So we have tons of server with theplanet.com. The Planet is one of the biggest webhosting facilities there is.
A couple weeks ago we ordered a full cabinet rack with 3 servers signed contracts and all that. They tell us off the bat that Debian is not supported with the onboard raid card so we have to buy this extra card for every box… well whatever we said ok lets do it. Anyway the last few days have been hell trying to get any status updates and today come to find out not only did they *forget* to add hard drives to the boxs that we paid for but they are not even using the raid cards we had to pay extra for….
Also they keep talking about Debian being unsupported and how its “non standard” and how its the whole reason its taken so long to get our servers working. However the servers just got there monday and according to the ticket it took less then 3 hours to install Debian so how is that the main issue? Its so super fricking annoying.
Anyway theplanet is no longer on my recommended page.
About the author...
Jeremy Schoemaker – who has written 2415 posts on ShoeMoney.com.
Hi I am Jeremy Schoemaker and ShoeMoney.com is my blog. 99% of the post here are done by me but you will see others occasionally make guest posts. This blog is fun to write but for my day job I run several online companies.
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{ 124 comments… read them below or add one }
That sucks Shoe. I wonder if you reach anyone at the planet from your blog? If someone as big as you gets crappy service guess how they treat the smaller people?
Never heard of them before, after reading this I’m glad I didn’t.
I’m not sure how you never heard of the planet before, they’re basically biggest server provider, specially after merging with Ev1…
now that planet is out of picture? who you gon use? there is not alot of option out there like that
I have a feeling they will care when this ranks for there company name =P
I will probably end up going with the much higher priced but higher valued services like he.net or xo where I can pay for bandwidth and buy my servers outright.
Actually for the price we are paying at the planet we could own each server for 3 months of renting.
Try Colocation. I live near SF and I have a 100MBit pipe. It’s screaming fast and beats the hell out of managed services. Well, of course you gotta know a lot of stuff about linux administration, networks, file systems, caching and a lot of other stuff.
Shoe – check out NTT Verio. We’ve been with them for 5 years now. World class all the way. NTT is the largest telco company worldwide.
And oh, Try Coloserve, I’m hosting with them. The quotes from HE.net were a little higher than Coloserve. Youtube was hosting at coloserve before they moved to HE. I prefer Opensuse over Debian.
I’m sorry, Youtube has their own pipe, not hosting with HE.
Its like built in feature of hosting providers.
wow lol and to think I was even considering them ..
Shoe, come and host with us. All our techs speak fluent debian. You definately get what you pay for !
I agree with Jeremy.. theplanet is annoying i just went thru a weeklong move trying to upgrade ONE of my servers. It was so frustrating I ended up having to talk to Regional Sales Manager and the Account Administrator before I was done. Kind of lame. They did comp me a months worth of hosting.. but still a week is along time in webtime. //g
Well I don’t use dedicated hosting, maybe that’s why. But I believe they are popular in that sector of the market and good at what they do.
Everybody gets the hiccups now and then.
Use softlayer !! i ran away from theplanet one year ago because of the same support issue ! they cant handle the growth. run !!
Blah I’ve had similar exp, I recommend leaving a review at our site:
http://www.webhostingunleashed.com/the-planet
We only have 2 reviews for them right now, 1 positive 1 negative but hopefully more shortly.
thanks, Ben
http://www.webhostingunleashed.com/
I have servers with The Planet as well and I have to say ever since the merger with EV1 (who I was originally with) things have really gone down hill. Generally anything going to sales takes about 3 weeks to get a reply and it took a month to change my credit card with them. They’re proving to be a great study on how to take a good company and drive it into the ground.
Yes, I had the misfortune of utilizing EV1 during the merger with the planet. Yuck. Plus they only support RedHat Enterprise which is less flexible and in my opinion, harder to customize, than Fedora. Support and Domain tools are crap as well.
WOW man I was just looking into using them and giving them a try… maybe i will be holding off going to them…. sounds like they may have forgot the number one rule is to keep the customer happy!
I recently had tons of issues with TP too and in Feb moved two of my servers from TP to SoftLater. WOW, what a difference in support!!
My biggest problem with TP was liars and terrible support.
I’ll look for my write-up on their support and let you know but basically they lied to me about data a file had in it and changed it while I was on the phone wtih them so that it said what they said.
HE higher level than TP? I have an account on a friends box at HE (he has a rack) and they are a LOT slower and it’s been down more than TP network. I wouldn’t call HE higher level than TP.
I don’t know about XO co-lo but I looked into getting XO for the office and they were decently priced but after talking to friends who have them at their work decided to go another way.
