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 setting plans in place to return to the two previous portals you used. In the case of our Dallas customers, you’ll have access to the Orbit site; for our Houston customers, we will return to Server Command. I expect to be able to tell you more later today and provide a specific timeframe for when this will occur.

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.

If you have immediate issues or questions, we have set up a toll-free 800 number for our domestic customers at 800-913-3724. For our international customers, you can reach our team at 281-854-0202.

As soon as I have specific and accurate information about returning to the previous portals, I will let you know here.

As promised earlier today, I want to provide you with an update on our customer portal and the progress we are making to provide you with access to your previous sites.

To reiterate, both the “original” Orbit and ServerCommand portals will be available, and 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, I want to again provide you with the phone numbers you can call to get additional support. We have these additional phones 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.

Before midnight CST this evening (GMT -6), we expect to make this change so that you are able to return to the “original” Orbit and ServerCommand portals.

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.

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.