The Planet, which, come to find out, is suitably named since it's the largest of the privately held U.S. hosters with eight data centers and 50,000-odd servers playing host to 18,000 SMB companies and 12 million web sites worldwide, has a new Server Cloud that undercuts Amazon.

Amazon jacks up its bandwidth charges 700%-800% over cost, Planet's practically scandalized senior product manager for cloud services Carl Meadows tsk-tsks.

The Planet is offering a far more reasonable prix fixe menu compared to Amazon's à la carte prices. Its bandwidth price alone is more like eight cents a gig to Amazon's 22 cents.

And the infrastructure Planet is pitching initially at hosting companies and hosting resellers is distinctly enterprise-class and purpose-built for web-based businesses: Sun SANs, rack-mounted dual-Nehalem-based Dell servers, a Cisco and Juniper powered network. None of your shoddy local disks, it says, that can leave customers vulnerable to hardware failures, downtime and data loss.

But, since it's going for lower cost, it's using the KVM hypervisor for virtualization, not VMware mojo, and Canonical's Ubuntu Server for its KVM platform. Xen, Meadows figures, at least the open source Xen project, is "dying."

For the price customers still get dedicated resources. They get fully guaranteed CPUs, RAM, storage and network capacity of their own that can't suddenly be usurped by some noisy neighbor. Redundancy and availability are built-in.

The widgetry, which supports both Centos Linux and Windows platforms - Windows Server 2003 R2 or 2008 R2 run an extra 20 bucks a month - went into beta in February with 400 customers using 1,000 virtual servers. The production-ready Server Cloud instances provide completely automated provisioning, with login reportedly in as little as five minutes and round-the-clock service.

Prices start at $49 a month for a half-gig of memory and 60GB of storage with a dedicated half-core of CPU power and a free terabyte of bandwidth. From there it increases in steps depending on RAM and vCPUs to $339 a month for four vCPUs and 16GB of memory. Extra bandwidth costs 10 cents a GB or 80 buck a month for another TB. Extra storage runs $25-$110 a month for another 160GB to 500GB.

Hourly billing has flown out the proverbial window. There's a meter visible for the customer to see if he's exceeding any perimeters. There are also supposed to be clear SLAs.

In The Planet's opinion "The industry is rife with cloud services hindered by inconsistency and a lack of redundancy. By contrast, our customers count on us for high availability, rapid provisioning and seamless scalability, which they'll find in our new Server Cloud. Customers are able to fully manage all aspects of their virtual servers, as well as include managed services for the platform, which provides the best value in the business."

It says Server Cloud is always available, since computing and storage resources are separate and independent. In the event of a complete host server failure, data is always protected.

The Planet offers service upgrades, including managed server monitoring and remediation, server security management and managed backup.