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Thread: My experience at The Planet
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12-28-2006, 02:13 PM #1Newbie
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My experience at The Planet
Hello, I'm not really new to this forum as I have been a lurker for years now. You see, I was not permitted to post in industry forums due to company policy. My review of The Planet is from a different perspective, as an employee. I worked as a Datacenter Technician (formerly titled NOC Engineer), which would make me one of the people that updated technical support tickets. I also fielded some calls, but after the creation of the CCA department, not many. I am no longer employed with The Planet, nor do I work in the hosting industry at all.
First, I will say that I will not share any information that I have acquired that may be considered proprietary, such as information shared in various meetings, insider information, or other various "secrets". I will only share my experience working with the company and the various employees I encountered.
So lets take a look at what many of you see outwardly, the technical support. Technical support is a weak point at TP. Not all technicians contribute to this weakness, but I would say most do. The average level of knowledge is not very high at level one support. That is not to say that all technicians don't know what they are doing. There are some that are far above the rest. I was one of them. I will not provide names of those that I feel are the better technicians because I don't want people asking for them, and I don't want hard feelings on those technicians not listed should they read this (as they should be reading this forum).
I think the biggest flaw with TP is not necesarily the poor technical support, but rather the poor compensation. The poor compensation does not attract the better qualified people, and the better qualified people that do work there are attracted elsewhere very easily. Of course, the public would not necesarily know this since you don't really see it. I was probably one of the better paid technicians, yet I received a substantial raise taking my new job. Granted, I am now a server administrator rather than a technical support agent. However, TP still pays less than many of the other providers.
I guess you now know why TP's prices can remain as low as they are
While I survived some issues that TP went through, I don't have many complaints about working there. The work itself was pretty good, most technical issues were pretty simple to resolve (at least for me), and while there were customers that stood out as being ones that I cared not to deal with, most customers were pretty cool. My biggest complaints, really, were just compensation and quality of technicians. Quality of management was pretty far up there, but I will keep that to myself
I worked for The Planet for almost 3 years and I'm glad I had spent that time there. It was not the perfect job, but it at least got me to where I am now. I do miss working there a little, and I honestly wish I could have been able to advance in position there and play a bigger role at TP. Unfortunately they could not offer to me what I wanted, so I found a place that could. I'm happy in my new job and I wish The Planet good luck and good fortune in the future.
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12-28-2006, 02:34 PM #2Web Hosting Master
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so indirectly you want to say all these things to those who are working at planet
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12-28-2006, 02:37 PM #3Junior Guru Wannabe
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I'd suggest re-reading that NDA when you started working there and maybe ask a mod to delete this post. Not that I care that much, but you could definately get yourself in some trouble...
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12-28-2006, 02:37 PM #4Newbie
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I've already said these things verbally. They know my thoughts already. That is unless they chose to ignore what I said to them before I left
I'm not sure what is secret about what I posted. I didn't state what I was paid, I didn't provide any secrets, and posting in an industry forum is not a violation of the NDA. flaggg, I would like to send you a PM, but it appears forum policy does not permit it. If you know of a way we can trade contact info to communicate outside of this thread, let me know as I would like to discuss with you what you believe to be a violation of the NDA I am still bound to.Last edited by Nimdae; 12-28-2006 at 02:46 PM.
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12-28-2006, 02:43 PM #5Junior Guru Wannabe
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I wouldn't know, but I'd imagine any large company has half a legal department to make this sort of post illegal. It couldn't be too hard to put "3 years" "disgruntled" and "recently quit" together.
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12-28-2006, 02:49 PM #6Web Hosting Master
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Originally Posted by Nimdae0
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12-28-2006, 03:14 PM #7Newbie
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Type of post and content are completely different. However, if you strongly believe you are protecting me in having this remove, then by all means, go for it. However, I am not disclosing anything other than my personal experience. If this violates the NDA, then that would make everyone who leaves a job that signs a NDA a target for litigation as much of this information is also something I might share with a potential employer. I'm not slamming TP by any means, just sharing information from this perspective as I'm sure some people would be curious. I know when I was a customer of TP over 3 years ago, I was
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12-28-2006, 03:22 PM #8Retired Moderator
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Originally Posted by flaggg
In his post he gives opinions and certainly hasn't divulged anything that could remotely be considered trade secrets. Not sure why you think that has any chance of being an issue for him. It doesn't.
All I read is that he is one of the best technicians and he actually liked working at theplanet.0
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12-28-2006, 03:28 PM #9Junior Guru Wannabe
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Originally Posted by CoolRaul
Anyway I'll just leave it at that and keep quiet.Last edited by flaggg; 12-28-2006 at 03:34 PM.
