[another guest post, this time at boingboing.net ]
Back in the good old days everyone knew how many planets there were, then scientists came along and screwed everything up. How could something that was always a planet suddenly not be one? It made no sense. Chaos ensued, people protested, and scientists were thrown in prison.
I'm not making up that prison part, either.
It was dangerous
These days, a question like that is easy to answer: type it in to Google, click on the Wikipeadia entry, and read the answer: 2306 +/- 20 km. The +/- (to be read “plus or minus”) is important here: every measurement has limitations and an often critical part of science is correctly quantifying those limit. The correct interpretation of 2306 +/- 20 km is that 2306 km is the most likely value,
In part 1 of this story I told about the discovery of Sedna, the first – and still only – body found far beyond the edge of the Kuiper belt. Part 2 described some of our early theories on how Sedna had gotten there and what it was telling us about the early history of the solar system. Here I’ll begin talking about the most recent searches for more things like Sedna and how we’re doing so far.
One of the fun things about having a book coming out [TODAY, IN FACT] is that you get invited to do guest posts here and there around the web. You can, for example, watch for me from now until the solstice over at BoingBoing. One of the most fun so far was a chance to write at Babel Clash, about my take on life on other planets. Here is what I had to say:
I grew up in a universe teeming with
The news last week that Eris might actually be a tiny bit smaller than Pluto led to the inevitable question: doesn’t this mean that Pluto should be a planet, after all?
The simple obvious answer to this question is no. Pluto was not demoted in 2006 simply because it was no longer the largest known object beyond Neptune, but because it was one of many many such small objects beyond Neptune. The
Brian Marsden, long time director of the International Astronomical Union Minor Planet Center died today. While it is easy to say “he was the nicest guy…” in this case it was simply true. Everyone who came across him has stories about Brian. My book, coming out in out a few more weeks has a few too. Just last week I autographed a copy for Brian and bookmarked the spots where he appeared. I say
 |
| Interiors of all Kuiper belt objects with known densities. Yellow/brown is rock, blue is ice. Objects range from 100% ice to 100% with everything in between. The largest object is Triton, the next two are Pluto and Eris. The elongated body is, of course, Haumea. Quaoar, Charon, Orcus, and smaller objects also appear. Truly, the dwarf planets are crazy. |
Eris, the goddess of discord and strife and the most massive dwarf planet, is up to her usual tricks.
 |
| The predicted size and path of the shadow of Eris. South America was the mostly likely location to make a good detection, but the uncertainties in the position of Eris and the star might have put the shadow as far north as N. America or even down in Argentina. |
There is one important catch. Even if every single telescope in the world were watching, most would not see a thing. That’s because Eris is so small that if it is blocking the star from one spot on the earth it is not blocking it from most others. The easiest way to think of this is to imagine that that one star being occulted is the only star in the entire sky and it is super bright. As Eris moves in front of the star it makes a shadow on the earth, and that shadow is the size of Eris itself. Eris has a diameter about 5 times smaller than that of the earth, so the shadow covers an area something like 5 times 5 = 25 times smaller than the earth itself. It’s not quite that bad, though, because, like a lunar eclipse, the shadow of Eris sweeps across the face of the earth, making a track that looks something like the picture here.
The first positive report came from Sebastian Sarabia, Alain Maury and Caisey Harlingten at the San Pedro de Atacama Celestial Explorations Observatory in Chile, who saw the star disappear for 76 seconds. Later it was reported that Emmanuel Jehin at the TRAPPIST telescope, about 700 km south in La Silla Chile also saw the star disappear. This means we’re in business. While each single detection gives you only one chord across the body, it only takes two different chords to precisely define the size of a circle. And since we are pretty certain Eris is massive enough to be spherical (Pluto, only 80% the mass of Eris, is spherical), that means a size can be measured.
Next up: What does all of this mean for the dwarf planets and the solar system?
 |
(Be sure to read part 1)
Seven years ago, the moment I first calculated the odd orbit of Sedna and realized it never came anywhere close to any of the planets, it instantly became clear that we astronomers had been missing something all along. Either something large once passed through the outer parts of our solar system and is now long gone, or something large still lurks in a distant corner out there and we haven’t found it yet.
