The Planet Web Hosting Company, Consolidates Houston and Dallas Networks

Houston, Texas - (The Hosting News) - October 8, 2008 - Privately held dedicated web hosting company, The Planet, has launched significant improvements to its enterprise-class network, to consolidate its Houston and Dallas network, into a single global operation.

The consolidation is intended to provide increased reliability, better scalability and a more consistent experience for the company's 22,000 customers. It also provides a common network policy across the company's six world-class data centers in the two cities. new promotions that offer discounts on a selection of dedicated servers and new technologies.

In preparation for next-generation technologies, The Planet's network is now IPv6-ready and is running MPLS for greater traffic engineering and management, as well as enhanced IP services.

Will Charnock, Vice President of technology at The Planet explained, ''In survey-after-survey, customers tell us they choose The Planet based on the quality and reliability of our network and data centers. Both comprise the central nervous system operations for our customers, who rely on us to operate their mission-critical IT infrastructures around the clock. During the past two years, we've performed significant upgrades to deliver even better quality network capabilities. As we prepare for future technologies that will be important to our customers, these upgrades represent strategic investments that provide them with access to the highest-quality network in our industry.''

Over the past two years, the company has continued to advance the quality of its network to provide an even better customer experience and to improve its operational efficiencies. Following is an overview of the key improvements:

Interconnection Upgrades: The company upgraded all of its major carriers to 10Gbps connections, providing industry-leading network speeds.
Port Upgrades: 10Gbps port upgrades were added in the Houston data centers to AboveNet, NTT, Level3 and AT&T, expanding total capacity and enhancing performance.
Redundant Links: The company installed redundant 10Gbps links between its Dallas network and Houston's H1 and H2 data centers, as well as between these two data center locations.
Router Upgrades: All core network routers have been upgraded to Foundry XMRs, while all customer-facing routers are now Cisco 4500 Series routers.

Increased Capacity: The company increased its Internet capacity in Houston to 65Gbps, which offers greater network speed and performance.

Private Peering: The Houston network can now leverage the company's direct peering connections, reducing latency and providing faster performance to end-users.

IPv6-Ready: IPv6 provides an almost infinite number of addresses. Customers can rest assured The Planet is prepared to deal with the threat of IPv4 address exhaustion.
MPLS Ready: MPLS provides higher network performance for customers and more granular traffic management across the company's network. In addition, it lays the foundation for offering advanced IP services in the future.

Ultimately, The Planet's goal is to provide:

High levels of network capacity and speed to deliver peak performance
Instant scalability to handle even the largest spikes in network traffic
Parallel, redundant, multi-tiered network routing and switching architecture to assure reliability and stability
Multiple layer network security that prevents Delayed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks from harming businesses
Knowledgeable experts with a passion for excellence and a commitment to operate the best networks in the business

The Planet hosts over 22,000 small and medium-size businesses and 7.7 million Web sites worldwide. The Planet Alpha division provides the widest array of self-managed dedicated servers and advanced services backed by 24x7x365 support. The Planet Northstar Managed Hosting division combines a proactive methodology and seasoned IT experts to deliver a fully managed hosting solution. With the best choice of servers, software tools and world-class support, backed by state-of-the-art facilities and an enterprise-class network, The Planet turns IT into a powerful competitive advantage that enables customers to grow their businesses.

For more information about the promotion, please visit: www.theplanet.com/dedicated-servers/server-specials.

To learn more about The Planet, please visit: www.theplanet.com.

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