Houston, Texas – (The Hosting News) – May 27, 2008 – Privately held dedicated web hosting company, The Planet, has completed its acquisition of support services solutions provider, Touch Support, LLC.

Based in Lafayette, Indiana, Touch Support provides server administration management services to its global customer base. Financial terms were not disclosed.

With this acquisition, The Planet will introduce a new portfolio of advanced services for dedicated hosting customers who are looking to optimize their business results without relinquishing control of their IT infrastructures.

The new advanced services offerings will provide customers with the ability to select advanced services from a modular suite of solutions. Touch Support’s current portfolio includes server administration, technical support, security audits and server hardening, server virtualization, migration, monitoring and managed backups. The company also provides hourly server administration support for customers looking for one-time or custom requests.

Douglas J. Erwin, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer at The Planet commented, ”The complexity of managing an IT infrastructure continues to grow, and we’ve had a number of our dedicated hosting customers request that we provide additional services. These companies entrust their businesses and their livelihoods with The Planet, and they come to us for our enterprise-class network and six world-class data centers. With the acquisition of Touch Support, we can extend our portfolio to include high-quality advanced services that enable us to help them grow their businesses.”

David Lindahl, General Manager at Touch Support noted, ”The Planet offers Touch Support and our employees opportunities to grow the new advanced services business for their dedicated hosting customers, backed by solid financial resources. Our existing customers also will appreciate The Planet’s commitment to being a customer-centric company, which reflects our own philosophies. I envision growing our services portfolio to provide even greater value for our existing companies and to those we will attract to our offerings.”

Mr. Erwin continued, ”We looked at a number of companies in the services arena, and far and away Touch Support was the best fit. About 25 percent of their customers use our hosting services, so they have a strong working knowledge of The Planet. Equally as important is their commitment to being a customer-driven company. Over the next few months, we’ll make a number of announcements about the breadth of our extended services.”

Sean Richards, Technical Director at Touch Support added, ”We bring to The Planet a highly skilled team that’s been chosen for their technical ability, intelligence and problem-solving skills, as well as their natural inclination to help customers. From our own dealings with customers, this is a market that continues to grow since so many companies need help but don’t want to turn over their entire IT framework to be managed. We plan to quickly integrate Touch Support and The Planet and then extend our services to our combined customers.”

During the third quarter, The Planet will make announcements about its Advanced Services portfolio.

Recently, The Planet welcomed to its newly created affiliate program, one of its largest customers, Directi. The partnership marks The Planet’s largest-scale affiliate relationship to date. As a builder of mass-market web products and services used by customers in over 240 countries, Directi will refer business to The Planet through its over 7,000-member web hosting partner community.

Directi has been named to Deloitte’s Technology Fast 50 and Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500 List for the last three consecutive years. It operates various business units – LogicBoxes, ResellerClub, WebHosting.Info and Skenzo – that provide their customers with products and services that enable them to capitalize on the advantages of a networked world. It also owns and operates PublicDomainRegistry.com, the 10th largest ICANN-accredited domain registrar in the world.

Directi is a multi-national Internet products company that builds mass-market Web 2.0 products and services used by millions worldwide. Directi’s business units — Logicboxes, ResellerClub, Skenzo and WebHosting.Info — are based on the common goal of empowering customers with the products and services that allow them to capitalize on the advantages of a networked world. Directi’s combined product portfolio includes communication and collaboration apps, social networking software, instant messaging, context analysis engines, antispam and antivirus solutions, large-scale billing and provisioning platforms, traffic monetization solutions, online advertising solutions, DNS management products, Linux and Windows server management software and web hosting control panels.

Ultimately, The Planet’s goal is 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 Touch Support, LLC, please visit: www.touchsupport.com.

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

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