We have had many servers with The Planet over the years. I think at one time we had over 15 boxes there and when we were starting AuctionAds we were going to use them which would have been several more servers/load balencers all that. That was a total fiasco and they dropped the ball but to us it turned out awesome because we purchased all our own servers and got hosting with iphouse which turned out to be about 1/10th the cost per month.
Now of course we have to do our own support/reboots but honestly we did all that at the planet anyway. The monkey ass admins they have working there are the biggest pricks….. and they must get paid by how fast they can close tickets.
So ive held on to 1 machine there thats costed me $99 a month. Ive had that box for almost 5 years. I IRC from it and also use it as a proxy for other things which is nice when I go on the road.
Today I canceled this box. After about 2 weeks of playing ticket tag with there support system its just not worth it.
Ive been meaning to do it for a long time but just it was more of a hassle to cancel it then keep it running.
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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Should I sell my website? 
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{ 94 comments… read them below or add one }
liquidweb>*
Can’t believe some people don’t realize yet that customer service is king – if it sucks, so will your business
ya, if you dont treat your customers well then you can forget about them comming back to you
Self Hosted > *
More control and more power. If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.
Try Tmzhosting. They are pretty good and offer fast support with managed dedicated servers.
Decisions can sometime show the real person we are. Your decision is great, just choose what’s best for your biz
http://www.softlayer.com is good, the stuff left theplanet because they fed up with the management there.
It is interesting when you get to a point when you overcome the objection that something is not worth the hassle anymore, even if you see fixing it as a waste of time.
It might cost you $200 of your time to do but that will be easily offset by the time you save chasing them and the general “fog” of knowing how crappy they are and that they cannot be relied upon.
Give it up for iphouse! Whoooo!
Greetings from Thailand.
I had a Xeon-Server for many, many years with them. Bought it in the old days with ev1servers.com … hey – THAT was great service. Excellent in every way.
After The-Planet and EV1 came together I lost sight about their service, as my server had no problems at all – over the coming years. So I didn’t used their support-system.
What made me wondering was – hey – in 3 years the price was getting actually HIGHER, not lower for my box. Now – after about 2-3 years I still paid about 250 USD for an very old Xeon-System.
I made the switch to hetzner.de – as they have excellent AMD-X2 machines for just 50 Euros with similar bogo-mips reporting. But don’t expect support for that money.
You get a debian – you get a webmin … and there you go with your own knowledge and the bash-prompt. After a half year I can say, that the price is VERY reasonable – for what I get.
What if you don’t know Linux?
I have to agree – I loved my ensim box at ev1servers. It was my first dedicated server, and my first attempt at being an admin. They were extremely supportive AND patient, and at a great price.
But they will limit your bandwidth to 10MBit/s if you use more than 1000GB/month.
Okay, for most people this is not a problem, because they do not have that much traffic…
It is interesting that many providers do this here in Germany.
Isn’t The Planet the same thing as Hostgator? Everybody and their mom recommends that place…. I think I even have a reseller account there. Still sucks just the same?
Host Gator is a customer of the planet… probably by far the biggest.
Hostgator uses their servers but has their own support staff. Since the issue in question is the support, I don’t think Shoe’s comments RE: the planet apply to Hostgator.
Hostgator (shared hosting) actually ranks pretty high in terms of customer satisfaction according to research I’ve done on the subject.
http://www.goodhost.org/hostgator-review/
Economic crisis like today… Affiliate Marketing is the best Internet Business that is Low Cost and High Profit.. Wow… It amazed me!!
Some companies are very good before the sales, one the sales closed their support also became very sluggish, this looks the same case. I am using host rocket for several years quite satisfied until now.
I second the softlayer recommendation. I have 3 servers and a load balancer with them and their support is wonderful. Plus, they have a kick-ass API for all of their management portal functionality.
I can manipulate DNS records, turn on/off targets on the load balancer, etc via a SOAP api.
web hosting always gets a lot of complaints, no matter what company. personally, I think if you used them for 5 years you really can’t complain, especially if you had trouble in the past…why did you stay at $99???
I’ve had trouble with 1and1.com. They seen to think they can reregister domain names for you after they expire and then send you a credit collection for the domain price and collection fees…
So does GoDaddy.
But I’m happy with them because they agreed to cancel it after I called.
I use GoDaddy. to buy names. you can always find coupons codes and their super cheap. but I don’t use them for hosting
Once I used Godaddy hosting for my few blogs. After few months I just ran away from their hosting service.