Of all of the planets, comets, asteroids, and Kuiper belt objects in the solar system, Sedna is the only one that tells us this astounding fact so glaringly. The orbit of every single other object in the entire solar system can be explained, at least in principle, by some interaction with the known planets. Sedna alone requires something else out there.
But what?
In our 2004 paper announcing the discovery of Sedna (give it a try; though it – like all research papers – has some technical details that might not make sense, I believe it to be relatively readable), we suggested three possibilities. Our first idea was that perhaps there was an unknown approximately earth-sized planet circling the sun about twice the distance of Neptune. Sedna could have gotten too close to this Planet X and been given a kick which would have flung it out into a far corner of our solar system. But, like always, nothing can kick you into a far corner and make you stay there. You always come back to the spot where you were kicked. So Sedna’s new orbit would be one that came in as close as this Planet X and went far into the outer solar system – just like Sedna’s orbit. Back in 2003 I had liked this idea a lot. Our search of the skies had only begun a few years earlier, so the prospect that there might be an earth-sized planet awaiting discovery seemed pretty exciting indeed. It was, admittedly, a long shot, but discovering planets always is.
The second possibility that we considered and wrote about was that perhaps a star had passed extremely close to our solar system at some point during the lifetime of the sun. “Extremely close” for a star means something like 20 times beyond the orbit of Neptune, but that is 500 times closer than the current nearest star. A star passing by that close would have been brighter than the full moon and would have been the brightest thing in the night sky for hundreds of years. Perhaps our early ancestors even temporarily lived under a dual-star sky. Sedna, before the rogue star came calling, would have been a normal Kuiper belt object with a looping orbit which would take it out to the distant solar system but then eventually back to Neptune (which had, presumably kicked it around earlier). But on one of its trips to the edge of the solar system, Sedna would have accidentally gotten too close to this interloping star, and the star would have given Sedna another little kick. Suddenly, Sedna would find itself on a new orbit which no longer went back to Neptune. The orbit would, of course, have to go back to the spot where Sedna had gotten the kick from the passing star, but the star would be long gone by then. This idea was a fun one, and, best of all, we could do a reasonably good job estimating the probability that something like this might have occurred. Looking at the number of star near us in the galaxy and fast they all move relative to each other, we found that the chances of such a rogue star encounter happening sometime in the past 4.5 billion years was around 1%. Not good odds to hang your theory on. (People often ask: can’t you just go back and find the star that did it and see if it is there? Sadly, there is no chance. The sun is 4.5 billion years old and it takes about 250 million years to orbit around the galaxy, so it’s gone around about 18 times. So has everything else in the vicinity. Everything is now so mixed up that there is no way to know for sure what was where back when.)
The third possibility was the one that we deemed the most likely. Instead of getting one big kick from an improbably passing star, imagine that Sedna got a lot of really small kicks from many stars passing by not quite as closely. The chances of this happening might seem low, too, but astronomers have long known that most stars are born not alone, but in a litter of many stars packed together. How tightly? In our region of the galaxy, there is currently something like one star per cubic parsec (don’t worry too much about these units here; suffice it to say that a parsec is a little less than the distance to the nearest star, so it is not surprising that in a box with edges about that length there is about one star). In the cluster of stars in which the sun might have been born there would have been thousands or even tens to hundreds of thousands of stars in this same volume, all held together by the gravitational pull of the massive amounts of gas between the still-forming stars. I firmly believe that the view from the inside of one of these clusters must be one of the most awesome sights in the universe, but I suspect no life form has ever seen it, because it is so short-lived that there might not even be time to make solid planets, much less evolve life. For as the still-forming stars finally pull in enough of the gas to become massive enough to ignite their nuclear-fusion-powered cores they quickly blow the remaining gas holding everything together away and then drift off solitary into interstellar space. Today we have no way of ever finding our solar siblings again. And, while we see these processes occurring out in space as other stars are being born, we really have no way to see back 4.5 billion years ago and see this happening as the sun itself formed.
Until now.
Maybe.