Jeremy- If you want to lease still I HIGHLY suggest SoftLayer, i’ve e-mailed you some info about them too
-Todd
I’m in the process of moving my servers to ServerBeach (serverbeach.com). It’s where YouTube (at least pre-buyout. dont know about now), MyBlogLog, Automattic, TailRank, Dogster, [insert web 2.0 company here] seem to be congregating.
Youtube hosted at Server Beach. You can see the recommendations from YouTube on the Server Beach homepage.
Yeah, I use SoftLayer myself. Not only are their system powerful and affordable, but their service level is amazing. Definitely check them out.
I took a look over the forums at theplanet and no Shoemoney buzz yet. The EV1 merger is still the number one story and perhaps also the reason behind the crappier than usual service.
I’ve had the same problems with ThePlanet, except mine was basically.. I rented a dedicated server with them, less than week later the hard drive fails, takes my crap offline for a few days to put in a new hard drive, then tries to charge me extra fees for OS reload. I understand you need to charge those fees, but who’s fault is it for not testing the hard drive before putting it online? I cancelled instantly and went back to my old host which is the bomb, they are just a little more expensive that’s why I tried ThePlanet, but now it’s so worth the extra money. So basically I lost like $200 with those jerks, they wouldn’t even give me ANYTHING back at all for my troubles and huge waste of time. Oh well.
Want me to go down there and talk to them for ya? ThePlanet is just a few miles away from me here in Dallas and I drive by it every day.
Looks like a lot of folks are going to ServerBeach…lots have been there for a while.
Another recommendation for SoftLayer. The company was started by some of the senior folks that left The Planet a couple years ago…read the CxO and VP Management Profiles on SoftLayer’s site to get an idea of the exodus. The Planet has gone downhill ever since.
I have a dedicated with them, I wouldn’t switch companies. They’ve been pretty good to me and I’ve been with them since October of 2005.
ShoeMoney take-dawn list is 76%
That sucks…I’ve installed Debian on several different servers and it’s not *that* hard.
Ali,
I’m with you on that one, never heard of em or EV1 for that matter.. Though I have my head a bit in the sand when it comes to big hosting companies.
Nice plug
Really seems like everyone has a different provider they whole heartedly recommend, prior to reading the comments here I actually suspected there would be a small number of suggestions.. It is really lame that they would try and excuse the delays with something that is so obviously a lie, if your at least honest even if you screw up at least theres a chance that customer won’t go around spreading bad karma about your company..
We’ve got a number of servers with them, and do run into the not-so-occasional issue as well. We’ve also got a number of servers with LiquidWeb and have been very happy with them.
I’ve hosted sites with dozens of shared and dedicated hosts, and the most reliable and responsive company is RackSpace. They’re not cheap, but definitely worth it.
i’ve been with EV1 AKA theplanet for 5 years now and i’m a big fan. i only wish they’d open up shop in the UK so i can get some UK IP’s along with my great service.
Buying your own server is cheaper. It’s getting all the programming set up to run it and getting your own DNS service ports and stuff set up on it that is time consuming and costly. It’s just simpler for all of us to pay someone else to use their servers.
I’ve had similar issues with The Planet in the past, got the feeling from them they couldn’t care less if they get the business or not unless you’re spending a huger amount with them, definitely not a friendly company for the little guy.
Have you looked at LiquidWeb for fully managed? Been with them for over a year and couldn’t be happier.
I recommend softlayer.
At least Lost is on! (too bad it’s a lot of background on those two no one really likes)
okay that ending was jacked up
Why Debian?
Ouch, with as many readers as ShoeMoney.com has this is not going to do much for new business.
wtf does “debian is not supported” mean? since when is hardware support distro-specfic? what a lame response on their part.
I am upset with ThePlanet as well. Today some of my sites were down, turns out they had problems with a known group of IPs. No notice, nothing. Took them several hours and lots of lost revenue before they got it back up. Anyway, I got moved to ThePlanet as a customer of EV1. I think they’re having growing/transfer pains.
I left the planet along time ago. When the server they had me on broke they did’nt do a thing. I was yelling at them for 3 days to fix it. good thing i had other servers but It was a nightmare.
Yeah, and most of us are exactly their target market who require dedicated servers. Webbies with either a few large sites or a bunch of smaller ones.
Always go with an “Apple” for servers and racks, smaller companies who have a proven track record. TP is just too damn big for its own good.
I remember once i ordered 1 GB extra Ram for my existing server and it took 15 days for them to get a piece of 1 GB RAM.
