Please join me in http://irc.ev1.net/ceo/ on Thursday, October 26th from 9:00 to 10:00AM, Central Time (GMT -6). I’ll be there to report on the progress of our merger, as well as continue the dialogue we started with our chat back in August.

I look forward to talking with you then.

Here is a log of this morning's chat for those of you who may have missed it:

<Doug-CEO> good morning everybody

<Doug-CEO> thanks for taking time out of your busy day to join me

<Doug-CEO> we have been very busy here at the planet/ev1 for the last 3 months

<Doug-CEO> trying to merge these two great companies...take the best practices from each and spread them across the entity

<Doug-CEO> we've also spent a lot of time talking to customers...earlier this month I assigned 5 to 6 customers to each one of my top 20 execs

<Doug-CEO> and asked them to call...and talk about several items

<Doug-CEO> for example...

<Doug-CEO> our service...our network...our data centers...our sales organization

<Doug-CEO> and at the same time we asked a lot of questions about their businesses and how we can support them better

<Doug-CEO> i got the 20 execs together 2 weeks after we announced the program and shared all the results with the group

<Doug-CEO> what a great wealth of knowledge we gained

<Doug-CEO> I am pleased to hear overall that they're happy with our support data centers and networks

<Doug-CEO> but it was not all good news...there are areas that we need to focus on and continue to improve

<Doug-CEO> we not only spent time talking to our customers...but for the new executives who have joined the planet/ev1 we spent a lot of time studying our competition and their offerings

<Doug-CEO> this meant hours of searching the web...talking to prospects that we lost who went with other people...all in the spirit to better understand the environment

<Doug-CEO> a lot of the changes that we are making...the unbundling of pricing...the lowering of component prices...and in some cases...raising a few

<Doug-CEO> all come from the research we've done

<Doug-CEO> we also have studied support...although we get high marks here there are a lot more things we're going to start doing...not everybody is going to want to pay for these new services...but it is essential for our future direction to begin to offer semi-managed and fully managed support

<Doug-CEO> we are in the process of figuring out just how to deliver the same level of support in the two cities...so that the current customers doing business in both cities and future customers doing business in both cities will find the same level of support and services

<Doug-CEO> enough of my rambling...let me see if there are some questions out there

<jeff-ev1> The room is moderated for ease of use, please message your questions to jeff-ev1 or Patrick-EV1.

<mrl144> Doug, thank you for taking my question. I have been an TP customer now for 5 years and while my experience has been great but I have 2 issues. The first one is that I feel we are always at the mercy of the technicians.Your company no longer does ghost copies of hard drives and this forces us to use one of the overpriced NAS or disksync backup services, which don't do a true backup, only account backups. Why has this changed? I'd be glad to sign a waiver that doesn't hold you responsible.

<Doug-CEO> first off to my knowledge we have never offered ghost copying of hard drives as a service...if this was done it was one-off and as a courtesy, but we do not and will not do this

<Doug-CEO> one of the things our customers did ask for was an array of backup services...we are going to start offering many flavors...in fact we have one customer today who is taking advantage of the fact that he does most of business in Dallas with us and for security reasons has decided to offload his backup to our Houston offices...we see more and more possibilities with this capability

<mrl144> Secondly, the reboots take way to long, on average 20-30 minutes, when we were promised reboot ports.I understand that the ports were to expensive, but this process needs to be improved up to 5 min. I think these things are way more important than the network you guys are building that was already powerful enough.

<Doug-CEO> great question...you are right...reboots are taking too long...some of that is due to inappropriate escalation procedures on our part which we are in the process of fixing...it is also a function of some of the hardware we've bought in the past that requires us to manually reboot them...in the future all servers purchased by us will be IPMI compliant giving you and us the ability to reboot remotely...technology only fixes part of this...we will fix the rest

<mrl144> Why do your servers continue to offer measly 80gb hard drives when your competition is already at 160gb or higher with guaranteed reboot ports?

<Doug-CEO> not any longer...have you seen our web site in the last 48 hours? we offer hard drives up to 750GB on almost every server we sell...this came out loud and clear talking to our customers and searching the web sites of our competitors...we fell behind in staying with your needs...i hope the new marketing and product line organizations we are building will never let that happen again...we want to be leading the industry again...not following

<AHDOnline> i appreciate the price changes on the bigger boxes, but now I cannot order the same box i have without an increased cost on top of the 25$ setup fee. If i want a Celeron or P4 its going to cost more than the exact config I pay for now. Can you explain this?