Slow and confused. For me hostgator is much better.
In my experience it is always better to get your hosting from a different company than the one you used to buy the domain name.
I’m really surprised to hear this. We’ve had well over 50+ boxes from The Planet over the years and they’ve done an excellent job. Of course there has been a few problems, but not near as many as we’ve had with other hosting companies.
My one server is still going strong at The Planet.. it’s the best place I think. Hostgator uses their servers and hostgator is awesome as well, I use them for my smaller sites. I’m a Planet friend.
I can’t speak to people enough about bluefur hosting! Since I switched to them, I’ve had no problems at all.
It also helps that the owner is on Twitter and blogs himself, so he knows what we all go through.
You can also get 10% off your cost if you use steven-sanders when you sign up.
Is that the one John Chow uses?
His site is slow as hell for commenting.
It is, but his site isn’t slow because of his hosting… it’s slow because of how many plugins he uses.
He has a lot of javascripts loading on page load.
I left them for the same reason as you.
/Andreas
I’m really surprised to hear this, I’ve been hosting personally with The Planet for about 7 years and been super happy with support etc. The hosting company I run has about 400 servers with them at this point and love them!
We used to use NAC and LiquidWeb and were very disappointed with both of those. Compared to the Planet service was lacking.
I hope you get everything taken care of!
I am using Host Gator for my hosting. So far they are quite good and I am enjoying their service.
I’m sorry to hear about this. I work for The Planet, and I’d really like to follow up with your experience to make sure it is escalated to all of our support managers.
I tried tracking down the most recent account you closed, but I could just find your older account, so if you could send me a quick email (included in this comment submission) with your info, I’ll be happy to follow up.
I think he’s already made up his mind
WTF!! My site is down on the Planet. I called the Planet, gave them my password and name and they tell me they can’t help me. The Planet is saying someone owns the rights to my account. What the hell is going on?????? I have the proof I paid for it. I have all this ticket history with them too. They said the zone file was deleted in our hosting environment and is now apparently owned by another account within the Planet. WTF????? They won’t tell me anything about this new account name!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I feel like I am in the twilight zone. How can it be under someone else’s name. What the hell is going on. Here is what we just mailed to their legal department.
Hello,
My name is _________
I am the designer and administrative contact for the domain name
_____________.COM.
Our site went down last night (02-26-09). We have learned that the zone file
in your hosting environment has recently been deleted. When we attempted to
rebuild the zone file via tech support, they informed us we are not the
account holders for hosting ———.COM. This is simply not correct.
We have been hosting with your company and had a functional website since
late August of 2008, but something has drastically changed on ThePlanet’s
end. We suspect this is due to an error on ThePlanet’s end. We have verified
this with MediaTemple.com
Please respond to this matter as soon as possible, as our this site being
down is costing us business.
If we do not receive a timely enough reply, we will be forced to host with
another company, unfortunately.
Best regards,
—–
Adminstrative and technical contact,
————-.COM
_________
This is insane. Can someone offer any comments?
that’s crazy man. that really sucks.
interesting, i heard lot of positive stuff about theplanet. may be you just got stupid admin replying to your tickets. many other hosting companies have better prices but basically no support, which may turn out even worse than expensive services…
I just use a small hosting company a friend my friend owns. It’s super cheap and works for that I need it to work for (my blog and a few other small projects
).
I remember when XY7 had a box at the planet and I agree that their support is terrible. That’s one of the reasons I like the smaller private hosting companies because they typically will provide quality support.
I use Bluehost. My site’s not big enough for a private box yet.
Just one funny thing I want to share that I’ve always noticed at hosting companies. If you call the sales department, someone picks up the phone right away, but if you call tech support, it takes like hours.
I found that funny.
It was more hassle to cancel then keep it for a reason, to make money. It is easy to get a box but they make it super hard to get ride of it because they want you to stay with them.
If I needed a dedicated server right now, I think I’d go with either Liquidweb or Steadfast — both known for great support & owning their own data centers. They both also offer a decent range of price & management level, depending on what you need.
The Planet was great at some point. We canceled our web hosting service when we moved to a local data center and one year later we have received an email stating that they were unable to charge our credit card on file and we need to update it. Go figure why they suddenly decided to charge us a year later.
Never tried them out but I know that you do get what you pay for and that seems like quite a lot for crap service.
