We had concerns going into last night’s WHIR Networking Event in Los Angeles that the incredible downpour might get in the way of a really good turnout, but thanks to a large and excellent group of people who braved the weather to get there, we kicked off our 2010 events schedule with a bang.

I don’t have the official final count on hand, but anecdotally, I know there were well over 100 people who turned up at The Air Conditioned Supper Club last night to do a little business and have a lot of fun.

I wanted to thank our sponsors again for making the event possible – OpenSRS, eNom, Telx, Net2EZ, Giglinx and AutomaticSiteMap, who all gave away some really cool prizes.

And of course, I want to thank everyone who came out in the rain, when it would have been easy to stay home and stay dry, for making last night a big event, and a whole lot of fun.

Here’s one picture of some of the fun. We’ll have a lot more pictures and video going up next week, so stay tuned for that.

For anyone who is planning to attend our Houston event on February 18, I’ll see you there (and you can follow that link to RSVP).

I’m in Los Angeles (I guess, technically, I’m in Santa Monica), gearing up for tonight’s WHIR Networking Event, and gearing down, if there is such a thing, from the WHIR Webinar with VMOps that concluded about 40 minutes ago.

The webinar, in my opinion, went excellently, and should be available on our webinars archive page sometime next week, if you didn’t attend.  But this whole paragraph, of course, is a digression from the true purpose of this particular blog post.

There is still time to sign up for tonight’s Networking Event in L.A. – the first of an exciting series of ten events we’ve got planned for 2010, and the return to the scene (if not the exact venue) of a great event in 2009. We’ve got a lot of response so far for tonight, but I don’t think there’s any risk of us over-filling the place, so anyone who was on the fence about attending, I’m here to provide you with a little extra encouragement.

How am I going to do that? Well, I was going to promise to be your best friend, but let’s be honest, I live in Canada. You live in LA. How is that really going to work? So let’s just say I’ll be your good friend.

Also, prizes!

As I have mentioned quite a few times the past, these events are free to attend, and furnished with free food and drinks, thanks to the generous support of our sponsors, every one of which will be giving away an excellent door prize tonight, which, depending on how you evaluate the dollar value of my friendship might be even more of an enticement to attend.

OpenSRS (which has signed on as our first title sponsor for the year’s entire series of ten events) is giving away an OpenSRS prize pack; Net2EZ will be giving away a Sony PSP; eNom will be giving away an $100 Amazon gift certificate; Telx will be giving away a Flip video camera; AutmaticSiteMap will be giving an Enterprise AutomaticSiteMap Certificate to every attendee, as well as a bottle of wine to each of six winners; and GIGLINX will be giving away a vintage bottle of wine.

The event starts at 7:00 p.m. and goes until 10:00 p.m., and will take place at the Air Conditioned Supper Club, located at 625 Lincoln Blvd. in Venice. More information about the event is available, understandably, at the event information page on this site. Head over to the info site, and you can still submit an RSVP for this evening’s event.

See you there.

[Cut-to-the-chase paragraph – click here to register for Thursday’s “How to Build a Computing Cloud]

I posted a feature today based on an interview I did in mid-December with Shannon Williams, VP of business development at VMOps (www.vmops.com), a company that very recently launched the generally available version of its software platform for cloud computing, a product specifically designed to be deployed by hosting providers.

As I discuss in the feature, the product is interesting partly because, like a few other significant pieces of hosting software, it helps to level the playing field for hosting providers who might not have the resources to develop the technology they’d need to develop cloud computing products of this kind of complexity on their own.

It stands to reason that, as a potential consumer of the product, or even simply as an interested observer, you might have some questions specifically for Shannon.

I’m pleased to report that he, along with Jason Baker, CTO of VMOps customer VISI (www.visi.com) will be joining me on Thursday, January 21 from 2:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. Eastern time (that’s this Thursday, just to be clear) for a webinar entitled “How to Build a Computing Cloud.”

