In a sign of continued expansion for the dedicated server market, The Planet has leased additional data center space and is hiring staff. The Planet has signed a 10-year lease for a 21,000 square foot data center in Dallas, where it already operates a 60,000 square foot facility.

But the new center, which will be able to hold 12,000 servers, isn't large enough to solve The Planet's long-term needs. At the company's current growth rate, the new site will likely be filled within nine months, according to chief operating officer Lance Crosby.

"We continue to scour Dallas and other major market locations for prime data center space," said Crosby. "This facility is about half the space of our primary location, so it's a short-term solution, but we anticipate closing on another new deal in about 90 days."

The Planet has added more than 165,000 hostnames in 2004, growing from 123K to 289K. The number of active sites hosted by The Planet has quadrupled in the past eight months:

The company has also hired about 50 new engineers and technicians in the last 45 days. Growth drivers include the momentum of The Planet's dedicated servers division, ServerMatrix, and the strong reception for its Total Control Server program, which packages a dedicated server with a flexible menu of managed services, including monitoring, intrusion detection and the FloodGuard service to mitigate the impact of distributed denial of service attacks.

The Planet's move comes just two months after a similar data center expansion by Houston-based EV1Servers, another fast-growing dedicated server specialist. EV1Servers opened a second data center in March providing 48,000 square feet of expansion space, enough room for another 34,000 servers.