I’ve been a long time fan of The Planet, the “Global IT Hosting Leader”, because they’ve always had outstanding service. They aren’t the cheapest out there, but in my experience they’re the most reliable.

Just one quick story, then I’ll get to the point. A couple years ago, a Sarasota news channel and paper were going to sit down with our startup and do an interview. The interview was scheduled for some time before I’m usually awake, no big deal, but on the day of, I get an escalation call from The Planet saying out main webserver is down. I immediately learn that our server had literally caught on fire and we were supposed to do this big interview where we planned to demo our website, IN HALF AN HOUR. To make this story short, the technicians were able to salvage our drives, swap chassis, and get new hardware back online within 15 minutes. We were able to demo our website just fine during the interview. It was an amazing coordination of effort that come together perfectly at the end.

Well, in setting up my next company, I looked to The Planet. By following their twitter stream, I found out about The Planet Sand Castle. In their words,

The first major hurdle for a software developer is finding the online space for new ideas to grow. The costs of rolling out and testing new software can be prohibitive, especially in uncertain economic times. The Planet is offering the developer community an economic stimulus of sorts to transform dreams into realities: The Planet Sand Castle.

I applied and within a week, I was in. I was initially given the mid level server, then at the last minute they bumped me up to the highest end server under the program (about a $500/mo. deal). Free! No strings attached! For a year!

The Planet also did something else pretty amazing under this program, they gave Rice University 50 servers for entrepreneurial research and development. Since I was one of the first into the program, I was asked for a quote for an article: Hosting Company Offers Free Servers to Developers.

I’m not a paid shill for The Planet, I actually purchased a year’s worth of service on my own dime for a different server days before all this happened (they wouldn’t even go beyond the lousy 6% yearly discount. I asked for a free t-shirt and I got a “lol” over the online support). I just think they offer superior services and I’m willing to pay for that.