I’ve been a customer at theplanet.com for almost 4 years. I choose them because they had a great reputation. The point of this post is to highlight the great travesty which is happening at The Planet.

A few years ago, The Planet merged with a company called EV1 servers. They were both big boys in the hosting industry and the eventually joined forces. However, shortly after, they came out with a new version of the customer control panel which has always been called Orbit. It was awful! Tasks which were very simple took two or three times as long with the new system, and overall it was just plain ugly.

However, The Planet did a great thing. They listened to their customers and ultimately admitted it wasn’t the best move and brought back the old version of Orbit. I was really impressed when this happened because I had never seen a company actually listen to their customers. I among many others was a very happy customer.

Last year The Planet had the unfortunate incident where the power equipment blew up, caught on fire, or whatever. They were down for several days but the CEO (Doug Erwin) did a good job of letting everyone know what happened and what they were doing to fix it. I know this business, and I know what is involved in running a data center that size. Overall, and considering the circumstances, they did a great a job. I’ll chalk that up as good move #2 for The Planet.

Their business has expanded since that incident. The Planet now offer more servers, new data center locations, and even cloud services. I’ve had several servers there over the last 4 years and have never had a service issue to date. (Knock on wood)

Then they drop the bomb us. Several weeks ago, The Planet announces “Orbit 2″ which looks a lot like the Orbit 2 they tried a few years ago. A simple reboot request, which took seconds to issue in Orbit 1, has been replaced with a 5 step wizard. To make things worse, the wizard returns an error once you complete the 5 steps! I don’t even want to mention the time it takes for the pages to load. We could elect congress faster than it takes me to view my bandwidth graphs.

I have opened this thread at webhostingtalking.com asking other customers of the planet what they thought. They all agreed with me.

Doug Erwin and the rest of The Planet staff: Please don’t do this to us!