In case you missed the hundred-or-so mentions on the WHIR over the last few weeks, HostingCon 2008 was last week. And we went to considerable lengths to cover the event from every angle - news, blogs, features, WHIR tv. While we're not quite finished posting HostingCon-related material, I finally finished my own event blogging campaign today. So, I thought it might be a good idea to post a recap of our coverage, in case anybody missed anything that might have interested them.

It seemed to me that the best way to organize the information would be divide things up by format, and then work backwards through the coverage by day. And I suppose I should mention that I'm only go back as far as the start of the show itself, and not go too far into the "HostingCon is coming up" type stuff, as that would be a little redundant.

(I've also left out a few posts that don't need to be recapped, such as the now-irrelevant "win this tv!" post or the self-referential "more blog entries to come" post.)

NEWS

Wednesday, July 30

HostingCon 2008 Wraps Up Today

Tuesday, July 29

Zeus Adds License Agreement Program

AtMail Adds Cluster Ed. Email Server

Monday, July 28

HostingCon 2008 Kicks Off

BLOGS

Friday, August 8

Message Systems Protects the Network Edge

Waxing a little glib, I recap a conversation with Barry Abel of Message Systems, which is on hand at the show promoting its Edge of Network email platform.

Thursday, August 7

AtMail Brings Clustered Edition to Show

Recapping a conversation with Corey Bissaillon of AtMail, who describes the company's clustered edition. I leave out some of the nuts-and-bolts details, which I promise to cover in an upcoming feature.

MailSite and Your In-House Exchange Alternative

I talk to John Davies of MailSite about the company's hosted email application, and he describes a model for distributing it that includes offering it alongside the more expensive Microsoft Exchange as a privately branded in-house alternative.

Wednesday, August 6

Microsoft Spreads the Word on Hyper-V

I talk to Microsoft's John Zanni and Michael van Dijken about their HostingCon mandate of getting hosting providers up to speed on the facts regarding Hyper-V the recently completed hypervisor virtualization component of Server 2008.

Tuesday, August 5

MailChannels Makes the Most of HostingCon

A conversation with Ken Simpson of MailChannels, winners of my informal "coolest swag" award. He discusses how the Nerf guns the company was giving away at the show combined with a compelling product offering to create an enormous amount of interest in MailChannels, and a highly successful visit to HostingCon for the company.

My Hosting M and A Presentation Revealed

Tom Millitzer recaps his "Flip That Hosting Company" presentation from Wednesday afternoon, and offers to send a copy of his presentation to readers if they get in touch with him directly.

Wednesday, July 30

Exhibiting Wraps Up With Giveaways

My last post from the show itself, I recap our TV giveaway, take a bit of a good-natured dig at Ping Zine and spark a bit of debate (a few interesting comments on this post, for sure).

Wendy Pearson and Verio's New Marketing Effort

I speak to Wendy Pearson, the newly appointed director of marketing and communications at Verio, who describes the effort to re-launch the company's marketing strategy - with a particular focus on really defining what the company means when it says it serves the "SMB" market.

Sealing the deal

David Snead recaps the last-day keynote panel he moderated, discussing some of the key points that emerged concerning the sale of a hosting company.

Tuesday July 29

iNET Interactive and the HostingCon 2009 Details

I talk to Kevin Gold of iNET Interactive, the new owners of the HostingCon event, about the company's plans for HostingCon 2009, and what they intend to do with their presence at this year's show.

The Parallels Fast Track Program

I sit down with Serguei Beloussov of Parallels, who describes some of the ideology behind the company's "Fast Track" program which is designed to help ISVs get involved in developing applications designed to be hosted by hosting providers.

The Case for a Professional Association for Web Hosts

I talk to Paul Hirsch, who is at HostingCon on the behalf of the Association of Internet and Hosting Service Providers, the latest effort at putting together an industry-wide association focused on providing smaller hosts with some of the resources they might not have on their own, as well as providing the industry at large with a voice, both internally and in the business and political worlds.

Paid RBL's?

Following the first session he moderated at this year's event, David Snead discusses the risks that Spam poses to your company, from a legal perspective.

Monday, July 28

Building a Buyer-Friendly Host

Here, I discuss a presentation by Adam Eisner of Tucows, who discusses some of the obvious failings of the sales efforts at a lot of hosting companies vis-à-vis their websites, and offers up a few easy solutions and some more thoughtful advice for selling.

Social Media and Web Host Marketing

Following a sometimes-dull, sometimes-very-interesting panel discussion on marketing, I pose a few questions about one of the sticking points of the session - the value of the social media space to web hosting providers as a marketing vehicle.

The OpenSRS Booth and Tucows New Brand Strategy

After snapping a couple photos of the newly branded Tucows booth, I discuss what I've heard about the company's plans to re-brand their reseller services with the long-standing OpenSRS name.

Where's the Hosting Association?

David Snead starts things off with some general info about the nascent hosting association and its presence at the show, and explains what you can do to get involved.

Exhibit Hall Setup Shots

Here, I post up a few of my photos of the Exhibit hall during the set-up phase.

Ads Where You Don't Expect Them

An early-morning post about my room key having an ad for HiVelocity Hosting on it. Pretty cool little promo.

FEATURES

Tucows Eyes Resellers with OpenSRS

At the back of the HostingCon 2008 exhibit hall, directly adjacent from the WHIR's own Networking Lounge, lies a rather modest-looking, 10' x 30' booth decorated with a playful illustration of a '50s-era ice-cream man.

