Houston, Texas - (The Hosting News) - January 14, 2009 - Privately held dedicated web hosting company, The Planet, is now providing private and virtual rack customers, with its 'Business-Class' level service offerings.

Known as Alpha Professional, this new service offering is expressly designed for private and virtual rack customers. The solution includes around-the-clock direct contact with the dedicated Alpha Professional team of certified systems administrators, one-hour hardware replacement, as well as server monitoring with reaction and daily managed backups. The Alpha Professional team serves as the customer's personal internal ambassador, with a commitment to solve virtually any problem on the first call.

Red Hat Certified Engineers (RHCE) and Microsoft Certified Systems Engineers (MCSE) comprise the Alpha Professional team, which provides customized technical guidance, troubleshooting and assistance to Alpha Professional customers.  They also remediate servers immediately in the event of a service disruption. The new 'business-class' offering delivers critical services without the added cost of a complete managed hosting solution.

Todd Mitchell, General Manager for Advanced Services at The Planet remarked, ''Virtually every company evaluates IT spending during an economic downturn. For companies with reduced IT staffs, Alpha Professional provides a cost-effective alternative to a fully managed hosting solution, backed by our world-class data centers, network and support. We offer the industry's most comprehensive range of choices, whether it's self-managed servers, additional services, colocation or managed hosting, so customers gain access to the solution that fits their specific business requirements.''

Alpha Professional is the company's newest service offering for customers who use The Planet's virtual and private rack solutions.  It provides an intermediate step between self-managed dedicated servers with a la carte Alpha Advanced Services - including Alpha Managed Backup, Alpha Server Monitoring and Alpha Security - and the company's Northstar Managed Hosting solution:

First-call resolution: Alpha Professional customers work directly with a select group of top-level systems administrators, each either Red Hat or Microsoft certified. This team serves as the customer's internal ambassador for resolving issues on their first call to the team.

One-hour hardware replacement SLA: The Planet guarantees to replace any failed, standard configuration customer hardware within one hour of problem acknowledgement.

Server monitoring with reaction: Up to 15 services are monitored every five minutes, including rapid reactive response with customized escalation procedures. Should a server go down, customized remediation ensures experts are waiting and ready to get the server back online immediately.

Managed backup: The Advanced Services team ensures daily, uninterrupted backups on each customer server. Data is stored on a high-availability, fault-tolerant storage platform, and customers are alerted when they near the limits of their existing storage space.

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 the leading provider of On Demand IT Infrastructure solutions, hosting more than 25,000 small and medium size businesses and 14.1 million Web sites worldwide. The Planet Alpha division provides the widest array of self-managed dedicated servers and advanced services backed by 24x7x365 support. The Planet Northstar Managed Hosting division combines a proactive methodology and seasoned IT experts to deliver a fully managed hosting solution, with the best choice of servers, software tools and world-class support, backed by state-of-the-art facilities and an enterprise-class network.

Alpha Professional is promotionally priced at $125 per server per month, and is currently available only to private and virtual rack customers.

To learn more about Alpha Professional, please visit: www.theplanet.com/managed-dedicated-servers.

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