Merger announced to theplanet customers with below email. New company probably will be the biggest hosting provider in the world and accrding to techcrunch.com they will take the IPO route some time next year.

Hello!

Today, I’m pleased to announce that the transaction to merge The Planet® and SoftLayer® is complete!

Next week, on November 16th, we will have officially joined forces and begin serving you as one company under the SoftLayer brand. It’s my privilege to serve as Chief Executive Officer of the merged organization. I wanted to take a moment to introduce myself and let you know how excited we are about this important milestone and what it means for you.

As a customer of The Planet, you’ve had access to world-class support and a personal relationship with the company. You can trust that the new SoftLayer is committed to bringing you the highest level of service and assurance.

Even better, we bring new capabilities that provide you with increased value. SoftLayer is recognized for its automation and a commitment to innovative product development. You’ll have direct access and control of your solutions through our industry-leading Customer Portal and open API, allowing you to order, deploy, and manage your entire environment on-demand, without needing human interaction.

The new SoftLayer provides:
An expanded product line, with new products and services not available to you before.
Industry-leading automation, Customer Portal, and Open API, for direct access to more than 150 backend systems and activities.
Increased geographic diversity and the ability to choose where your servers reside.
High-speed network and multiple PoPs, providing more than 1,500G of connectivity and direct connections for lower latency.
Exclusive network architecture that weaves together distinct Public, Private, and Data Center-to-Data Center networks built.
Improved Service Level Agreement with 100% uptime and 2-hour or less hardware replacement (failure or upgrade) guaranteed.
Greater value for your business, including more performance per dollar, a larger international presence, and expanded partnerships with industry leaders.

Our customers believe that SoftLayer provides the best hosting experience in the business. We look forward to you seeing that firsthand.

Your existing The Planet services and account are still managed and accessed as before through Orbit and the Managed Hosting Portal. But beginning today, you can also access the SoftLayer Customer Portal with your The Planet username and password and start exploring.

For questions about your current services, please contact 866.325.9041 for support, 866.325.0045 for billing or sales, or open a ticket or live chat with a representative via Orbit or the Managed Hosting Portal.

For more information about the merger and its benefits to you, please visit Merger Information, email transaction@softlayer.com, or live chat with a representative via Orbit, the Managed Hosting Portal, the SoftLayer Customer Portal, or www.softlayer.com.

Welcome to the SoftLayer family! The best is yet to come.

Sincerely,
Lance Crosby
Chief Executive Officer

Rapidshare is in 34th place of Alexa's top 500 Global sites list and everyone knows that if you are paying for Rapidshare premium account you are using it to download music, movies applications.

Copyright protection agencies have been going after Rapidshare since it got popular but so far Rapidshare never disconnected a user due to uploads or downloads of user being against Rapidshare's terms and conditions.

But looks like things about to change. According to TorrentFreak article  Rapidshare will start disconnecting/deleting accounts of ‘infringing’ users.

If you are using Rapidshare there is no reason to worry. File hosting business is so profitable there are literally thousands of them on the internet.

Here are some of the file sharing services ordered randomly:

http://www.4shared.com/

http://www.mediafire.com/

http://www.sendspace.com/

http://www.megaupload.com/