Everyones Internet

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Everyones Internet was originally a Houston, Texas-based internet service provider. It was formed on October 6, 1998 by Robert Marsh, Roy Marsh III, and Randy Williams. Its service coverage expanded to 42 U.S. states in 2002 and is now nationwide.

Since 2000 the company's focus has shifted toward Web hosting through its EV1 Servers subsidiary. The company was one of the leaders in creating the cheap dedicated server hosting market, introducing a new low price point of $99/month for dedicated servers. It remains a large competitor in this market, as of 2006 hosting about 40,000 servers, as of September 2006. ^[1]

In May 2006 private equity firm GI Partners bought a controlling investment in the company. ^[2] At the same time, Everyones Internet announced that it had merged with The Planet, another leading providers of dedicated hosting in which GI Partners had invested.

The CEO of EV1 Servers would become Doug Erwin, from GI Partners, after they gained control of EV1 Servers.

^[3]

In October 2006, Everyones Internet revealed that it would stop providing dialup internet starting November 12 and sold their dialup portion of the company to PeoplePC, a dialup internet service provider.

As of January 2007 the EV1 name was dropped and is now named The Planet due to the merge of The Planet and EV1.

[edit] EV1 and SCO licensing controversy

Main article: SCO-Linux controversies

In 2004-3-1, EV1Servers.Net announced it had licensed SCO's intellectual property, saying that it was looking to offer its customers stability in the wake of SCO's protracted battle with the open source community. However, the deal was perceived by Linux users as using licensing deal to support SCO Group's lawsuit against Linux. On 2004-3-25, Netcraft reported EV1 had lost 1,080 Web sites in the previous 30 days. Robert Marsh, CEO of Everyones Internet, said that althought EV1 had lost some hosting business since the deal, it was not out of line with the number of sites EV1 loses in a typical month.^[4]

In 2006, Utah court document[1] filed on 2006-4-5 revealed that Langer was misled by SCO's claims when making the deal, and EV1 paid $800,000 for the licence.^[5]