Explosion at The Planet wins them 3,500 new customers?
On May 31, an explosion at Web hosting company The Planet affected about 7,500 customers, 2,600 of which experienced downtime for at least 3-4 days.
Between June 8 and July 8, The Planet gained about 3,500 new customers, according to Netcraft, which was the third-highest gain of the 50 hosters that Netcraft tracks.
So what gives?
I came across this little tidbit via Rich Miller, who wrote about Web hosters’ uptime over at Data Center Knowledge. That got me poking around the Netcraft Web site, where I found the section about “Sites on the Move.” Seeing as we had covered the electrical explosion at The Planet, I was curious how many customers they lost in the aftermath. They did lose quite a few — almost 900 — but their net change in customers was around 3,400 on the positive side, something I certainly wasn’t expecting.
A couple possible explanations. Management at The Planet kept an open dialog throughout all the downtime, which for some customers was almost a week. Doug Erwin, the company’s CEO, did two or three podcasts that they posted on The Planet’s Web site, detailing the reasons for the outage and any updates on what the company was doing to fix the problem. And one of The Planet’s message boards was dedicated to updates on the problem, which were quite frequent shortly after the explosion, and then waning off as more customers got back online.
Another, possibly simpler explanation? Many of The Planet’s customers are just looking to get their personal Web sites or some simple business Web sites online. As a result, they don’t do much research into the Web hoster of choice, and it’s fair to say that many of the 3,500 new customers probably didn’t even know about the explosion.
Posted: July 8th, 2008 under Blogroll, Data center disaster recovery planning, Managing data center outsourcing services.
There’s another possible explanation: one or two customers who operate a domain monetization service may have moved a portfolio to The Planet. The host switching data on the Netcraft site reflects sites (domains) rather than customer accounts. Thus, a single customer with a domain business running ads on 20,000 parked domains can skew the monthly numbers. Many of the domain advertising providers lease dedicated servers at the larger providers, and they typically control tens of thousands of domains. There’s no way to know if this is what happened at The Planet, but it’s another plausible scenario.
Netcraft has another metric called “active sites” which tries to separate out sites with content from parked domains. You can see broad trends in active sites on the monthly web server surveys, but they historically don’t break that out by provider on the public site.
Comment by Rich Miller — July 8, 2008 @ 4:04 pm
I could be wrong, but I think you are mis-interpreting the data. The data reflects new sites not clients. If I am reading the report correctly, the 3500 number is based on DNS information. If you look at the detail list, you will clearly see some sites being counted more than once. 3500 new sites is nothing for ThePlanet. 3500 new customers would be huge. Last I knew they had about 25K clients. So 3500 new clients would be a huge score for them and it would be everywhere in the press.
Also, they have been slowly updating their DNS whois information. You will see some of the wins were from Everyones Internet, which they own anyway.
Comment by jeffatrackaid — July 9, 2008 @ 10:37 am
Rich and Jeff,
Thanks to both of you for clearing up the stats. It is indeed for new sites, not new customers.
Comment by Mark F. — July 9, 2008 @ 12:10 pm
[…] Read the rest here:Â Explosion at The Planet wins them 3,500 new customers? […]
Pingback by Data Center Life Blog » Blog Archive » Explosion at The Planet wins them 3,500 new customers? — November 7, 2008 @ 10:03 pm