Privately held dedicated web hosting company, The Planet, has debuted the launch of Windows Server 2008, to its operating system portfolio of dedicated server operating systems offerings.

The company is now offering four editions of the operating system, available immediately on all servers in The Planet's broad fleet. The offering includes Windows Server 2008 Web Edition, which is free on single-processor servers.

Windows Server 2008 features enhanced capabilities and powerful tools that build on the strengths of its predecessors. The new operating system delivers enhanced web tools, virtualization technologies and security features that, backed by The Planet's network and six world-class data centers, provide a secure and scalable hosted IT environment.

"As more companies move their complex IT infrastructures to hosted environments, they're looking for the broadest portfolio of offerings to support their strategic business requirements.

Windows Server-based solutions are one of the fastest-growing operating system segments in our business, and we expect this growth to accelerate by offering the added security, scalability and unique features that Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7.0 provide," said Urvish Vashi, Director of Product Management for The Planet.

The most robust Windows Server operating system to date, Microsoft's latest release delivers new functionality and improvements to the base operating system is designed to meet the most exacting business requirements. The Planet will offer Windows Server 2008 in four editions:

- Windows Web Server 2008 enables businesses to rapidly deploy Web pages, sites, applications and services with IIS 7.0, ASP.NET and Microsoft .NET Framework;
- Windows Server 2008 Standard features built-in Web and virtualization capabilities and enhanced security features;
- Windows Server 2008 Enterprise delivers an enterprise-class platform with consolidated identity management features plus clustering and hot-add processor capabilities;
- Windows Server 2008 Unauthenticated Version offers all the Web server power of the Enterprise edition without the ability to run Active Directory and related services.