Now what else can you expect from them !!
RackSpace for those “can’t be down” websites. Support is excellent.
I dont use the planet i got screwed over by them so i moved all of my sites to new servers
My friend has purchased servers with a company for about 4 almost five years now.. she runs e-starr.com and has about like 4-6 servers with them, she has some of the best servers her website is asastar.com you should contact her to find out where she gets them i used to have the link but i lost it :\
I’ll second that.
We started purchasing our new accounts at SoftLayer this year and they’re amazing compared to ThePlanet. We’re going to be migrating all our old servers across soon enough.
Yeah I use SL after leaving the planet
Those companies, specially the ones that provide internet-related services, will certainly need to review their customer care policy.
An incident like the one with Jeremy will probably cause them thousands of dollars in lost clients.
I can’t say enough good things about Rack Space. Those guys really know what they are doing. We’ve got two dedicated boxes with them and have been very happy with the support.
Does this mean ShoemoneyServers will be another branch of ShoemoneyMedia in the not too distant future?
thx
Might take a look at Fastservers.net and rackspace.com, both have a good rep, fastservers.net is cheaper but still as good I think.
Something as small as “Your ticket is assigned” makes a big difference when you are wondering WTF is going on.
If I were to pick up a few dedicated servers today, I’d probably go with Steadfast. Liquid Web would also be up there, or even Gnax/tranxactglobal.com.
I’ve used the Server Matrix part of the The Planet without problems, but that was a few years ago, before any shakeups, mergers, etc.
Softlayer also seems like a good choice. Aren’t they mainly the guys that used to be at The Planet, back when people seemed to like The Planet more?
ThePlanet is down to hill …. Softlayer is the best company i recommed their services are super fast less then 20 mins ticket responce time. Issue resolved with in mins (if any occur which is very rare)
Above the top is their Panel where you find all the information regarding every thing you ordered for. Which they called customer portal.
I’m pulling my hairs out right now trying to get a new set of servers setup for a client. I recommended this ISP, and they took my reco and switched from their previous hosting company… Now they are making me look bad… ughh.
It’s coming up on the first anniversary of when the planet caused over a quarter of a million in damages to our company and our hosted customers.
They wiped our primary and backup drives…
Complete and total idiots.
My clients and i been personaly dealing a big huge amount of the datacenters that are mention here. Totalserversolutions have been working with Ev1 / TP since the start of the company, and i personaly been working with Ev1 since almost the first cobalt servers where offer when they used to have the all RS name.
Since the start , we have seen many people come around and many changes on the company. So far i must agreed this Merge between EV1 and TP is not realy working well.
About Softlayer, we been working with them since the start, i must say they are doing the things realy well. I personaly have talk to the CEO and we been working together to make the control panel more usefull and friendly to the users. There setup times are what Ev1 used to be, almost real time (depends on the hardware).
RackSpace works nice and there support is ok. I must say there uptime and response time is good, but i got some storys from clients that arent that great.
At the end , you realy get what you pay for most of the times, personaly i think, each provider you use depends on the people that is working with you in your company and how much you depend on the datacenter.
You’d either need a background in linux administration or to hire your own developer to work with stuff like that.
You guys might want to hire Bill.
does anyone have experience with media temple?the grid hosting deal looks interesting, but i heard a lot of negative feedback
yeah, that’s surprising that you haven’t heard of them. they’re huge.
yeah, so was i. bummer.
Dunno why anything else. I’ve been using CentOS on my servers, and was just curious what you guys thought was such a compelling reason to use Debian.
yeah, you get what you pay for, but boy do you pay…
no experience, but I’ve heard the exact same thing.
I was with ev1 before. I am moving to another web hosting company as I feel they are getting worse after the merger with ThePlanet.
If you own your own servers which you should, you should try colocating them at zerolag.com. They are pretty damn good.
how much does a high end server cost anyways ??
Man after reading all this I am glad I run/own my servers. Was wondering if I should ever go to using a company like TP. Hope I can keep running my own show now forever. Getting fiber right to my home/office and have a spare bedroom setup for servers with racks hot air exhaust and extra air conditioning. Guess I am lucky. I also run a small isp but hosting is my 1st love and by far most profitable.
I would assume they hosted with someone before they got so popular.
Sorry to hear about your troubles. Let me know if you need any assistance.
Sorry to hear about your troubles, but what kind of drives and RAID were you looking for? You were going to manage these servers yourself?