If Sedna got put on its peculiar orbit by the interactions of all of these stars 4.5 billion years ago, it is now a fossil record of what happened at the time of the very birth of sun. Everything else in the solar system has been kicked and jostled and nudged by planets big and small so there is no way to trace them back 4.5 billion years. Sedna, on the other hand, has been doing nothing but going around and around the sun in its peculiar elongated orbit every 12,000 years. After almost half a million of those orbits, Sedna remains lonely and untouched by anything else. By watching the orbit of Sedna we could be watching 4.5 billion years in the past.
All of these possibilities are exciting! A new planet! A rogue star! Fossils from the birth of the sun! And in the years since Sedna’s discovery other astronomers have chimed in with their own ideas, including the possibility that Sedna was kicked by something large out in the Oort cloud (small planet? Brown dwarf? Nemisis? Who knows) and, in the most imaginative spin, that Sedna was kicked by the sun. The sun? Yes, because, in this hypothesis, Sedna used to orbit a different star, and the sun got close and kicked Sedna around and stripped if away. Sedna would then be the first known extra-solar dwarf planet. Or something like that.
Sedna is telling us something profound, but what? With only a single object, there is absolutely no way to know. It would be like finding a fossilized skeleton of a T. Rex and trying to infer the history of the dinosaurs. If you had just that one skeleton you would know just what to do: head back out into the desert and start digging. When we found Sedna, we, too, knew what was next: head back out into the night and keep looking. Until we found more, we wouldn’t know what this profound bit of the solar system was trying to scream so loudly in our ears.
Next week: The search for more Sednas.
 |
Seven years ago this week I was preparing one of my favorite lectures for The Formation and Evolution of Planetary Systems, a class I frequently teach at Caltech. “Preparing” is probably the wrong word here, because this lecture, called The Edge of the Solar System, was one I could give even if instantly wakened from a cold deep sleep and immediately put on stage with bright lights in my eyes and an audience of thousands and no coffee anywhere in sight. The lecture explored what was known about the edge of our main planetary system and the ragged belt of debris called the Kuiper belt that quickly faded to empty space not that much beyond Neptune. Conveniently, one of my most active areas of research at that time was trying to figure out precisely why this ragged belt of debris had such an edge to it and why there appeared to be nothing at all beyond that edge. I could wing it. So instead of preparing the lecture, I really spent that morning doing what I did whenever I had a few spare moments: staring at dozens of little postage-stamp cutouts of pictures of the sky that my telescope had taken the night before and my computer had flagged as potentially interesting. Interesting, to my computer, and to me, meant that in the middle of the postage stamp was something that was moving across the sky at the right rate to mark it as part of the Kuiper belt. I was not just lecturing about this debris at the edge of the solar system, I was looking for more of it, too.
 |
 |
Many objects out in the Kuiper belt have shockingly elongated orbits like Sedna. For almost all of these objects, this characteristic makes sense. These small leftover pieces of debris have been kicked around by planets throughout their existence. Whenever they come too close to one of the planets (usually Neptune, since it is the closest to these objects), they get a gravitational kick that can send them on a looping orbit to the distant outskirts of the solar system. But – and this is the key part here – unless they get kicked all the way out of the solar system, they always come back to where they were kicked. If you get kicked by Neptune, you can go zooming off into the unchartered regions far beyond the Kuiper belt, but you will come back to see Neptune again. When we look at the Kuiper belt, we see the results of all of this kicking clearly: the Kuiper belt objects that come closest to Neptune are on the most elongated orbits. Those far away are more free to go about their circular orbiting lives.
(Read part 2)
 |
Seven years ago this week I was preparing one of my favorite lectures for The Formation and Evolution of Planetary Systems, a class I frequently teach at Caltech. “Preparing” is probably the wrong word here, because this lecture, called The Edge of the Solar System, was one I could give even if instantly wakened from a cold deep sleep and immediately put on stage with bright lights in my eyes and an audience of thousands and no coffee anywhere in sight. The lecture explored what was known about the edge of our main planetary system and the ragged belt of debris called the Kuiper belt that quickly faded to empty space not that much beyond Neptune. Conveniently, one of my most active areas of research at that time was trying to figure out precisely why this ragged belt of debris had such an edge to it and why there appeared to be nothing at all beyond that edge. I could wing it. So instead of preparing the lecture, I really spent that morning doing what I did whenever I had a few spare moments: staring at dozens of little postage-stamp cutouts of pictures of the sky that my telescope had taken the night before and my computer had flagged as potentially interesting. Interesting, to my computer, and to me, meant that in the middle of the postage stamp was something that was moving across the sky at the right rate to mark it as part of the Kuiper belt. I was not just lecturing about this debris at the edge of the solar system, I was looking for more of it, too.