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12-28-2006, 03:40 PM #10Web Hosting Evangelist
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Originally Posted by flaggg
I would agree. If this was one of my former employees (resigned or released), you can bet my legal dept. would be drafting a letter.
-Tom0
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12-28-2006, 05:18 PM #11Retired Moderator
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You guys are crazy. I can say with certainty at least in Canada that what he has posted would be laughed out of court were I to try to bring suit against a former employee.
I have hired and employed enough people in Canada at least to know that for a fact. Can you point to anything that cannot be an opinion or public knowledge? At no point has he named anyone nor has he given anything related to time of day coverage, number of staff and only a subjective view of staff competency.
I suggest what you guys are referring to is slander in saying that the staff competency was poor. If Theplanet was to try to take this to court they would lose.0
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12-28-2006, 05:53 PM #12Web Hosting Evangelist
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I agree with CoolRaul absolutely. My experiences with TP as a customer are good. Support was quite good, sometimes a bit slow, but overall OK. What I'm really missing is more ways to configure your server , especially I'm missing 15K SCSI drives there.
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12-28-2006, 06:10 PM #13Newbie
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I don't remember if you can order a I365 server without cortex, but 15k scsi drives are available there. You might try asking sales about that.
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12-28-2006, 07:43 PM #14Newbie
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I take that back, looks like they went to SATA II drives. Shows how much being out of the loop makes you misinformed I mean, I didn't leave just yesterday, heh.
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12-29-2006, 09:24 AM #15Aspiring Evangelist
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As a new customer at the planet (1½ months so far), i can say that i haven't seen much of the techs yet (only time i dealt with them was when i had my management package set up). I was kind off hoping to find something in this thread about how the merge with ev1 has impacted the staff/quality, but i guess you're not allowed to disclose any of that (btw, you can send pm's now ).
All in all i hardly see anything wrong with this post, and i'm very happy you made it, it's always nice to hear something from the staff|| Semi-professional PHP developer || Exams right now, don't I just feel lucky? ||
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12-29-2006, 10:44 AM #16Newbie
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Yeah, I sent a pm already
If you've ever watched 2 companies merge, you might have an idea what The Planet and EV1 are going through. I won't comment beyond that.0
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12-29-2006, 01:30 PM #17New Member
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But what I don't under stand is...
Everything was so bad, then why didn't you just get up
And leave? Were you
Under some sort of contract that meant you had to work there for 3 yrs?0
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12-29-2006, 04:35 PM #18Newbie
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It's not necesarily that it was so bad. My primary reason for leaving is I didn't feel like TP was for me. I can't really go into detail about my terms of termination. It's a good company to work for, but beaurocratically is about the same as any other.
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12-29-2006, 05:36 PM #19Web Hosting Master
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I think whatever you said is against the NDA. You can get in trouble....
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12-29-2006, 07:13 PM #20Aspiring Evangelist
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Originally Posted by Zafar Ahmed
Do you know the NDA?
Come on guys, Nimdae is the person who worked there, and quit, and signed the NDA, i bet he knows what he's doing, and that he read the NDA closely...|| Semi-professional PHP developer || Exams right now, don't I just feel lucky? ||
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12-30-2006, 11:40 AM #21Web Hosting Master
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Originally Posted by Zafar Ahmed
He is just stating his opinion about the company's aspects. There should be nothing wrong. And as per my read about his post, he might had discussed more positive points rather than negative ones. And two negative points are associated with the employees only.
We have servers with TP but we are really not happy with their server's quality and support. Every repeated year, servers have this and that faults comparing to our other servers with DedicatedNow.
We will be moving our data from them to either Dedicatednow or to some other providers as recently we are facing major issues with one of server at TP.Dinsol.com Web Hosting Since Year 1999 Open Running Stable
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12-30-2006, 12:25 PM #22Web Hosting Master
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I think you should leave the NDA up to the OP as he is, I am sure, quite familiar with it. We are not, lets not speculate and say he'll get in trouble.
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12-30-2006, 04:23 PM #23Web Hosting Guru
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As a customer, I can concur that the techs there are sometimes totally clueless.
Someone claims it's because they're not paid enough. Wow, big surprise... is it a new economic dynamic at work?
In my experience, I have had a higher percentage of clueless responses at TP than at e.g. softlayer, voxrox, GNAX, etc. While initial tickets in those other places may sometimes be of the nature "I don't know, but I'll forward it", at least I'm not getting some clueless response that's supposed to be the definitive answer.0
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12-30-2006, 07:24 PM #24
Closed by request.
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