A few weeks ago, I received an interesting email. The sender claimed to be from CNN, and he wanted to chat about The Planet’s #showmemyserver experiment. Before I filtered the seemingly surreal opportunity into a folder typically reserved for emails that say, “Dear Sir, I will send you $1million dollars if you send me $25.93 for postage,” I did a little snooping around. To my very pleasant surprise, this John D. Sutter guy is not only a real person, he actually writes and produces for CNN!

We exchanged a few phone calls, and I learned that he spoke with Rich Miller at Data Center Knowledge for a CNN Tech article about “The Cloud.” As they discussed the mechanics of the cloud in terms of data centers and servers, Rich pointed out the juxtaposition of this hyped demand of virtualized products with an old-school desire to have the data in a visible, tangible location. Enter The Planet’s #showmemyserver project.

John was very interested in our take on the social media experiment’s success, so it was great to share a little of what we heard from our customers … and we were even able put him in touch with Nate Tallman at HealthTeacher.com to give him a direct customer perspective. Thanks for your help, Nate!

Long story short: John posts A trip into the secret, online ‘cloud’ to quite a bit of fanfare … which isn’t surprising, given its great introductory video:

From the heart of that article, he links to a “Behind the Scenes” blog about The world of ’server huggers’ and investigates his subconscious desire to find the “real” location of his digital data. As any customer who visits one of our data centers can attest, he’s not alone.

If you’re interested in “hugging” your server, stay tuned to The Planet Blog over the next few weeks, and keep your keyboard at the ready. We’ll offer another opportunity just in time for the holidays.

-Kevin