 |
 |
Many objects out in the Kuiper belt have shockingly elongated orbits like Sedna. For almost all of these objects, this characteristic makes sense. These small leftover pieces of debris have been kicked around by planets throughout their existence. Whenever they come too close to one of the planets (usually Neptune, since it is the closest to these objects), they get a gravitational kick that can send them on a looping orbit to the distant outskirts of the solar system. But – and this is the key part here – unless they get kicked all the way out of the solar system, they always come back to where they were kicked. If you get kicked by Neptune, you can go zooming off into the unchartered regions far beyond the Kuiper belt, but you will come back to see Neptune again. When we look at the Kuiper belt, we see the results of all of this kicking clearly: the Kuiper belt objects that come closest to Neptune are on the most elongated orbits. Those far away are more free to go about their circular orbiting lives.
Chris Valderrama. The man. The myth. The legend. Some say he’s “Stig” on Top Gear. Some say he wrote his first fully functional operating system just after his first birthday. Some say the Seinfeld episode where George naps under his desk was inspired by the fully furnished studio apartment he built in a file cabinet in his office. Some say when he orders donuts, his minimum order is a baker’s dozen dozen (13 x12 = 156.) All I can say is that he’s the manager of The Planet’s technical support department, and he’s a crazy smart guy.
At the 2010 cPanel Automation Bootcamp, Chris was the headlining speaker in a session titled “From Happy Customers to Loyal Customers: Taking Customer Service to the Next Level.” He discussed some of the problems inherent in scaling support, what characteristics support managers should look for in new hires, setting support goals, choosing metrics and evaluating performance. If your business is support-centered, you’ll get a lot out of his presentation:
If you want to see what else you missed at this year’s Automation Bootcamp, check out the Bootcamp Hoedown wrap up video cPanel posted. What to watch for in that video: Few familiar faces from The Planet, incredible shots of the Server Challenge, some line dancing and people getting thrown off a mechanical bull.
-Kevin
For most of the past decade the last thing I would do before going to bed was to step out on to my back patio and stare up at the sky for a few minutes, checking for clouds. If the skies were clear I always slept better. In the morning, I would hop out of bed and do the same thing, to see if any unexpected weather front had passed or cirrus had snuck in while I had been sleeping. If all was well with the skies, I knew that my robotic telescope 95 miles southeast of me, likely had a successful night scanning the skies, and I was excited to get up and get to my office to see the results. I knew that any clear night we might (and eventually did!) discover something larger than anything else ever seen past Neptune. It was just a matter of time and of keeping those pesky clouds away.
|
 |
With a little discussion I got involved with a group from the Australian National University who were building a fancy new telescope to survey the whole southern skies in what they called the Skymapper project. It was going to be perfect, though the telescope and camera were still under construction, so it would take some time still. Michelle Bannister, a graduate student at ANU, took the project on as her Ph.D. thesis, and, with the beauty of Skype, I have yet to get on an airplane even once for this project.
 |
Unbeknownst to anyone, though, Michelle and I have a secret weapon. While it is true that existing cameras and telescopes are great, they still lose to one thing: existing data. For the past 10 years the Siding Spring Survey has searched for near earth asteroids from the moderately small Upssalla telescope at Siding Spring Observatory in Australia (right next to the new Skymapper telescope being built, in fact). The pictures that the Uppsalla telescope takes night after night have been fabulous for detecting the motion of the occasional fast moving tiny rocks that might someday come slamming into us, but these pictures were never designed for finding the much more slowly moving distant objects that we wanted to see. To the Uppsalla telescope, the things we want to discover are so far away and moving so slowly that they might as well be the stars of the Milky Way. But over the past year Michelle and I have developed a huge software package to go back over 10 years worth of pictures and try to pull out the distant slowly moving objects.
