First, I would like to thank all of our customers for your continued business and support over the past few years. Together, we have built one of the worlds largest web hosting companies and server farms on the globe. We have pushed the envelope in the hosting world with new products and services and numerous value adds across all server lines. As we enter 2005, the competition is trying to copy our every move and sometimes even announce services before product launch trying to beat The Planet to market. I guarantee we will continue to drive the value and innovation in the hosting world to bring the best products and services available to our customer base.

Competition Beware …..here is where we start 2005.

January 1, 2005 – The Planet is excited to finally announce the launch of our newest datacenter located in the Infomart in Dallas, Texas. This 51,000 square foot tier one facility is state of the art and will house SM, I365, TC and the new Focus Series. All services including our unrivaled network will be available in the new datacenter and we expect to have space for another 20,000+ servers. Final work is being done now and we anticipate the official launch to take place February 1, 2005.

January 1, 2005 – The Planet has installed Cisco’s new DDOS Guard XT(formerly RiverHead Networks) to mitigate against DDOS and Syn Flood attacks. With one of the largest Guard farms ever deployed by Cisco, The Planet security team is now equipped to defend large scale attacks. This service was installed in late November while security engineers began work in retiring the old Netzentry FloodGuard system. This service will be offered free of charge to all clients as a value added service with additional ORBIT reporting offered for a small fee.

January 1, 2005 – Coupled with the installation of Cisco Guard XT, The Planet has selected Arbor Networks Peakflow for DDOS, Syn Flood, and traffic analysis. Together, these two products create the most advanced traffic monitoring and mitigation tools available to ensure maximum uptime. Again, this service is added at no charge as a value add to our customers with additional ORBIT reporting offered for a small fee.

January 10, 2005 – Leading with the best, The Planet has executed a deal with Internet Security Systems (ISS) to bring the best host based IDS system in the industry to our customer base. ISS host based IDS will be a fully managed service available to all customers. ISS host based IDS will come standard on TC and Focus Series and will be a $10 per month option for SM servers. This service will be managed by our security team engineers from our new Security Operations Center (SOC).

January 15, 2005 – Continuing with our security theme, The Planet will install Tipping Point’s Unity One product across all network connections. Tipping Point is the industry leader in network intrusion detection systems guarding against all types of malicious activity. The Planet will be the first authorized hosting provider to install Tipping Points Unity One IDS system. Again, this service will be free of charge as a value add to all customers with additional ORBIT reporting available for a small fee.

January 24, 2005 – The official launch of The Planets new Security Operations Center (SOC). The SOC will house security engineers 24/7/365 with the sole purpose of managing all security resources to maximize uptime and availability of all services. SOC engineers will monitor Cisco Guards, Arbor Networks Traffic Analysis, Tipping Points IDS systems, ISS host based IDS systems, Firewall graphs, and overall network connectivity and performance. SOC engineers will escalate issues to security, network, administrators, and others as needed.

January 31, 2005. All new security services reporting will be available in our SecurePack service. For only $20 per server, you will get access to Cisco Guard XT reporting, Arbor network reporting, Tipping Point reporting, ISS host based reporting, and firewall graphs. All current FloodGuard customers will be converted to this reporting service as the remainder of the FloodGuard systems are retired. This will be the most comprehensive security service available in the hosting marketplace. This service will come standard on the Focus Series Server line.

That sums up January 2005 and you won’t believe the announcements for February 2005. More to come.

its all good :D

anymore info on the focus series

How about Focus Series servers? I assume those will launch with the new datacenter?

focus servers? any more info about?

Sounds like the focus servers are going to be pitched higher than SM's...

They sound like a ThePlanet product, not a ServerMatrix product.

But... Weren't the Focus series supposed to be Opterons too?

Focus, I'm willing to be, will be complete custom servers (or atleast as accomidating as possible). So anything could be possible.