I’ve never had so much traffic that I’ve needed a dedicated server, so for now I just use SEOHosting and HostGator
I have 2 servers at softlayer – never had any problems, but a friend of mine just signed up there and has problems from day one. Their support team is working on that server for 5 days already and as soon as one problem is fixed the next one occures.
Cancelling a server with The Planet is like pulling teeth. Their cancellation process is overly complex and totally insane.
I couldn’t agree more. The Planet Hosting has killed several big launches in the Internet Marketing industry. People who care about their sites should use Rackspace, Amazon EC2, or Slicehost. I’ve never been let down by these companies.
I use DreamHost – they kick a*s…for the price you cannot beat them. If you want to move “up” you can then graduate to a MediaTemple Grid or DV Server. That is what I recommend…
I find it so funny that companies like that have no idea how their days are numbered. One thing about a crappy recession like this is that it weeds out riff-raff companies that don’t provide excellent services.
In the salad days, you could have the crappiest company and still be successful. When the economy tightens up, only the most committed to service will survive. It’s a whole circle of life thing.
Jeremy it would be nice if you could post in lay mans terms, LOL.
That sucks that their support is so bad, you would think if you were paying monthly they could hire some good support teams.
Economic prognoses are like weather forecast,nobody knows exactly what services will survive and how the recession will go.
Yeah, support costs money.
I got my dedicated server at serpronto… They are ok, nothing special except the price. I pay under $40/mo for lower end servers and manage them myself. It doesnt take that much skills to set up a server and virtual hosting on a linux box. As for domain registrar, name.com is the best and I found it easiest to manage my domains.
I still have a shared account for a website with millions of records in the database. 
Anyway, Shoe, why did you need 15 servers for auction ads? Seems like too many, but I am not sure how much traffic you had… I just like to use 100% of the server that I pay for…
never tried them before, hope their service will be better.
you have money, may be you can setup your own webhostng company.
Hey, I 2nd the motion. If shoemoney started his own hosting company a bunch of us would jump on it. He knows exactly what is needed when you aren’t an IT geek and just need some good, cheap, fast, reliable hosting.
I’ve had a couple of dedicated servers at ThePlanet for several years and my experience has been pretty positive – my two cents.
I was in the same boat as you Shoe. Over the past 5 or 6 years I’ve had close to 10 servers with The Planet. I had another one set up a few months ago and it was a total fiasco from the start.
They have way too many entry level techs trying to handle jobs that should be designated to admins.
They also jipped me for over $600 when I tried to get a refund for a server that had been crashing repeatedly. I finally said to hell with it.
If I’m not mistaken, HostGator uses The Planet’s servers but has their own support department which is really good.
I couldn’t agree more with this post.
There are plenty of decent hosts. Sadly there are just as many crap ones.
Never underestimate the power of good customer service/support to retain customers – or the power of bad service/support to quickly alienate good customers.
No matter how big a company is, no one can afford to give poor service. It sounds like theplanet has some work to do.
It’s surprising – I’ve always heard good things about them and their BBB rating is “A”.
I think that’s The Planet’s main problem.
They got too big, their ass fell out from under them, so they had to hire a bunch of a morons.
They used to be great which is why I had so many servers with them. Only in the past year they have started to go wayyy downhill.
The Planet needs new management and needs to quickly realize quality customer service is what it’s all about.
That’s often the problem with larger companies. New management is probably not the answer, rather they need to ramp up their service staff and train them better.
So guys tell me in nutshell if I want to have a dedicated server than which one I should go for … any idea or good suggestion.
Please tell me price as well with the name.
I hear very good things about Rackspace if you absolutely need dedicated hardware, if not – check out Mosso for a very good scalable service.
Prices depend on what you’re looking for.
When you need to change from hosting company it is alway a real pain, everything fails.
Never been with PlanetWebhosting and by now I never will.
I have been using MidPhase for my dedicated server for over four years now but the services sucks and the price seem high. I am now paying:
Supreme support 69.00
cPanel with fantastico 35.00
MyDomain.com 139.99
=====
243.99
But I am hesitant to switch hosting companies because I have over 110 domains (all with FrontPage extensions) on this server and have NO experience with migrating to another server.
Any suggestions will be appreciated.
