The Planet Expands Peering with Equinix

The Planet is beefing up its network by adding new nodes in Equinix colocation facilities in San Jose, Calif., and Ashburn, Va., The Planet, one of the largest hosting companies, said the access to additional networks through peering connections at the Equinix data centers will "significantly enhance network performance and latency."

Network performance is important for large U.S. providers, serving as a major selling point for international customers who seek to host in American data centers because of their superior connectivity. About 42 percent of The Planet’s 22,000 customers are international.

"Our international business continues to grow substantially, based on the quality of our world-class network and SAS 70 Type II-compliant data centers, and on the favorable exchange rate," said Will Charnock, vice president of technology for The Planet. "By establishing nodes on both coasts, we’ll be able to interconnect with international carriers directly, bypassing third-party networks, which results in increased performance and reduced latency. Customers rely on us for managing their mission-critical IT infrastructures around the clock, and we offer them the widest range of options in the industry, from dedicated or managed hosting to colocation services."

Peering allows providers to exchange traffic with one another at no cost (or low cost) by establishing direct connections between their networks, instead of routing traffic across the public Internet. Peering is often free as long as the amount of traffic exchanged is not out of balance, providing substantial cost savings for bandwidth for high-traffic sites and networks.

The Planet expects the new nodes at the Equinix centers to be live in mid-November and will begin transitioning traffic at that time. Earlier this month, The Planet announced enhancements to its network operations, adding new transit providers with 10Gbps for each, and the make-ready additions for MPLS and IPv6.