The webinar will include a bit of a case-study look at VISI’s deployment of VMOps platform in the building of its ReliaCloud (www.reliacloud.com) product, currently available in beta.

In case it isn't clear at this point, this webinar, like all our WHIR webinars, is free to attend.

It will also include some general discussion of VMOps product, and a bit about the nature of cloud computing services in the hosting industry in general.

One aspect of our ongoing webinar series that is proving to be increasingly popular is the live Q&A session, during which I will put attendee questions to our panelists and presenters. So register for the webinar and tune in Thursday if you’d like to ask any questions of Shannon or Jason.

In the interest of perhaps expanding that aspect of these sessions a bit, I’d also encourage anyone with a question to post it in the comments section of this post. I’ll take a look at them before we run the webinar and try to bring up anything pertinent during the session.

If you can’t make it Thursday, you’ll be able to watch an archived copy of the webinar on our webinars page, where you can currently view saved copies of the webinars we’ve already run.

You’ve probably noticed a bit of a redesign around the website in the last week or so. Certainly nothing enormous from an aesthetic standpoint, but a lot of little changes that should make your interaction with the site itself go a lot smoother.

Many of the changes are of the navigational variety, particularly in the area of tags, and even more particularly in the building of a better functioning and more prominent tag cloud.

But that’s something that has probably already made itself apparent to you in your navigation of the site.

One feature we wanted specifically to bring to your attention is the new updated “most popular” function, another way of interacting with our news page (and our blogs page, etc.).

We’ve added a link to the yellow navigation bar at the top of the Web Hosting News page, (as well as at the top of this page, if you want something to compare it to) and you can use that to navigate to a display of the most popular news stories from the past week, the past month and the past year. You can navigate to an expanded look at each of those boxes as well.

Just to make things really clear, I’ve made a graphic showing the link. You can find it from within any news story, or from on the main WHIR news page.

the yellow and black panel shown in the image is the nav bar found at the top of the news stories, and the red circle indicates, well, it should be very obvious at this point what the red circle indicates (link to most popular news stories page).

I promise I’m not being condescending. I just want to make it really clear what I’m talking about. We're friends, right?

Anyway, I hope you’ll find the new “most popular” function to be useful. It’s already been a big help to me in interpreting how people are using the site.

I hope you’re finding all the other new features just as useful too.

As I mentioned last week, we’re ramping up the frequency of webinars here at the WHIR. Yesterday we had a great presentation from Neustar on traffic management and its UltraDNS collection of products. And we've got another one lined up for next week.

(If you want to cut to the chase and register, follow this link straight to the webinar registration page)

Next Wednesday – November 18, at 2:00 p.m. Eastern time – we’ll  be hosting a panel discussion sponsored by TelecityGroup, in which we’ll discuss the specific experiences of The Planet and Proofpoint – a hosting provider and email security and archiving provider, respectively – as they expanded their data center operations into Europe.

The lengthy title: “How The Planet and Proofpoint Accelerated Growth in Europe by Outsourcing Data Center Requirements to a European Specialist”

Panelists will include Will Charnock, vice president of technology at The Planet; Alexei Rodriguez, senior director of operations and IT at Proofpoint; and Rob Coupland, COO of TelecityGroup.

Specifically, we’ll be looking at how these companies were able to expand their businesses internationally by moving into European data centers.  They’ll discuss their experience in choosing a data center and provide some insight into that process, as well as some of the service benefits of operating facilities in Europe when serving international customers. They’ll also discuss the experience of having the local support of Telecity in setting up shop, and lessons learned along the way.

I’m excited about the panelists, and the format. It should be great, and it’ll only get better if you participate by logging in for the presentation and putting your own questions about the process to the panelists.

So I’m going to ask you to do me a two-parter personal favor: 1) head over to the webinar registration page right now and sign up; 2) attend the presentation and submit some excellent and thought-provoking questions for our panelists.

See you on Wednesday.