Houston, Texas - (The Hosting News) - July 2, 2008 - Privately held dedicated web hosting company, The Planet, has included the addition of Gigabit speed and Virtual Private Network (VPN) services to its virtual private rack solution.

Urvish Vashi, Director of product management at The Planet noted, ''We introduced virtual racks to provide a cost-effective, automated solution for large and small complex hosting environments. By adding these upgrades, we're able to better meet the needs of one of our fastest-growing customer segments.''

The upgrades offer the benefits of enhanced network performance and increased functionality for virtual racks. The upgrade to 1Gbps network connectivity allows customers to transfer data faster between servers both within their virtual rack environment and to other servers on the Internet. As a result, customers can host higher-scale, more complex environments and offer more bandwidth-intensive services such as streaming media. The cost for Gigabit Network Uplinks is $10 per month per server.

The Planet is also adding VPN services - at no additional charge - to all customers with dedicated firewalls in their virtual rack environment. This value-added service offers customers remote access to their network and greater security. Customers can choose between site-to-site IPSEC VPN or Cisco AnyConnect VPN for individual end-users.

Virtual rack customers are now able to utilize higher-capacity firewalls and load balancers with these upgrades. These advanced hardware add-ons include the Cisco ASA 5520 and Cisco ASA 5550 firewalls, as well as the powerful Server Iron 4G load balancer.

Virtual racks enhance security, particularly for companies running advanced, high-performance applications that require flexibility in multi-server environments:

Unlimited server-to-server transfer: Multiple servers within the same virtual rack have unlimited connectivity so customers don't pay for bandwidth between servers.

Unlimited server-to-server transfer: Virtual racks allow customers to pool bandwidth across all servers in the environment.

The Planet attempts to eliminate the guessing game of which server will accumulate overages, only to find others below the limit. Pooled bandwidth allows servers to share the bandwidth included with every server purchased from The Planet.

Unlimited server-to-server transfer: A complete hosting solution for complex environments requires advanced firewalls and load balancers. Virtual racks allow customers to take advantage of these solutions across their multi-server applications.

Ultimately, The Planet endeavors to provide:

• High levels of network capacity and speed to deliver peak performance
• Instant scalability to handle even the largest spikes in network traffic
• Parallel, redundant, multi-tiered network routing and switching architecture to assure reliability and stability
• Multiple layer network security that prevents Delayed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks from harming businesses
• Knowledgeable experts with a passion for excellence and a commitment to operate the best networks in the business

The Planet is a leading provider of On Demand IT Infrastructure solutions, hosting over 22,000 small and medium size businesses and 6.7 million web sites worldwide, using the best choice of servers, software tools and support, backed by enhanced facilities and network connectivity.

To learn more about The Planet's private rack solutions, please visit: www.theplanet.com/hosting-products/private-racks.

For more information about The Planet, please visit: www.theplanet.com.