Do it yourself ====> Self-hosting
As a follow-up to my offer to Jeremy to escalate his concerns, I’d really love to talk with any other current or former TP customers expressing dissatisfaction with our service. Quite a few folks here at The Planet read Shoe Money, so it’s unfortunate that we weren’t able to step in to help as Jeremy was getting frustrated.
That is certainly not an acceptable customer experience, and we do everything in out power to ensure that our 20,000+ customers never experience anything like this. If anyone runs into a similar issue and wants another set of eyes on their problem you can contact us via twitter (@theplanetdotcom), in our open customer forums or you can follow up with me directly: khazard AT theplanet.com.
(Ticket Tag) You’re it….lol. Sorry that happened to you.
Kevin Hazard you’re full of crap. I just called you out on your bull. I remember you personally looked into my problem and all you guys did was try to spin and defend The Planet’s mishaps instead of being proactive and resolving the issue.
P.S. If you post on The Planet’s forum with any form of criticism prepare to get attacked by their goons. That was the worst customer service experience I’ve ever had.
Hosting can be a crap shoot. I have used dozens of web hosts over the last 10 years and have had the best experience with Host Gator. I also use their SEO Hosting and their setup could use a little overhaul but so far so good.
Everybody here who has used HostGator seems to be happy. Not me. I used them for a couple of years happily and then they total f-ed up on me. I’m just good at finding the week support people I guess. It’s a long story but to make it short – I stopped receiving email, several admins reported it fixed when it wasn’t, another admin started giving me instructions on how to set up my email client, several days and someone finally realized my account had been moved to a “temporary” server that does not pass email, days later another admin said I had exceeded some quota and that’s why my account was moved, it never got fixed so I moved to another service. Total circus. A week later one of the senior folks at HostGator contacted me via WebHostingTalk forum and offered to make it up to me. Too late. As always YMMV.
LOL@”ticket tag” and Kenney saying “Ticket tag, you’re it.”
LOL@Cullen typing out Kevin’s full name. “Kevin Hazzard you’re full of crap.”
I love shoemoney.com. I use Host Gator for a few of my other websites. I hope their using The Planet’s servers doesn’t cause any problems in the future. *Keeps fingers crossed*
THEY BLOW! I hate them too.
It can be a hit or a miss when it comes to web hosting. most of the customer services are terrible.
Really? I had a lot of people recommend Planet to me when I was looking for dedicated for proxy site hosting. Glad I didn’t end up going with them.
hmmm some failed but many succeeded with that! You know why? because they followed some of my precious advices. Like in my blogs.
ev1servers back then everyone tried to match the price of those servers. I was just trying to remember the name of the owner. He was always on WHT, the Head Surfer? Then I heard they were bought out by the planet.
Anyways it was a while ago. Funny that I found this thread.
Webhosting can be a hit or a miss. I have used many services over the years and support is nearly 70% of why you stay or go.
I think companies should expand, but don’t forget the customer service, and stop nickle and diming everyone.
This thread brings back memories, bad and good.
This blog site totally sucks. I cannot believe how popular it is. No information whats-so-ever
Had a economy server at the planet just for some messing around / projects… Never had any problems with it but I didn’t completely utilize it either. The cancellation was more involved than I would have preferred. Moved to a hostgator reseller account for some clients and only had a couple of issues when some upgrades hit. Did get an email for the upgrades in advance but ended up needing to create a ticket for some SQL databases that got currupted somehow. The live chat techs couldn’t fix this real time and had to revert to a ticket but it was the lower end reseller account so I don’t know. Took about an hour and a half for the admins to restore the databases from backups because repairing the db wasn’t working because of a key error. Had hosting with bluehost but they are a little to mormon for their own good… No pun intended, but from the terms of service “Profanity. Profanity or profane subject matter in the site content and in the domain name are prohibited.”… Got suspended for using a for letter word on a blog… Wanted to reply back to the admins and just ask if they’ve heard that joseph smiths dad was a freemason. I refrained though and should have read the TOS first. My mistake. Had a server at rackspace and had a level 1 admin reboot my server when this was supposed to be pushed up to an upper level admin (smtp service was down so the guy rebooted it?!?!)…. maintained a web site for a guy who hosted at godaddy and I hate their custom cpanel BS at least after getting used to ISPconfig for simple setups and cpanel for others……. asked about having access to another control panel even for a few extra bucks or something and got a “you’ll have to make do with this” response.
every host will screw up or have one or two or 50 morons but there are always those few or more than that who have a clue…
in any case, although i’ve had various issues with downtime, latency, tit-tat this and that with every host in the end you just learn to expect it….