<Doug-CEO> you're right...we did raise the price on a few repeat on a few items...what we haven't charged you for is the incredible investment we are making in our current and new data centers to be N+1 and tier 2 or tier 3 rated...this gives us some of the best data centers in the industry...we have also plowed additional money into our already powerful and redundant network...we are duplicating redundancy in Houston and Dallas as well as linking them

<Scanner2> Since the buy-out we have noticed the quality of support has gone down, those that managed to hold on to their jobs through the buy-out are doing their very best to keep up with the load but it seem you have less support people then EV1 used to?

<Doug-CEO> i'm sorry to hear that is your feeling...on the contrary through talking to many customers in the last several months they see a huge improvement

<Doug-CEO> i don't know who you've talked to about "managing to hold onto their job" because we have gone out of our way to make sure we are building the best team in the industry...

<Doug-CEO> i happen to know who you are...and your relationship to an employee who is no longer with us...the issues behind why that person is no longer here had nothing to do with the merger of our two companies

<Doug-CEO> we are understaffed...no question...we are trying to hire additional QUALIFIED technicians as we speak...you are correct in stating that those that are working in our data centers today are carrying a huge load...we know that...p.s. another opportunity for a paid advertisement...anybody out there looking for a career in helping us build the premier hosting infrastructure companies...we have plenty of jobs...send your resume to us... jobs@theplanet.com

<Scanner2> We been seeing and having more network issues in both datacenters since the Merge, all is good what you have been saying about the future 100gbps network, but is kind of a long way to there, we seen that i can recall 1 dc1 network down issue, one for dc2, and 1 atleast for Theplanet (dc2 i think). How far is the stability we used to have before the merge?

<Doug-CEO> we unfortunately did have an issue with our routing that affected some services...it had nothing to do with the merger

<Doug-CEO> i'd like to learn more from you about the stability issues you refer to...send me more information if you would and i'll have our director of networking get back to you...thanks for the question

<Doug-CEO> are there any other questions?

<jeff-ev1> Does anyone have any more questions for Doug??

<TheRabbit> What direction do you see i365 group going?

<Doug-CEO> we just released 4 new servers in the i365 line tuesday...and we can support the new release of battlefield 2142...we offer this as a ranked server...one of very very few who can

<Wojjie> I have noticed that the images used to install on the servers tend to be out of date and with services setup that should never be enabled on a server (print spooling for windows). Will there be any plans on improving and updating these images more frequently, and making them more secure for customers at delivery?

<Doug-CEO> i will have the provisioning department look at this specific issue...as you know windows comes out with a number of patches...it sounds as though we're just not staying up with it...we will look into it

<Doug-CEO> thanks

<TheRabbit> follow up to that question is with many gamers, Location is everything, do you see branching out that group to other Datacenters or locations?

<Doug-CEO> if you mean outside of the state of Texas we have no plans as of yet...BUT that can change

<mrl144> why is it a hassle to try and get specials/deals for existing customers? I was looking into a NAS backup and found a competitor offered more space and a cheaper price In addition to NOT charging for bandwidht like TP does. How come this could not be matched or at least on price/space?

<Doug-CEO> we are working towards making sure the planet/ev1's pricing is correct...being correct could mean being in line with the competition...it could mean charging for a service that we provide better than anyone else...but the bottom line is our pricing takes into account THE TOTAL package...again not to beat a dead horse, but that's our network...our data centers...and our overall value

<Doug-CEO> in the past few weeks it has again proven that lowest price doesn't necessarily give you the redundancy and the uptime needed by people in the hosting community

<tyler> Do you guys plan on ever offering a completely unmanaged line of servers for a lower-price?

<Doug-CEO> last question...and a great one to end on...i'm not sure if you've visited our web site lately but we started offering a low end unmanaged server for $69 a few weeks ago...you better hurry up and grab one...they're going fast...where else can you get a server at that price supported by our network and maintained in our N+1 data centers...i challenge anyone who is doing business with another vendor to visit both sets of data centers

<Doug-CEO> thanks very much for your time...and more importantly your business...we are working diligently to earn every dollar you spend with us and hopefully convince you to spend more