Everyone's Internet

Everyone's Internet, commonly known as EV1, 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 was available nationwide.

Since 2000, Everyone's Internet's focus has shifted toward Web hosting through its EV1 Servers subsidiary. This company was a dedicated server hosting market. At its peak in September 2006, EV1 Servers hosted about 40,000 servers. [ [http://www.ev1servers.net/about/History.aspx Dedicated Servers & Web Hosting | Managed Web Hosting Services | The Planet ] ]

In May 2006, private equity firm GI Partners bought a controlling investment in Everyone's Internet. [http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/business/3844608.html] At the same time, Everyone's Internet announced that it was merging with The Planet, another dedicated hosting company in which GI Partners had invested.

The CEO of EV1 Servers was Doug Erwin, from GI Partners, after they gained control of EV1 Servers. [ [http://www.ev1servers.net/about/Newsroom.aspx?ArticleId=53 EV1 AND THE PLANET ANNOUNCE MERGER ] ]

In October 2006, Everyone's Internet announced that it would stop providing dialup internet starting November 12 and sold their dialup portion of the company to PeoplePC, another dialup internet service provider. Some users were upset because PeoplePC requires a dialer, which does not work on all operating systems, and therefore opted to move to other internet service providers.

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

EV1 and SCO licensing controversy

In 2004-3-1, EV1Servers.Net announced it had licensed SCO's alleged 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 although 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. [ [http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/03/25/HNscolicensee%20_1.html SCO Linux licensee has second thoughts on deal] ]

In 2006, a Utah court document [http://www.groklaw.net/pdf/IBM-835-Exhibit_224.pdf] filed on 2006-4-5 revealed that Robert Marsh, co-founder and CEO of EV1, was misled by SCO's Philip Langer's claims when making the deal, and that EV1 paid $800,000 for the licence. [ [http://jeremy.linuxquestions.org/blog/_archives/2006/10/19/2429656.html The truth about the SCOX/EV1 SCOsource deal] ]

References

External links

* [http://www.ev1.net Everyones Internet]
* [http://www.ev1servers.net EV1Servers]
* [http://www.gipartners.com GI Partners]