The Planet Receives 39 Red Hat Certifications

DALLAS -- Dec. 15, 2005 --The Planet(SM) today announced that 39 employees, representing a majority of departments across the company, have received Red Hat certifications. Of the 39 employees achieving RHCT (Red Hat Certified Technician) status, 33 received the prestigious RHCE (Red Hat Certified Engineer) certification. Company wide, The Planet now has 47 RHCTs, of which 40 are RHCEs.

"With 60 percent of The Planet's customers using the Red Hat platform, this level of certification further demonstrates our commitment to support our customers' technology," said Pamela Houston, course and training coordinator at The Planet. "We have had a long and mutually beneficial relationship with Red Hat and look forward to continuing and expanding that relationship."

One unique factor in the Red Hat certifications is that the recently certified employees do not all come from our technical support team. Staff members within departments such as abuse, customer care, product development, information systems, provisioning, sales, professional services, Internet data center, security and support all participated in classes and achieved certification.

"Rarely do companies have so many certifications across such varied departments and levels. In fact, this recent achievement puts The Planet in the top five hosting companies in terms of number of Red Hat certifications," said Michael Sutphen, hosting provider account executive for Red Hat. "The Planet should be very proud of its employees and their accomplishments."

"With this milestone, The Planet has made RHCE a key part of their strategy for support of Linux-based managed services," said Peter Childers, vice president of Global Learning Services at Red Hat. "RHCEs can play a key role in demanding client services contexts, assuring excellent 24x7 technical services and support on Red Hat Enterprise Linux for The Planet's customers."

The Planet conducted the classes with in-house technical trainers including Greg Bock, Michael Montgomery, Anthony Yarbrough and Tim Schuh. Pamela Houston coordinated the effort with Red Hat.

Employees began internal training classes in August to prepare for the rigorous examination process that ended in early December.

About Red Hat, Inc.

Red Hat, the world's leading open source and Linux provider, is headquartered in Raleigh, N.C. with satellite offices spanning the globe. Red Hat is leading Linux and open source solutions into the mainstream by making high quality, low cost technology accessible. Red Hat provides operating system software along with middleware, applications and management solutions. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide and through top-tier partnerships. Red Hat's open source strategy offers customers a long term plan for building infrastructures that are based on and leverage open source technologies with focus on security and ease of management. Learn more: http://www.redhat.com.

About The Planet

With over 10 years experience, The Planet continues to be one of the fastest growing Web hosting companies in the world. Delivering enterprise level hosting solutions to the SMB and SME marketplace, The Planet offers the ideal blend of affordability, simplicity and reliability. The Planet's dedicated server product lines offer extreme value through a broad range of turnkey solutions. Services also include co-location, Internet access, e-mail and business continuance solutions. Customers benefit from value-added features such as advanced security services, proactive server monitoring, database administration, managed data storage, load balancing, clustering, and virtual private networks, all managed through Orbit(SM), The Planet's customer portal. For additional information, visit www.theplanet.com.