Go price out two quad core processors a motherboard that can handle them and 16gb ram. Then price out 4-8gb of high-end ram, 2-4 15k rpm scsi drives, a scsi controller, a low-end video card and come back and let us know
$3k+ for a good one.
Sorry to hear about the problems Jeremy, I know it can be frustrating to see customer support like that
I cannot but recommend LiquidWeb for you (no… I’m not their salesman – I’m their *dedicated* customer
– they have top notch support and fast servers. I recommend checking out webhostingtalk.com for more reviews, but my personal recommendation is them.
Yeah, that isn’t a big deal. Let me know if you need assistance.
so many suggestion and comments for shoe .. Lets see who is the next big commpany in the news that Shoe choose .. It will boost their sales aswell
with the hype Shoe will create …
I have been very happy with layeredtech so far. I have 5 servers with them. 0 downtime, good support, and good prices for the hardware they offer.
Just wanted to add that Server Beach gave me a 15% off/no setup fees discount. They call it their ‘refugee discount’ for all those coming from The Planet. 15% off made a huge difference on several servers. Plus, if you use this referral code VEPFKHGVSA you’ll get $100 off your montly bill after 3-months with them. Nice also.
Nicely put – but just try that argument on the phone. I’ve had simillar conversations with hosting companies before.
They always have an excuse – it usually takes around 20 secs for the usual support jockeys to hand me off to a tech… the best way to deal with any hosting company is make them feel stupid.
Soon enough the excuses vapourize when you get to the crunch with the actual tech staff. At the end of the day – fuck the fluff. If they don’t deliver the services you’ve paid for, the best thing is just to move on.. (or if you happen to own a popular blog..)
Shoe, glad you finally “see the light” regarding The Planet but sorry to see you found out the hard way.
I use Server Beach and can’t say enough good things about them, so far.
Not only do they support Debian but they use it for emergency server recovery for RedHat boxes even!
ThePlanet is biggest provider, we have many servers with them, when we started support was great. Recently, support is not good, it seems some techs are not experts.
SoffLayers seems good, we never used them. It is better to get servers some data centers who can care about you.
I will third the SoftLayer recommendation. Their customer support is unbeatable.
sucks to have people like that be handling your servers. always have to sleep with one eye open incase something goes wrong.
looks like they don’t really want your business after all… just your money.
Shoe, I think this guy has a point. The bigger guys in Hosting really don’t care unless you make them more than a million dollars a year. If you go with a smaller place, they’ll bend over backwards for you.
Now a days companies need to be more careful with customer service simply because they never know when one crappy CSR is going to cause a blogstorm of criticism that will live on forever in google’s caches.
A good side effect of the Internet I think.
I was hosting with EV1 on one of my larger reseller sites last year and never had any problems.
Reminds me of the AOL ‘won’t cancel your service’ story.
I’d be interested in seeing pictures of your setup. I would only host with a company that has servers in a good datacenter, anyway.
RackSpace is excellent. Proof that you do, indeed, get what you pay for.
Lets see how long it takes for ThePlanet to put a spin on this and turn it into a win for them. If they’re smart they will do it very quickly.
I like Redhat enterprise
It is an EV1 trademark, though.
Tell us what company you think is better than thePlanet now.
I wish they were cheaper
100% sure you are correct.
Apparently this is not the only case of this kind. The company is losing customers faster than it can count them. Their support forum is full of horror stories.
this company cant stop losing customers apparently.
I’ve had experience with Zerolag and ended up moving my servers to HE.net. Zerolag’s (contrary to their name) infrastructure is not that fast compared to HE.net’s. Support with HE.net is top notch.
Considering ZeroLag uses HE.net as it’s upstream provider, your comment makes *ZERO* sense. If ZeroLag is slow, so is HE.net. ZeroLag is consistently in the top 3 web hosts on NetCraft: http://uptime.netcraft.com/perf/reports/Hosters
And has topped the list of most reliable web hosts numerous times. Nice try though.
Customer service is everything. This is how you lose people fast. Making excuses after excuses, take the fault and fix it.
I hate it when I have trouble with my host. Theres not a whole lot you can do about it.
Shopping for a good host has always felt like shopping for a ‘good’ used car.
Jumba is a good host for aussie websites, been using it for quite a while
yeah you definitely get what you paid for…
Fasthosts are, in my opinion, a great web host. I currently host with them and from what I’ve seen, there hasn’t been any downtime problems and the support team have been able to sort out the problems I’ve had. My overall opinion? Definitely recommended.
Thanks for letting me know about these guys, I was actually looking into switching to them. Just reading some reviews when I stumbled on yours, thanks for warning me!