overall I’ve had decent experiences with all of these hosts on the grand scale…. hard to admit it sometimes when the bad experiences tend to stand out more than those times when things were sailing smooth…
interesting reading other peoples perspectives though…
THE PLANET = LOUSY SPEED
My experience with The Planet (and their partner Everyone’s Internet or EV!1) is that they have the lousiest network connections you can imagine. No bandwidth! I have watched my high-volume file sharing Hostgater server at The Planet plummet from a rock solid 1 MBps download speed to just barely 200 KBps over the last year. And my upload speed went from 220 KBps to 26 KBps. I can’t get anything done anymore! And these lousy speeds have been consistent from month to month, even at 1:00 am in the morning. I’m leaving. This is bullshit.
And just in the last week, I have seen EV1 download speeds start at 3.5 MBps (RoadRunner cable) and drop like a brick to 200-300 KBps. Smells like throttling to me! When I pathping their servers, it reports packet loss within their own facility! Over-congested to the max.
I highly recommend The Planet if you’re not going to upload or download anything. They are the Microsoft of hosting services! But I’m curious — has anyone else experienced a noticeable decline in network performance at The Planet over the last year? I’d really like to hear from you.
I got scared just trying to order a server from ThePlanet. I am now fighting for a refund for a sever order they never completed and refused to complete unless I paid them more money than they quoted on the sales order.
Also their use of my credit card may extend to the level of federal credit card fraud because they used it after the date on which the authorization they had expired and without ever delivering the server as ordered.
I will pay more and stay with Rackspace…they are the best and I should never have tried to find better just to save a dime.
Yeah, trouble with web hosting sure sucks, I hear that
I have had problems with them as well. I switched to HostGator now.
HostGator is pretty good. I moved my servers out of TP few years ago..and instead use 3 VPS accounts..
The autumn code will count for your affiliate referral.
Recently their DNS server [ns1.theplanet.com] became very unreliable – even their site http://www.theplanet.com is down a few times a day. They have to fix it.
Otherwise they are prettty good.
This is the worst company I have ever dealt with. Their techies are all on acid and servers are down more than they are up.
Of course if you talk to them when your server is down due to network outage…huh, what are you talking about? There’s no problems here!!
I have had enough of this shit. After reading this post I am throwing in the towel today with these clowns!!
ThePlanet overbilled me by over $1,000 in consecutive months. I have a single dedicated $200 server there, so go figure.
I would have left but they refused to refund my credit card. The best they could do was give me ThePlanet credit.
I have no gripes about their infrastructure and the speed/reliability of the hardware. Tech support has generally been good too. I rarely need it.
Their billing department is why I’m leaving the planet after 9 YEARS of being a loyal customer. I’ve hosted with them since my first Cobalt Raq.
I couldn’t have said it better myself.
ThePlanet.com and Hostgator suck bad. We have multiple servers and after almost a year of pulling our hair out… we are moving.
Cheers for this post. I’ve actually been looking into different web hosts to find my next hosting company. So far I’ve been considering using HostRocket. In general, the reviews of them seem pretty decent and their plan suits my needs. Do you think this is a good idea? — Jake
HostRocket are, in my opinion, a good 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 fix the problems I’ve had. My overall opinion? Definitely recommended.
@Rick: Hostgator’s service (as of 2 days ago) SUCKS! The same issues I had with The Planet are here now. The only difference is the support team. Hostgator has a great support team that really try. When the problem goes deeper there is only so much those poor guys can do.
Today, I have had enough of Hostgator. I am feeling a little duped actually. I had no freaken idea Hostgator was using The Planet’s servers. According to my trace root they are. Anything that has “The Planet” tied to it online should tell you to run away (and fast).
Be Aware … HOSTGATOR IS THE PLANET!!
I feel better now. Thanks for letting me vent!
Theplanet has been merged into SoftLayer now and they are at much better position, many big hosts using their DC including HostGator.
I have disconnected my server with them because of frequent DDOS attacks and maintenance issues, anyway they are at least better than Theplanet.
I have finalised my list of web hosting after years
For small website go to http://www.shopaserver.com
For VPS or website with medium traffic go to WiredTree or KnownHost
For dedicated servers and large websites go to Softlayer , Webnx and LiquidWEB
These are my tested hosts and I doubt if any one can go wrong with them
they are