March is Data Center Month (for me, at least)

Having bought from, sold to, published a magazine about and work within the web hosting industry, I used to think I understood what this market is all about. But over the past year, I've become increasingly aware that there's more to the big picture than what I'd seen.

It all started when I came across a Marketwatch article about Facebook's $550 million valuation; GoDaddy was worth only half as much. The comparison made me question the relevance of the age-old "bandwidth + disk space = monthly fee" equation. I wondered if launching a social network might enhance GoDaddy's IPO appeal. Shortly thereafter, I learned about 3tera and Amazon's S3/EC2. Dedicated servers began to seem obsolete.

More recently, thanks mostly to Martin MacLeod's BladeWatch, I've been wondering about the amount of Internet infrastructure expertise that resides beyond versus within the web hosting industry. Martin covers a lot of familiar-ish ground - yet he's writing about large enterprises in which the IT department acts as an internal hosting provider. Their responsibilities, I've noticed, aren't very different from ours.

Anyway, there IS a point to all this rambling. I get to be on a virtualization panel with Martin at Data Centres Europe (March 21-23 in London)! I'm very excited about that. The following week, as Liam heads over to Cologne for Intergenia's second annual Web Hosting Day, I'll be on my way to Vegas for AFCOM's Data Center World. I remember telling The Planet's Jeff Lowenberg last year that enterprise-oriented data center events could be a great place for web hosting providers to win outsourcing business. Now that seems terribly presumptuous. In fact, Jeff told me later on that he found Data Center World to be an excellent learning experience.

After Data Center Month, I'll be back in regular web hosting territory. I'm looking forward to SWSoft's Partner Summit (May 7-9 in Reston, VA), ISPCON (May 23-25 in Orlando) and HostingCon (July 23-25 in Chicago). And later in the year, I'm counting on Ismael to organize a second Office 2.0 Conference. If you scroll through last year's list of participants, you'll see a mix of enterprisey and Web 2.0-ish folks. And you'll notice that Joyent - a web hosting company! - was among the event's award winners. Which goes to show that the web hosting industry exists not in isolation, but belongs in a much broader web services ecosystem.

So, which of these events will you be going to?