SoftLayer And The Planet In Discussions To Merge - what's next?

Ok, I must admit that I was not at all excited when I received the notice from SoftLayer that they have been acquired. By who? GI Partners that controls their biggest concurrent ThePlanet. This is a deja vu for me and I really hope it will not end the same way. A few years ago I was a happy customer of EV1Servers a hosting company that was one of the best in the business. I was using them for most of my clients and had a great relation with them. And then it happened. You normally receive this like: “we are so happy to announce the acquisition, we are going to take this to a new level, and bla bla bla”. Ha. never happened. Maybe it’s great news for the owners and the people cashing out, but for clients and sometimes even employes this is not quite the same. We were doing great until now, right? We don’t want to change… Anyway, short story is that this went horrible wrong and the service and support from the new ThePlanet (that incorporated ev1 also) was terrible. I moved all my clients to SoftLayer and was a happy again.

Until now. I mean, anyone with some experience can easily see that SofltLayer has already grown a lot and lowered their level of performance and support. Their tech people seem much less experienced and interested to help you out as they used to be, but this is not such a big deal because from how I see SolftLayer’s strength is their automation; they created a system designed to not need them so much. You can do everything yourself: from their control panel, or even from their api, and as long that works correctly all is good. You can order a server using api calls, you can cancel a server using the api, reboot it and you can even respond a ticket using api. Now with this merger I am am assuming that they are going to bring ThePlanet infrastructure to use SoftLayer automation; this is the only way that would make sense. SoftLayer is so much better than anything ThePlanet has, and there is no question in my mind this is what will happen. Still the concern remains and unfortunately for me, I don’t see the next ‘place’ for me to move if this will be needed. SolfLayer raised the bar so high, and other hosting companies don’t even dream to be close to that. SoftLayer was built by some of the original ThePlanet people (back in the days when it still was a great hosting company) and with their experience they knew exactly what they wanted to build. And they were right… They’ve done a great job.

I would be really interested if anyone knows or can recommend some other advanced hosting companies like SoftLayer? they need to have an api for everything and cloud computing solutions. I would love to try them. Let me know…