Based on open-source test and measurement tools, Bench the Cloud evaluates cloud applications on three major criteria; CPU performance, disk-read and disk-write speed. Users can access an individualized dashboard with this data, and can sort and filter these criteria according to provider, virtualization status, total RAM and CPU cores. Users can also download the tool onto any Linux OS machine.

“We contributed real-world feedback into building this industry-first tool with Web Hosting Talk,” said Carl Meadows, senior product manager for cloud solutions at The Planet. “We’ve seen first-hand from our customers the time spent researching various cloud providers, and the amount of confusion and misinformation that exists in the marketplace. Our goal in participating is to provide additional value to customers by offering a quick, transparent view of the strengths, weaknesses and performance of solutions — a virtual ‘Consumer Reports’ for the cloud. Customers can now objectively compare solutions before purchase, and make their first pick the right one.”

It sounds like a great idea, but it’s likely to invite criticism from providers who may complain of “apples to oranges” comparisons, or who feel the metrics lack sufficient context to give customers a full appreciation of optimal cloud service or compute requirements. But provided the metric database is accurate and current, Bench the Cloud could serve as an excellent starting point for customers looking to the cloud, giving customers greater confidence in experimenting with these services, and helping them set realistic expectations. It could also spur adoption by giving the user community better insight into what these providers offer in terms of price vs. performance, enabling users to identify just the right compute service for a given price point, and mix and match offerings accordingly, instead of being locked into one provider or overpaying for unused resources.

“As other hosting companies and colocation providers are cutting back their programs, The Planet is making significant investments in Partner Plus to build indirect sales and leverage the power of the channel to expand our market reach,” The Planet global sales vice president Tom Blair said in a statement. “Today marks a strategic expansion in our already-successful partner program.”

The Planet “Partner Plus” plan includes three aspect of partner models intended to fit most of business needs of its clients: Reseller Partners, Referral  Partners as well as Affiliates.

Reseller Partners buy services and products to resell to clients, using The Planet’s buying strength, by means of volume-based server discount.

Referral Partners make up to 20 % commissions with deal size and the total business referred to The Planet.

Lastly, the Affiliate class offer clients who link customers or website visitors to The Planet 100 percent of a referred customer’s first month’s bill.

The Planet opened its entire product portfolio to partners earlier this year, letting them earn commissions or server discounts on one of the broadest portfolios of products and services in the industry, including colocation, advanced services and dedicated hosting, all the way to fully managed hosting, virtualization and cloud services.

Blair concluded, “We set about to reshape the partner landscape, with the most lucrative and creative program in the industry, backed by a dream team of sales, technical and support personnel committed to partners’ success. I’ve been in the industry for more than 25 years, and this is the program I’ve always envisioned being able to offer.”

Tenko Nikolov, chief executive officer of web host and The Planet partner SiteGround (www.siteground.com) said its global customer base relies on the most cutting-edge reliability and connectivity solutions to operate their businesses. “Our business continues to grow, as does our relationship with The Planet,” Nikolov said in a statement. “Their commitment to customer support and attention to our requirements makes them an ideal partner for our company, and those are among the reasons we work with The Planet.”

“As other hosting companies and colocation providers are cutting back their programs, The Planet is making significant investments in Partner Plus to build indirect sales and leverage the power of the channel to expand our market reach,” The Planet global sales vice president Tom Blair said in a statement. “Today marks a strategic expansion in our already-successful partner program.”

The Planet “Partner Plus” plan includes three aspect of partner models intended to fit most of business needs of its clients: Reseller Partners, Referral  Partners as well as Affiliates.

Reseller Partners buy services and products to resell to clients, using The Planet’s buying strength, by means of volume-based server discount.

Referral Partners make up to 20 % commissions with deal size and the total business referred to The Planet.

Lastly, the Affiliate class offer clients who link customers or website visitors to The Planet 100 percent of a referred customer’s first month’s bill.

The Planet opened its entire product portfolio to partners earlier this year, letting them earn commissions or server discounts on one of the broadest portfolios of products and services in the industry, including colocation, advanced services and dedicated hosting, all the way to fully managed hosting, virtualization and cloud services.