Now that you’re an expert when it comes to bash, logs, SSH, and passwords, you’re probably foaming at the mouth to learn some new skills. While I can’t equip you with the “nunchuck skills” or “bowhunting skills” Napoleon Dynamite reveres, I can help you learn some more important — though admittedly less exotic — user management skills in UNIX.
The root user — also known as the “super user” — has absolute control over everything on the server. Nothing is held back, nothing is restricted, and anything can be done. Only the server administrator should have this kind of access to the server, and you can see why. The root user is effectively the server’s master, and the server accordingly will acquiesce to its commands.
Broad root access should be avoided for the sake of security. If a program or service needs extensive abilities that are generally reserved for the root user, it’s best to grant those abilities on a narrow, as-needed basis.
Because the Sysadmin Boot Camp series is geared toward server administration from a command-line point of view, that’s where we’ll be playing today. Tasks like user creation can be performed fairly easily in a control panel environment, but it’s always a good idea to know the down-and-dirty methods as a backup.
The useradd command is used for adding users from shell. Let’s start with an example and dissect the pieces:
useradd -c "admin" -d /home/username -g users\ -G admin,helpdesk -s\ /bin/bash userid
-c "admin" – This command adds a comment to the user we’re creating. The comment in this case is “admin,” which may be used to differentiate the user a little more clearly for better user organization.-d /home/username – This block sets the user’s home directory. The most common approach is to replace username with the username designated at the end of the command.-g users\ – Here, we’re setting the primary group for the user we’re creating, which will be users.-G admin,helpdesk – This block specifies other user groups the new user may be a part of.-s\ /bin/bash userid – This command is in two parts. It says that the new user will use /bin/bash for its shell and that userid will be the new user’s username.
Root is the only user that can change other users’ passwords. The command to do this is:
passwd userid
If you are a user and want to change your own password, you would simply issue the passwd command by itself. When you execute the command, you will be prompted for a new entry. This command can also be executed by the root user to change the root password.
The command for removing users is userdel, and if we were to execute the command, it might look like this:
userdel -r username
The –r designation is your choice. If you choose to include it, the command will remove the home directory of the specified user.
The /etc/passwd file contains all user information. If you want to look through the file one page at a time — the way you’d use /p in Windows — you can use the more command:
more /etc/passwd
Keep in mind that most of your important configuration files are going to be located in the /etc folder, commonly spoken with an “et-see” pronunciation for short. Each line in the passwd file has information on a single user. Arguments are segmented with colons, as seen in the example below:
username:password:12345:12345::/home/username:/bin/bash
Argument 1 – username – the user’s username
Argument 2 – password – the user’s password
Argument 3 – 12345 – the user’s numeric ID
Argument 4 – 12345 – the user group’s numeric ID
Argument 5 – "" – where either a comment or the user’s full name would go
Argument 6 – /home/username – the user’s home directory
Argument 7 – /bin/bash – the user’s default console shell
Now that you’ve gotten a crash course on user management, we’ll start going deeper into group management, more detailed permissions management and the way shadow file relates to the passwd usage discussed above.
-Ryan
If you keep an eye on @theplanet on Twitter, you know that last week, a few of us were repping The Planet in Washington, D.C., at the Fall 2010 Channel Partners Conference and Expo. The weather was perfect, the expo hall was packed with people, and our booth got great traffic … pretty much all you can hope for at a trade show.
As my title would suggest, I love talking about all the good stuff happening at The Planet, and in a trade show setting, I have plenty of opportunities. I get to share a little about our company and hear some of the cool things the booth’s visitors are doing in their businesses.
Sometimes, attendees know what they need and why they should talk to us. Other times, we’re the next booth in the aisle, and they want to try and talk to everyone while ‘trick or treating’ for cool swag. Counterintuitively, I get to share the most about what we do with that second group of folks, and I’ve noticed those conversations can get pretty adventuresome.
We’re surrounded by the world of hosting day-in and day-out, so it’s easy to forget that it’s still a pretty foreign concept to some folks … even to businesspeople and entrepreneurs in other areas of technology. At Channel Partners, I had to step back a few times and restart from a higher “hosting in general” place before diving into how The Planet meets our customers’ needs as a hosting provider. The interaction might look like this:
The Planet: We do hosting.
