ThePlanet - one spam too many

Hey - the Planet is the 2nd largest dedicated server provider company in the US, home to hundreds of thousands of sites and domains, operated by literally thousands of resellers, web hosts, shared hosting providers etc. They are not web hosts or content providers themselves. Blocking whole ranges of The Planet addresses is foolish. Especially as even on that one IP address there could be thousands of shared websites, 99.99999% who may have had nothing to do with your spam. It's like blaming a hydro power station in Canada for the problem when a light bulb burns out in your house thousands of kilometres away. Track down the specific site and block that, not thousands of other innocent bystanders in the downstream systems.

I say this as a customer of one of the many thousands of downstream web hosting resellers who operate dedicated servers provided by The Planet. I have nothing to do with The Planet and I am sick of clumsy oafs in spam services causing problems for me by blocking IP address ranges that might correspond to the server I am hosted on, which is leased from someone who leases it in turn from The Planet.

Learn precision, fool.

Yes, I'm fully aware that they are hosting sites. But those servers shouldn't spam us, so that shouldn't be a problem for any legit site on there.

Plus, and that's the actual reason for me blocking them, they are completely unresponsive to spam complaints.

I agree that it's moronic to shutdown entire ranges of IP addresses when 99.9999% of those servers are not spammers. My business is seriously affected because I can't get an e-mail through!

On top of that, the Planet DOES shut down spammers. I know because they gave me 3 days to explain some spam that linked to my site - it happened to be someone pirating my software and other music software illegally, and I explained that to them. They will only shutdown legitimate spammers, and I'm guessing that process takes time. But down shutdown a huge IP range and punish the innocent - just shutdown certain IPs.

Sounds like the cries of rationalization from a spammer to me...

I have banned that whole range for a long time. I'm interested in *real* visitors, not whatever script, bot or hotlink that resides on any ThePlanet server for any reason.

I don't see any reason for another server to pull my stuff unless their're a legitimate search engine. And they don't usually reside on ThePlanet.

I found this thread interesting, forward to now 2007 and Theplanet is still the source of unwanted spam. I as well have block the entire range of IP's from Theplanet and if I find any new IP's they will get banned as well. In my opinion, nothing good comes from them.

Main Problem is, that ThePlanet is not replying to abusemails, not investigating anything and is ignoring every mail they get about spam.

Lots of their servers are misused by botnets and they do not care at all. I have blocked the whole range and my logs show about 4 to 12 Spamattempts daily (IP from Everyones Internet / Theplanet via slavebot.ru)

FTC.gov is no help at all (just getting automated replies / no one is reading mails carefull... they think Spam is only unwanted Emails *doh*)

Add another Planet.com spam target - me. Is the range still the same to block?

Thanks, y'all, for putting this out there.

ThePlanet does not care at all about spam or abuse. How do I know? I have contacted them many times about spam. In addition, I have even notified them about a website that is a crack/warez directory. Their response? It's legal.

According to ThePlanet, even though the website is a directory of warez, cracks, and serials, it is a legal site because "...the warez, crack, and serials are not located on our servers."

It's because of irresponsible networks like ThePlanet that so much criminal activity goes on. When I look for a hosting company, I make sure that they are not part of ThePlanet. It's one of the reasons I don't signup at HostGator. As much as I like their hosting service, they get their bandwidth and space from ThePlanet and I refuse to financially support ThePlanet and their disregard for the law and people's rights.

'Tis now 2009, and ThePlanet continues to host spammers and ignore abuse reports and/or forward reports to the spammer. Selective blocking is not effective. Spammers are routinely moved to new IP space to circumvent blocklists. They are block on sight here, first email gets the entire allocation listed. Pretty much lossless compression....

I have come to expect spam coming from foreign hosts - particularly in eastern Europe and Asia but, when I see spam coming from US ISPs, I damn well expect some response if I report abuse with details of IP address and dates and times. This has been going on for almost four years now and The Planet still is not taking these abuse complaints seriously. I'm getting close to blocking their entire IP range myself.

Hammering spam from ThePlanet to one of my sites.

IP: 70.86.166.34
Blocked by antispamscript, added to blacklist. Will be denied all future access.
Part of a bot network mainly doing harvesting and comment spamming.
In this botnet are featured several Google IPs as well (AppEngine/Google Code).


On another site I have, I think I'll just block the whole range for TP to be sure, since it is solely meant for danish visitors in the first place.

I havent had many problems with ThePlanet untill now, but reading this, I am able to make an easy decision.

Just block them and be done with it. It sucks for the legitimate customers who will be affected, but I'm sure they can move to a more reputable data center in short order.

Stay with this guys, you're helping a lot of ppeole.

Let the blocking continue. I've just added the 69.93.0.0 - 69.93.255.255 range to our company's firewall. Too much SPAM. If you have a valid business in this range and you want to do business with the rest of us, I would suggest you find another hosting provider.