Would be my guess, and if its so, I might hold off switching to a TotalControl server

I think the only thing we know about the Focus series with any confidence is that they are called the Focus series! C'mon TP, spill the beans... I'm after another server soon

I hope its somthing really cool

Focus Series are higher end servers and will be a step up from TC. We are currently working on adding Opterons to the SM line. As soon as we select the final vendor, we will be live within days.

Ah, so Focus servers are not necessarily Opterons only?

I'm very happy to see the new emphasis on security!

Quad and 8-way Intel Xeon's! packing so much processing power, its practiclly illegal!

hammer down - these are convincing reasons for others to choose The Planet over my other provider in Texas --

Keep these coming - upgrade Orbit and you might just be the next Robert Marsh.

might?

if they can keep there network up, i see them raining on headsurfer's parade

I think they can do just that ---

I wrote an article on EV1 a while ago --- their network is scary to say the least --- they run out of IP addresses - don't plan well - and overall - tell clients to get an OS restore for some of the most silly issues which after using Remote KVM - have gone away.


The Rack charges for most of what the Planet gives for free.

Remote KVM = $29 limited time frame to use
Here - free use of console port

EV1 should be running ---

I think if The Planet pushes IPv6 and gets on board first - they will have more to boast about...

IPv6 would allow for great things - including excellent traffic routing for all clients in Asia, Europe and abroad. Furthermore - IPv6 would allow for IPv4 sites who are having traffic issues to be re-routed should the tables be created correctly.


I think the Planet will be able to tell Houston they are having a problem in the near future...

Ground Control - (gotta love that theme)

I will say that I was previously with EV1 for 2 1/2 years and during that time my server had 100% uptime - not 99.9, but 100% real world uptime. The external monitoring never caught it down and I never caught it down for even a minute, so I think their network is very very solid.

Now the planet's has treated me very well too (though I did have some downtime on my servermatrix server prior due to a router failure)

Mmm, I'm loving all these new security goodies.

I can't wait until the Opterons come in and to find out more about the Focus Series.

Hmmm opteron servers.


More toys to play with!!!

Out of curiousity, why do you think Orbit needs upgrading? Actually, it was upgraded a few months back and is now much nicer - it was quite rough back in the day

<edit>
My bad, I've just seen your post http://forums.servermatrix.com/viewtopic.p...p?p=97908#97908
</edit>

Next Robert Marsh?

ThePlanet have over-taken EV1 a long time ago...they have 5k+ servers more than EV1 now and the services ThePlanet offer are so much better than those at EV1!!!

lol, Opterons are old now

Dual core opterons

Excuse my ignorence but who's robert marsh?

Owner of EV1 I think.

aka headsurfer, aka owner of ev1

Lets hope that they don't become the next Robert Marsh -

This guy I hear bought out wht because he wanted to control what was being said -

This guy also purchased up (or so I hear) a few magazines that showed what a mess EV1 was in.

To compete - The Planet will have to purchase its own bowl game as well as its own limo company

--
Although I have been one to complain - I am hoping that the Planet has a strong focus on staying the best provider in this industry - notice it seems like Netcraft has EV1 now lagging behind The Planet.

ah, so thats who he was, cheers i guess i do learn something new everyday (or several things in my case )

To compete sponsor the simpsons but I see that as a waste of money

just open a dc in some other place than dallas with the same network

I would more information on this Focus series they are talking about, higher end server doesn't cut it for me. Give us some base line specs. I'm still interested in getting a Solaris box, but no word on those....ARGH!

yes that would be a pure slice of fried gold, a nice couple of fires

I cannot talk for the others, but I can say that you are wrong about the WHT comment. Being a regular member on WHT, I will have to give him credit for a good job he was doing when WHT was under his ownership. It was run fairly and the postings about EV1 were treated fairly with same rule as any other post.

As for Limo service, nothing wrong with that.

Regarding purchase of "a few magazines," I have not heard about that. Can you let me know which magazines he purchased?