Attendee: Oh, so do you have a cloud?
The Planet: Absolutely. Our cloud is designed for production with *insert Server Cloud differentiators*
Attendee: What kinds of servers do you have in the cloud?
The Planet: Let’s back up a second … What do you mean when you talk about “the cloud?”
Attendee: You know … I send all the data off and I don’t have to mess with any of the hardware.
At that point, we’re on the same page. We can talk about the The Planet as a very general “cloud” by the attendee’s definition and how our specific cloud product is a specialized product that abstracts the hardware at the next level. From there, we can talk about what their business needs, the products we have that will meet those needs, and what they can do to learn more.
Success in the those kinds of interactions requires establishing a level foundation that we can build upon. Terms like “hosting,” “cloud” and “virtualization,” are loaded with buzz these days, so more often than not, the best way to talk about them is to lay out a definition and move forward from there.
Are there any other buzz words you don’t understand or that you think have too many definitions?
-Kevin
Hola y buenos dias, me llamo Yhonit Flores. Trabajo en el departamento de soporte tecnico del ‘El Planeta.’ Hace unos dias tome el tiempo para hablar con el V.P. de cuidado de clientes sobre nuestro soporte en español y aun que no tenemos soporte en español, me dijeron que podria hacer lo yo mismo.
Asi es que, me da gusto en informarles, que yo — a lado de otros tecnicos — si es que puedan, vamos a poder dar soporte en español. Toda via no hay soporte oficial en Español, pero consideren este mi “nooficial” oficial suporte en espanol.
Si ud requiere sorpote en español, favor de sentirce libre de llamar y preguntar por me o mandar un ticket en Español y pedir que yo lo trabaje o cual quier otro tecnico que pueda hablar y escribir Español. Pero, puede talves tomara un poco mas de tiempo en recibir una respuesta, porque no todos pueden hablar en español.
Miro adelante en ayudarle con sus necesidades de soporte tecnico.
Y gracias otra vez por elegirnos a nosotros
My name is Yhonit Flores, and I work in The Planet technical support department. I recently spoke with our VP of customer care about providing support in Spanish to our customers, even though our only official support language is English.
And now, I’m happy to inform you — our great customers — that technicians can provide you with Spanish-language support if they are able. Because there is still no “official” Spanish support, you can consider this our unofficial-official Spanish support.
Simply ask for me, or send in a ticket in Spanish and request to have it worked by any technician able to speak the language. Keep in mind there may be a delay in response, since not everyone can provide Spanish support.
Thanks again for choosing us as your hosting provider, and I look forward to helping you with your support needs!
- Yhonit
The Planet Partner Program drives business to The Planet and makes money for our partners.
That’s a pretty straightforward mission statement.
We have reseller, referral and affiliate programs to enable execution of that mission statement for anyone and everyone, and our goal is to make participation easy. We’ve already talked about which partner program fits you best, so in this post, I want to highlight an exciting promotion we just announced for our Referral Partner Program.
In the month of September, registered referral partners have incentives on an even broader range of contract terms: In addition to standard monthly recurring payments for contracts of 12 months or longer, referral partners can receive commissions for month–to–month agreements and six–month contracts.
I’m a pretty “go with the flow” kind of guy. Give me my family, my friends and University of Texas Longhorn football, and I’m set. The fact that I value simplicity so much might be why I’m so excited we’re introducing this new flexibility into our program. Long-term contracts are not always a fit for our partners and the customers they refer, so we’ve listened and created options to meet them where they are.
So what does that mean for you?
-Drew
In the 240 posts that have been published on The Planet Blog to date, one of the most consistent themes has been the importance of data protection. If you’ve been around our blog for a while, you’ll be able to rattle off different backup strategies and new technologies that can keep your data safe. If you’re new to the scene, here are a few backup-related gems that can help you catch up:
Unfortunately, having “book knowledge” (or in this case “blog knowledge”) about backups and applying that knowledge faithfully and regularly are not necessarily one and the same. Regardless of how many times you hear it or read it, if you aren’t actively protecting your data, YOU SHOULD BE.