Blair concluded, “We set about to reshape the partner landscape, with the most lucrative and creative program in the industry, backed by a dream team of sales, technical and support personnel committed to partners’ success. I’ve been in the industry for more than 25 years, and this is the program I’ve always envisioned being able to offer.”

Tenko Nikolov, chief executive officer of web host and The Planet partner SiteGround (www.siteground.com) said its global customer base relies on the most cutting-edge reliability and connectivity solutions to operate their businesses. “Our business continues to grow, as does our relationship with The Planet,” Nikolov said in a statement. “Their commitment to customer support and attention to our requirements makes them an ideal partner for our company, and those are among the reasons we work with The Planet.”

The bundles are available in three types which make purchasing process very simple:

• The Performance Bundle is The Planet’s highest robust solution. It added to the Advanced and Essential Bundle an additional quad-core Web server for a total of three servers, they are fully managed with dedicated Cisco ASA 5510SP firewall, also a wide array of managed services, like backup, security and server monitoring.
• The Advanced Bundle has all the features of the Essential package, and a RAID 1 database server with 15,000RPM SAS drives to make database access very fast. This also includes superior load balancing, with three times the capacity and speed of the Essential Bundle.
• The Essential Bundle has two Intel quad-core servers with load balancing. This system is ideal for mission-critical applications.

Bryce Edwards, The Planet’s general manager for complex infrastructure said “Many SMBs require the ability to grow their hosted environments quickly and easily, yet aren’t sure where to start,” he also added “With our new Virtual Rack Solution Bundles, we’ve prepackaged three of our most popular virtual rack configurations, making it an easy choice to meet particular business requirements. All of our bundles feature drive-level redundancy, 1Gbps connection speed and bandwidth pooling, and customers receive additional value by taking advantage of low introductory pricing.”

There is also an offer from The Planet that ends on Dec. 31; they are the Virtual Rack Solution Bundles with unbeatable prices. The Advanced Bundle is priced now for $1,329.60 per month, this is a 20% savings. The Performance Bundle is priced at $2,048.85 per month; it is discounted for more than 25%. The Essential Bundle now has a price of $801.55 per month, normally the price is $943 per month.

The Planet’s clients now can add servers to their virtual or private racks at a big discount of up to 50% for the first two months. This discount is not applies on all of The Planet’s plans, Only certain plans including the Core2 Duo 4500, the Dual Xeon 5405and the Xeon 3040 has this discount. New private rack clients with more than three servers will receive even a big a 70 % discount on “shelf” prices. Moreover, The Planet has offers for about 50% discount on RAID cards for virtual and private rack clients. These discounts will stay until November 30, 2008, or “while supplies last”.

General Manager of the The Planet, Bryce Edwards explained “Ecommerce continues to grow, requiring businesses to have a strong online presence for complex infrastructure solutions,” he also added “The Planet’s private and virtual racks help businesses accommodate increased demands on IT infrastructure, with the benefits of unlimited server-to-server transfer, pooled bandwidth and advanced security technologies. With these promotions, our customers can prepare for growth during the holidays and beyond, while keeping capital expenditures to a minimum.”

The Planet web hosting is the place of more than 25,000 small and medium-size businesses by hosting about 13.3 million sites globally. The Planet’s Planet Alpha plans also offer self-managed dedicated servers while its plans “Planet Northstar” which are a managed hosting plans offers a fully managed web hosting plans.

Just now, chose Dual Xeon and Pentium servers are priced from $70 /m and up, with discounts of up to 57 percent.

Starting now on, the Dual Xeon 3.2 SCSI and SATA are priced at $149 /m, which was $299. The Pentium4 2.4 is priced $79 /m, the previous price was $109. clients who purchase double or more of these servers by on order get the second Dual Xeon 3.2 SCSI or SATA discounted 57 percent, this is $170 less per month. The other Pentium4 2.4 can be purchased at $70 /m, a 36 percent savings.

