Customer support is undoubtedly a topic in our industry people can get very passionate, dare I say, "fanatical" about.

So when a company, like Bobcares, dedicates its entire business to providing outsourced support as a service - and currently boasts a clientele of over 3.5 million websites - passionate could arguably be seen as somewhat of an understatement.

Serving the hosting industry for almost a decade, Bobcares says it offers support plans for dedicated administration facility, server administration plans, helpdesk plans and telephone support plans.

WHIRtv recently caught up with Amarjyoti Krishnan, co-founder of Bobcares, and gained some insight into the philosophy behind the service and where he envisions the company going in the next few years.

Virtual private data centers, or VPDCs, are a new paradigm for data centers that we've been hearing quite a bit about in North America through companies like Layered Technologies and 3Tera.

In Europe, Q-layer has been offering a fully virtual private data center since 2005, enabling service providers to compete with next generation hosting offerings such as Amazon S3 and EC2, using the private virtual datacenter concept: utility-based provisioning and billing based on actual usage.

WHIRtv recently spoke to Niko Nelissen, VP of business development and co-founder of Q-layer, and gained some insight into his company's vision with VPDCs.

A couple of weeks ago, we posted an interview with Michael van Dijken, Microsoft's lead marketing manager for hosted services, where we gained some insight into the direction Microsoft is taking with its partners through events like its annual Hosting Summit.

On the other side of the spectrum are the partners themselves, and we caught up with a good variety of them at the event to really get a sense of what the overall experience was like for them (considering this event really IS mostly about them, right?). We particularly decided to focus on questions like why they decided to attend the event, what they thought about the information Microsoft was presenting to them and what value they felt Microsoft's summit brought to the hosting industry as a whole.

The WHIR team recently had the pleasure of attending Microsoft's fourth annual Hosting Summit in Seattle, WA (which, for the record, is breath-takingly gorgeous and seems to have a unique balance between man and nature, and I could go on and on, but I digress). Hopefully you followed the ever-eloquent Liam Eagle in his live coverage of the event and checked out some of the photos from the summit on our Flickr site.

Lucky for us, after the summit we had the opportunity to explore Microsoft's campus in Redmond (we saw the executive offices that Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer work in AND played in Microsoft's museum) and took a moment to chat to a familiar guest on WHIRtv, Michael van Dijken, Microsoft's lead marketing manager for hosted services. Michael had some enlightening things to say regarding the direction Microsoft is taking with its partners through these events.

In the coming week we'll be bringing you some of the attendee feedback we collected from the event, and let me just say that the openness and willingness from Microsoft's partners to share their thoughts and opinions was rather impressive.

I also wanted to bring to your attention that WHIRtv is now available through iTunes so if you want these videos conveniently delivered to you every time we post a new one, be sure to subscribe here.

As mentioned in the last post where we showcased some exhibitor and attendee feedback from Webhosting Day 2008, here we have an interview with Michael Korbacher, the director of Web and application, Hosting Communications Sector, Microsoft International.

He had some enlightening things to say about the launch of Windows Server 2008, Microsoft's developer network and what the company's been up to, but from a more of an International standpoint.

And on the topic of Microsoft, theWHIR's editor-in-chief, Liam Eagle, our director of marketing and business development Candice Rodriguez, and yours truly with the WHIRtv team will be attending Microsoft's 2008 Hosting Summit in Seattle next week, so if you see us around, definitely come up and say hello!

As promised, here's a look at what some of the exhibitors and attendees thought of this year's Webhosting Day 2008 and the value they see in attending this annual event.

In the next few days, we'll be bringing you a one-on-one with Michael Korbacher, the director of Web and application, Hosting Communications Sector, Microsoft International as he gives us some insight into Microsoft's role at Webhosting Day 2008 as well as what kind of excitement Windows Server 2008 has been stirring up across the pond.

While the WHIR's editor-in-chief Liam Eagle has provided us with some fantastic up-to-the minute coverage from Webhosting Day, which you can still catch on his blog here, WHIRtv was also on location gathering event footage and interviews with some key players in the European hosting market. (Let's also take a moment to note that as much as we try to describe the surreal atmosphere with the venue, there really is no better way to relay this to you than through images and video!)

To kick off our European coverage, here's an interview with the event organizer, Thomas Strohe, who discusses the event's rapid growth, some hot topics in the European hosting market and his overall vision for Webhosting Day.

