its network accounted for over 1.5% of all U.S. Internet traffic.
EV1Servers.net (ev1servers.net) made hosting history in 2000 by offering a $99 self-managed dedicated server, carving out a formidable market niche for itself. At that time, EV1Servers also introduced month-to-month service so that users could activate instantly and cancel whenever they wished. This offering dramatically increased the allure of the reseller hosting business model by making it more profitable and less risky.