The Planet Enters European Market with London Data Center

HOUSTON, March 2, 2009 – The Planet, the global leader in IT hosting, today announced plans for its first international data center, located in London. Based on significant customer demand for both international and globally redundant hosted infrastructure, the company initially will offer its virtual racks solution when its center opens in April. Preleasing begins immediately.

The data center features up to 20kW of power per rack, backed by N+1 redundancy on generators, transformers and UPS systems. Customers gain access to a 10GB private fiber interconnect to The Planet’s core network through its Ashburn, Va., data center, as well as local connectivity to Tier-1 providers and the major European peering exchanges.

“For the past 18 months, we’ve evaluated international markets that are of strategic importance to our planned global expansion, and Europe has been at the forefront of those discussions,” said The Planet’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Douglas J. Erwin. “We’ve had serious customer interest, which underscored that the time was right to move forward. “We’ve made substantial investments in our data centers and our network over the past two years, including the recent addition of new peering points on the East and West Coasts of the United States. Our storage cloud and CDN products also provide global access points. With 42 percent of our customers located in international markets, we expect considerable interest in this new operation.”

The Planet has forged a colocation agreement with London-headquartered TelecityGroup, which operates 20 network-independent data centers across seven European countries. Procedures in the new facility comply with ISO 9001:2000, which benchmarks quality processes for data center operations and management.

TelecityGroup is highly regarded for both its premium data centers and operational expertise. It is also taking the lead in driving energy efficiency in the data center in Europe as the first data center operator to sign up to the new “EU Code of Conduct for Data Centres.” It is also a member of the Green Grid.

“The Planet has established a strong reputation for delivering high quality, reliable hosting and Web services,” said Adriaan Oosthoek, Managing Director for TelecityGroup UK and Ireland. “I’m delighted that TelecityGroup will play a crucial role in supporting The Planet’s roll out into Europe, by hosting and maintaining their infrastructure in our new highly resilient and secure Powergate data centre. We continue to be the data centre of choice for leading U.S. businesses expanding into Europe.”

In December, The Planet announced plans for its seventh data center, a new 86,000 square foot colocation facility in Dallas. The first phase will open in May 2009. For more information, visit http://www.theplanet.com or contact the sales department at 1-866-325-0045 to learn more about pre-leasing opportunities in the new London data center.