Yeah, come on TP. Give clients with more than 5 servers a free ticket to the super bowl. A free plane ticket and paid hotels would be nice too.

Come on... you know you want to...

.

$10 Floodguard users will get the Security Pack for $10 instead of $20 then?

i have a question regarding the new ddos equipment/measures you guys have put in place

if one of the ips on one of my servers gets hit with a ddos attack that is 150,000 - 200,000 PPS and 600-900mbit in size

would that IP get nullrouted, or would you guys be able to take care of it?

at ev1, that is the kind of attack i was hit with, and they automatically filtered that for me... for once i wasn't nullrouted. i was truly impressed

If you guys can offer that with your new ddos stuff, or even offer BETTER then that, then that would be AWESOME, i would be very impressed!

If I am not wrong, EV1 uses the same hardwares Riverhead + Tipping Point so I would assume it would work the same way. The difference is that with SM/TP they have the additional support of the floodguard. I would supposed that with all this expensive new toys, it would do filtering instead of nullroute as with nullrouting, you do not need any sophisticated toys in the first place.

well of course, they would do filtering if they have just acquired all this equipment, but my point/question is, what is the threshold?

Because surely they can't block any size of an attack, they have to nullroute you if it gets to a certain size of an attack im sure? or no? (if no then WOW that is cool)

so i'm just curious about the threshold or what kind of threshold are we talking about here. when would it get to the point of nullrouting

I expect that a maximum threshold might be the available bandwidth on their own incoming connections. If a DDOS was overloading the entire datacenter's own incoming bandwidth, I don't think that they wouldn't be able to block it. Fortunately, I think DDOS attacks of the many Gbps magnitude are quite rare, if not nonexistent. I've think only heard of a DDOS using a little over 1 Gbps. But a number of large corporation's sites and/or infrastructure has been taken offline by DDOS attacks so perhaps there are botnets large enough to overwhelm the entire datacenter.

I'm not particularly experienced with large networks however, so my ideas are not to be taken as valid.

So I take it that the new Datacenter is UP, however servers wont start getting sold for at least another few weeks?

No, it seems that some final work is still being done and it won't actually launch until Feb 1st.

I'm curious as well.

A similar question would be what happens to the TP servers where Floodguard is included with the monthly price. If it is not automatically upgraded to the new Security Pack (with no price change), then do we have a choice whether to drop it (with price decrease accordingly) or to upgrade to the new Security Pack (with price increase)?

Has there been a policy decision on that? Or do we need to wait for an official announcement later?

I'll take a guess at

That is what we would hope. However, sometimes the "official announcements" tend to gloss over the exact details, while more focus is put on the PR aspects.

Anyway, there has been hint that the current Floodguard users will be upgraded to the new Security pack. But no word on whether there will be a price increase or not. Hopefully the official announcement will come soon and specifically address the issue, as well as clarifying if we have a choice to upgrade or not.

I find it ironic that I'm getting a DOS attack on the day that The Planet's new security center opens.

Sounds good, though. I'm glad to hear that SM and The Planet are putting an emphasis on security.

Have you opened a support ticket regarding this yet? Please do so if you have not so that we can assist you.

Yes, and I received a response within about 15 minutes telling me that SM is aware of the problem and is working on it.

In the meantime, the problem seems to be mostly solved already, at least on my server. I continue to be impressed at Server Matrix's speed in stopping these DOS attacks.

I just thought it a funny coincidence that this happened on the same day the new security center opened.

Hi there,

On the DDoS note, my two servers have been suddenly hit with Syn-Flood attack. The SM has done wonderful work already in plugging me into protection hardware, however, these attacks are making me wonder, whether someone else experiences sudden attacks like this.
Last time I remeber, DDoS happened in DedicatedNow center and my server was turned off without warning and later on IP address was nulled.

Congratulations to ServerMatrix!

Enigmatic

Anyone get up2date info on what the real deal is?? Hello??