My Board

A Message from Chairman & CEO Doug Erwin
With Monday\'s launch of new products, managed services, service level agreements and improved Web site, we began a new era with a single identity as The Planet. As one of the many improvements, we also streamlined our customer portal under a single umbrella. We\'ve had great feedback on our announcements and appreciate your support.

While we have high expectations and standards for quality, we\'ve heard from you that the Orbit customer portal isn\'t meeting your needs and isn\'t working as expected. Our teams have been working around the clock to address these issues.

We\'ve heard you, and we admit our errors. We\'re not happy either. After many long hours, we realize the issues are deeper than we thought.

We are developing plans to return you to the previous portals you used - either the \"original\" Orbit for legacy customers from The Planet or ServerCommand for EV1Servers customers. We expect to make this change by midnight CST (GMT-6) this evening.

All of your existing users and sub-users will be setup just as before. All historical settings for access, privileges and customizations will be retained. In addition, all management functionality - including reboots, monitoring, DNS and ticketing - will work as you were accustomed to in your previous versions.

While I wish everything were perfect, it\'s not. Here are the steps required:

For legacy EV1Servers customers:
New servers must be purchased at www.theplanet.com
These new servers will be managed from the \"original\" Orbit, with your new user name and password
For existing servers already under management, you will use ServerCommand
For legacy Planet customers:
New servers must be purchased at www.theplanet.com
All new and existing servers will be managed from the \"original\" Orbit
In addition to our 24x7x365 support, we have created new support phone lines to manage portal questions. These additional phones are staffed around the clock to help you. For domestic customers, please call 800-913-3724. For our international customers, you can reach our team at 281-854-0202.

Our goal is to build a unified customer portal and to make it one that you\'ll find easy to use. Under the \"hard lessons learned\" category, we will not proceed with the new portal without better engagement with you. This transition will not happen in days ... more likely it will be a few months before we have a permanent solution. We will offer you the opportunity to test the new portal in advance so that you are able to provide feedback before it is launched.

I can assure you that all of us at The Planet are committed to high standards of quality and to providing the best customer satisfaction in the industry. Please accept our apologies for not delivering on those promises.

Our team is focused on earning your confidence and helping you through this transition period. You have my personal commitment that these issues will be resolved. I appreciate your feedback, your patience as we work to correct these issues and most importantly your business.

Warmest regards,
Doug

Yeah, I get them in email. They closed down the Ev1 forums, and moved everything to ThePlanet. Since then, the users have been tearing them apart on the support boards because nothing works.
They\'re also hyping \"DDoS Mitigation Firewalls\" at $10 per month... I\'m wondering if this means they have ceased using FireSlayer and expect the users to pay for it now. Guess we\'ll have to wait and see.
Overall, I\'m not at all impressed... if I (or the thousands of other Ev1 customers) wanted to rent from TP, then why did they go with Ev1? This wasn\'t a merger... it was a /censored.gif\' class=\'bbc_emoticon\' alt=\'(cens)\' /> takeover.

I know, but in reality, other than at some point in time having our own inhouse server/servers, there aren\'t alot of options out there.

so... basically, this means what for us?

We may no longer have a DDoS firewall (the thing that kept us online when Greg was around), support is now nonexistant (there have been literally dozens of complaints in the past few weeks of Trouble tickets going completely untouched by the datacenter support team for up to a month), and Tami gets to make out payments to a different company now (who have been known to double-charge accounts because their software incorrectly reports to them that a payment was not received when it was).
Oh yeah... and one of the servers will die a quick and sudden death sometime in the next few weeks.

Speaking of which... if any of you have important things in your \"Staff hosting\" area, might want to back it up... staff subdomains are not going to be my top priority when I start migrating sites over. May want to pass the word to the other staff too... it\'s very likely that I may just wipe them all, and recreate them on the other server, since they won\'t migrate anyway (good opportunity to clean out the unused ones anyway).