In the following days and weeks we'll be posting feedback from exhibitors and attendees as well as interviews with Microsoft, Parallels and other key European players that were attending the event.

Today we wrote about Go Daddy's newest set of commercials starring the company's newest Go Daddy girl Amanda Beard, which will be airing for the first time this weekend during the ESPN2 Saturday Night College Football Primetime.

As with previous Go Daddy ads that have been known to leave audiences short of breath and the FCC in a fit (mainly I'm thinking of the ones starring WWE's Candice Michelle) Amanda Beard's ads seem to focus on her novelty as a seven-medal winning Olympic swimming champion, more so than her novelty as a "smokin' hot" member of the female sex (Thank you for saying it first, Bob Parsons).

Although let's be serious, clearly the ads showcase her assets (one of them has a shot of the Go Daddy logo conveniently placed on her backside) and the one we're about to show you here entitled "Shock" is definitely not shy with its innuendo. But really, how Go Daddy-esque would it be if it didn't insert a little bit of eyebrow-raising humor here and there?

All in all, this ad is DEFINITELY something you would expect from Go Daddy, but don't take my word for it. Check out the TV-approved ad we've posted or go to the Go Daddy site to take a look at the other Amanda Beard goodies.

Whatever your opinions may be about the ads, clearly Go Daddy is doing something very right with its use of videos if it is able to have such a stronghold on the domain name industry.

And honestly, I can't wait for the day Go Daddy signs on a male specimen to sell its domain registrations because its high time the company started catering to the ladies out there that may be interested in starting a website.

TAGS: "Go Daddy", "Amanda Beard"

Anytime Microsoft's hosting roadshow makes a stop on our home turf in Toronto (yes, we're proud Canucks) I always get the assignment of going to Microsoft's mall-like Canadian headquarters to check out a day packed with sessions and tutorials on Microsoft's latest contribution to the hosting industry.

And admittedly, I was expecting much of the same this time around, except things were a little different. We weren't at Microsoft's headquarters for one, having been relocated to the Novotel Hotel in Mississauga (due to an overlapping of internal event schedules) and the second difference (the main difference) was that there was a lot less talking and a LOT more doing at this event.

Being there in the conference room, looking at the rows of tables lined with laptops, I really felt like I was back in university, sitting in a classroom full of eagerly anticipating students, patiently listening to the prof outline the lesson for the day before unleashing us to dig our hands into the latest task. The buzz in this workshop, from presenters to attendees, was noticeable.

Rob Kent, a hosting technology specialist for Microsoft, says stirring up some excitement was part of the point with the roadshow this time around.

"This is a far more hands on event than in the past. Attendees will come away from this with the tools and knowledge they need to take IIS 7, quickly build it out in their own facilities and go into production, all well before Windows Server 2008 is officially launched in February. The hosting industry's becoming more and more commoditized and many hosts are finding that any edge they can get over their competitors, they're willing to take."

Rob took about an hour discussing Microsoft's hosting vision of platform, services and experiences, the movement towards functional hosting and of course, the plethora of opportunities and advantages available to Web hosts through the launch of Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7, before letting Brett Hill, senior technical product manager of hosting services for Microsoft, lead the labs.

Microsoft also heavily pushed its IIS 7 Go Live program, which enables hosts to develop and deploy IIS 7 on their infrastructures and offer it to end users before its officially launched on February 27, 2008. "We've already got hosting partners like Rackspace and HostMySite who've launched it into production and others are clamoring to get it. They want it and they want it now," says Rob.

Rob says some tips to best utilize your time at these events is to go through as much as the labs you can, but more than that, to take advantage of the fact that you have Microsoft's team right at your fingertips. He also says to try collaborating with some of the attendees, work through the labs together and really make the most out of the "classroom-style" environment. And, don't be afraid to grill the folks from Microsoft; that's what they're there for.

In an effort to encourage and embrace this feeling of community the hosting industry is really starting to develop, Microsoft is also ending off each workshop with a networking session and highly encourages attendees to fill out a feedback form to take home a DVD full of extra IIS 7-related labs as well as an opportunity to win a Zune.

If you haven't already registered for the event, go to the events page and check out whether its traveling to a city near you.

TAGS: Microsoft, "Windows Server 2008", "IIS 7"

While customer approval program operator RatePoint was in Toronto, we met up with its CEO and co-founder Neal Creighton and chatted with him about RatePoint's unique service, what it offers to partners and resellers and the demand he sees it drumming up in the near future.

TAGS: RatePoint