Tier 1 Research's fourth annual Hosting Transformation Summit in Las Vegas (well, fifth if you count the first European summit they held earlier this year in the UK) drew over 475 people from three continents and over 240 companies. Certainly the largest HTS we've seen to date, which is indicative of the continuous growth (and expanding financial interest, in this case) in our ever-evolving industry.

While we were at HTS we sat down with Dan Ephraim, the ever energetic and witty VP of business development at Tier 1 Research, and got his thoughts on how this year's summit went as well as some of the new events we can expect to see from the company in the coming year.

Over the summer while at HostingCon, Internet services provider Tucows announced in a rather flashy fashion (we're talking a brightly colored booth with a cheerful illustration of a '50s-era service man and delicious ice cream floats for each attendee!) that it was returning to its OpenSRS name for its wholly-owned wholesale reseller services group.

The company says OpenSRS provides wholesale services for hosted email, domain name registration, personal names and SSL certificates, all while rather enthusiastically abiding to reseller-centric mandate, which is based on the core values of service, friendliness, willingness to help, community service and reliability.

Although all this seemingly embellished goodness may sound like some slick marketing-speak (and much easier said than done), once you meet the team of people behind OpenSRS, you begin to see that this is a philosophy that is genuinely ingrained in the people and there is a real, honest-to-goodness passion for technology and service.

In an effort to fortify this re-branding initiative we had the pleasure of going to the Tucows headquarters (yes, in Toronto, Canada, and in quite a trendy area at that! Think bohemian meets technology) and producing a series of videos titled "Inside OpenSRS."

It features six of the of the people who work in various areas of the OpenSRS team - like product management, network operations, security and compliance, reseller support and development - to give customers a better sense of the names and faces (and personalities!) behind this reseller-friendly service.

You can check out the videos here.

Managed dedicated hosting provider SingleHop recently launched LEAP, what the company considers the first "webtop" or browser-based dedicated server interface (in other words, a fancy, schmancy control panel) that enables users to have complete management access to their dedicated servers.

We recently spoke to Dan Ushman, the co-founder and vice president of SingleHop about the company's latest innovation. You can get a closer look at LEAP with the demo on SingleHop's website.

Click image above to view video

In June, application delivery optimization company KEMP Technologies launched a version of its load balancing and delivery control solutions designed for managed hosting providers.

While at HostingCon 2008, the company took the opportunity to elaborate on this while discussing the challenges facing today's managed hosting providers and how to better address the growing application delivery needs of SMBs.

We sat down with Peter Melerud, VP of product management at KEMP Technologies to learn more about the company's latest LoadMaster solution, it's recently launched technical training program for channel partners and its upcoming virtualization-friendly offering.

A few weeks back, the WHIR conducted an email interview with Mark Klein, director of business development at Sedo, and asked him to make the case for his HostingCon 2008 session titled "Tapping the Exploding Secondary Domain Market: How It Can Increase Your Revenue and Customer Loyalty."

Afterwards, I caught up with Mark at Sedo's booth and asked him to give us some further insight into the maturing secondary domain name landscape and how web hosts could take advantage of it.