Here are a few questions to help you determine whether your data is endangered:
We can all agree that the idea of backups and data protection is a great one, but when it comes to investing in that idea, some folks change their tune. While each of the above questions has a “good” answer when it comes to keeping your data safe, your business might not need “good” answers to all of them for your data to be backed up sufficiently. You should understand the value of your data to your business and invest in its protection accordingly.
For example, a million-dollar business running on a single server will probably value its backups more highly than a hobbyist with a blog she contributes to once every year and a half. The million-dollar business should probably have more “good” answers than the hobbyist, so the business should invest more in the protection of its data than the hobbyist.
If you haven’t taken time to quantify the business impact of losing your primary data (questions 11-14), sit down with a pencil and paper and write out your answers. Do any of those answers make you want to change your approach to backups or your investment in protecting your data?
The funny thing about backups is that you don’t need them until you NEED them, and when you NEED them, you’ll usually want to kick yourself if you don’t have them.
Don’t end up kicking yourself.
-Kevin
It’s the end of August. That means one thing: Fantasy Football.
The NFL regular season kicks off September 9 in New Orleans, so these last few weeks of August have been abuzz with scouting reports, insider tips and sophisticated drafts all across the country. While I might have a bit more history with the NFL than my coworkers, when the season (and the smack talk) starts, that experience doesn’t mean much if my fantasy team comes up short on Tuesday morning.
I manage to play in a few fantasy leagues every year, and I’m always looking for an edge: from making draft selections to benching players in a given week to negotiating trades with my opponents. That’s why I turned to one of The Planet’s customers for help. Footballguys has trusted us to host their infrastructure for quite a few years now, so I return that trust in a small way by living on their fantasy football site during the months of August and September.
It looks like I’m not the only one:
It goes without saying that they must have a pretty good hosting provider to be able to handle those huge influxes of traffic. 
A few of my coworkers still buy fantasy football magazines and rely on a healthy dose of ESPN to prepare for the season, but with fantasy football’s huge popularity surge in recent years, everyone seems to be shifting toward online outlets for the latest news and stats. Time is of the essence when a top draft pick gets sidelined for the season or a new standout emerges from the pack, and depending on how you respond, it can make or break your season. When your pride is on the line, it’s important to have reliable resources keeping you up to date.
Because Kevin just featured a few of our customers who are doing some exciting things on our infrastructure, I wanted to send Footballguys.com some love with its own blog post. If you’ve already got your team drafted, check out their free Rate My Team application, and if you can’t get enough fantasy facts and stats, grab their iPhone app to take the info on the road.
-Keith
P.S. If you happen to be one of my fantasy league competitors, please disregard this blog post. Footballguys.com is a cool site, but they don’t want to help you beat me.
If you’ve clicked around our site since its latest redesign, you’ve probably noticed the “Citizen of The Planet” theme. When you navigate to theplanet.com, you’re greeted with our value proposition:
It’s Your Planet. Host It Your Way.
Technology that saves you money
Management options that save you time
Expert support that lets you sleep
When a visitor, customer or potential customer hits our site, our goal is to evoke a “That’s what I’ve been looking for!” sigh of relief. We make those promises because we know they’re what our customers care about the most. We also know we can back up all of those promises. The problem with making those kinds of bold claims is that the savvy Internet surfer is far too cynical to take any company at its word.
That’s why, in subsequent frames of our rotating header, we stopped. We instead handed the microphone to our customers to tell you what they think:
Even if you’re not familiar with REALworkspaces, Dynapp, Integrity Host or NetBroadcasting.tv, the fact that they’re not sporting “ThePlanet.com” in their signature is pretty refreshing. These customers run their own businesses, and those businesses trust and rely on The Planet.
Because we didn’t want a dozen frames cycling on the front page, we selected a few to feature. That was no easy task. I grabbed the customer testimonial videos and added them to a playlist here so you can have a one-stop shop for some cool success stories:
Needless to say, we’re as excited about having these folks as our customers as they are about having The Planet as their hosting provider. If you have a few minutes and you’re interested in seeing a cross-section of the kinds of businesses that are powered by The Planet, click on this “link love”:
If The Planet powers your business and you want to share your success, let us know! We’d love to help you tell your story.
-Kevin