These recent less expensive prices make a cost-effective way for customers which have interest in purchaing a second server to use as a business test bed or to pilot a new system offering,” said Urvish Vashi, The Planet’s general manager for dedicated hosting. “As with all Planet Alpha servers, customers will benefit from The Planet’s world-class network and 24/7 support.”

This offer is valid through Aug. 24, 2008. For more information, please visit the Web site at The Planet.

About The Planet

The Planel web hosting provider is the first provider web servers, they are hosting nearly 22,000 small – and medium-size businesses and 7.7 million website globaly. The Planet Alpha division provides the widest array of self-managed dedicated servers and modern services backed by 24x7x365 technical support. The Planet Northstar Managed Hosting division brings all together a proactive methodology and seasoned IT experts to deliver the optiumum managed hosting solution. With the best choice of servers, programing tools and the best support, backed by state-of-the-art facilities and an enterprise-class network, The Planet hosting makes IT into a big competitive gain that makes customers to grow their businesses.

These servers are available in one hour as one of Planet Alpha’s Ready To Go Servers, it is also including the new version of CentOS-5 operating system on all Ready To Go Servers with no additional charges. Also, customers now can have the option to operate the servers with or without the cPanel-brand control panel.

”Our rapid server-provisioning time is one of the chief reasons people choose The Planet for their hosting solutions. The combination of our vast inventory and automated provisioning system allows us to make servers available in just one hour. By expanding our line of popular Ready To Go Servers, our customers have even more options when they require a high-performance box that must be up-and-running quickly.” said Urvish Vashi, Director of Product Management.

The Planet endeavors to provide high level of network and speed for peak performance, instant scalability to handle large spikes of traffic, redundant, parallel, multi-tiered network routing and switching architecture for maximum stability and reliability also multiple layer network security protecting from (DDOS) attacks that harm.

The Planet dedicated server provider are the leaders of On Demand IT Infrastructure solutions, they are hosting more than 22,000 businesses and 6.7 million web site, they are using the best hardware, software tools and technical support with state-of-the-art data centers and networks.

“Planet Alpha”, a brand of “The Planet” is now holding all their dedicated services; they still have the same old configurations which are either single CPU, single or dual core & dual CPU, dual or quad cores.  Their prices have remained the same and still remain to be the best price value for their premium datacenter and bandwidth.  They are currently offering big discounts on their current dedicated server line with the launch of their new website which makes them one of the very reasonable options for premium hosting.  For the more complex applications requiring clusters or managed web hosting, The Planet has introduced the “Planet Northstar” brand.

The Planet remains one of the top privately held premium internet service providers, operating their own private 155,000 square feet datacenter at the moment with another 12,000 square feet ready for expansion. They are considered one of the top-end premium providers with N+1 power generators, N+2 redundant HVAC systems and connecting to tier-1 network providers such as AT&T (NYSE:T), AboveNet, NTT (NYSE:NTT), Savvis (NASDAQ:SVVS), Global Crossing (NASDAQ:GLBC), Level 3 (NASDAQ:LVLT), Time Warner Telecom (NASDAQ:TWTC).

The Planet adds that the new space will feature an energy-efficient design that utilizes improved measures to completely separate hot and cold air. This will improve the data center’s “coefficient of efficiency” to about 1.5. The coefficient of efficiency is an EPA- and Uptime Institute-recognized measurement of the total power necessary to operate a data center divided by the critical power, which is the energy required to operate its computers. The “ideal” ranking is 1.6.

The Planet further explains that the enhancement of the energy-efficient measures include extending the returns of the computer room air conditioning units through the ceiling and utilizing the space above the ceiling as a return air path. By using CPI ducted exhaust cabinets in the new phase, it says that it is taking the next steps beyond traditional “hot aisle-cold aisle” setups to completely isolate the hot and cold air in the data center.

The Planet’s Vice President of Facilities Jeff Lowenberg said “As energy costs continue to climb, operating our data centers at peak performance is absolutely critical, both to our company and to our customers,” he also added “Our goal is to use best practices and a practical approach to optimize our operations.”