WHIR tv

Video Feedback

Here's some feedback from the exhibitors and attendees from HostingCon 2008.

There will be more WHIR tv coverage of HostingCon to come, so stay tuned.

Flickr Feed

Check out our Flickr photo set from HostingCon 2008.

And that's about it. From this point on, this particular blog will be returning to regular non-HostingCon coverage.

I know what you're thinking.

Okay, I don't know what you're thinking. Or who you are. Or anything about you, specifically. But imagine you are thinking this: "did you talk to anyone who didn't have the word 'mail' in the name of their company at HostingCon?"

The answer, my dear hypothetical question-asker, is, "Absolutely. I talked to Message Systems."

And the point I'm trying to force home with my ham-fisted wit here is "there sure were a lot of email solutions floating around at HostingCon."

If you were there, you probably already knew that, being as difficult to miss as it was. Call it an affirmation of the fact that the real value in the hosting business these days lies in the delivery of hosted services - that, and he fact that email is by far the most broadly accepted of those hosted services.

Anyway, among the many conversations I had at HostingCon was one with Barry Abel of Message Systems, which actually was a bit of a departure from some of the other mail-related conversations I had that week, apart from the daring exclusion of "mail" from the company's name.

Message Systems' primary product (particularly in relation to the hosting space) is the company's email application server for Linux, Edge of Network, or EON. It's a software package that can be installed on your existing hardware to manage delivery, as well as provide traffic shaping and any number of anti-spam controls.

The anti-spam technology from Cloudmark, for instance, can be deployed within the message systems platform to provide filtering, along with grey list data and other email checking technologies from a variety of sources.

The system is operated via a web-based interface. And its major selling feature is its ability to process at an extremely high capacity, according to the company.

Much of it offered in bulleted points, the product information on the Message Systems website is a little bit sparse. Fortunately the company offers the means to arrange an online consultation via the site, which would likely be the ideal venue for satisfying whatever other curiosities you might have about Edge of Network.

I'll keep this one briefer than some of my other posts about the meetings I had at HostingCon, mostly because we covered part of the conversation - regarding the basic facts of the launch of AtMail's "clustered edition" - in a news story we posted from the show. But also because of the rather lengthy phone conversation I had with Corey Bissaillon a while back, which ought to produce a feature for the site within the next week.

So look for that - there is more to come about AtMail.

I met up with Bissaillon at the show to discuss the company's platform - an email server and groupware server platform that AtMail delivers most commonly in the form of an appliance running the software.

As in most of these "discussing a product" type blog entries, listing the AtMail features would be mostly redundant, given the fairly exhaustive approach taken on the company's own website. So I figured instead I'd talk about some of the technology the company seems most excited about.

Bissaillon was keen on the MySQL server engineering that has gone into the clustered edition. He says that while standard MySQL clustering practices use a "master-slave" relationship between clustered machines that makes the architecture scalable, they are only somewhat more reliable because in the case of an outage on the master server, a slave must manually be made the master. The AtMail clustered edition enables a "master-master" sort of clustering relationship (or master-master-master, or master-master-master-master, etc.) that makes the system both highly scalable and much more reliable.

Another interesting facet of the company's more recent efforts is the release of a free and open version of its webmail interface.

Being as the free webmail interface is the general premise of the upcoming feature, I won't go into such great detail here. But the basic idea is that the company has released an open version of its much-admired webmail interface, trusting in the product's ability to create back-end systems customers down the road out of users who simply want to deploy a free webmail interface today. That is, Bissaillon says he's confident customers using the webmail interface will appreciate the way AtMail operates enough to come talk to the company when they're looking to build out their back-end systems.

On top of that, it's a good way for the company to give a project back to the open source community, many of the best efforts of which (Linux, Apache, PHP, MySQL) are incorporated into the operation of its own products.

Allow me to cut and paste my preamble from Tuesday's MailChannels post:

HostingCon was last week, I'm aware. But by the end of the show I had talked to more people, and absorbed more information, than I was able to blog about. So I'll be filling in a few holes this week before all is said and done.

Wednesday (at HostingCon) was a busy day. I talked to a lot of people on Wednesday, which is why I'm playing catch-up this week. Everyone had some very interesting stuff to say, and nobody warranted leaving out, which is why I'm still playing catch-up more than a week later.

The good news: if you can bear with me for another couple of posts, I'll be wrapping up my own HostingCon coverage either today or tomorrow, and moving on to blogging about other things.

The other good news: all these HostingCon follow-up posts are about interesting conversations I had with interesting people doing interesting work. Hopefully you'll find them, you know, interesting.

One of those people I spoke to Wednesday was John Davies of MailSite, who was promoting both his company's MailSite Fusion messaging and collaboration platform, and its AstraSync plug-in software for Blackberry phones.

MailSite Fusion is an email and collaboration platform for Windows, intended to be a more affordable alternative to hosted Exchange. The list of features is long, and rather than repeat them all here, I'll direct you to the MailSite website for the exhaustive pitch.

The especially interesting part of the discussion was a model Davies described for deploying and offering a MailSite-based hosted email offering.

There are plenty of small businesses these days that are convinced of the value of hosted email, particularly hosted Exchange. And while they may be ready to come on board looking for the brand name at first, many of those small businesses can't afford a hosted Exchange solution.

MailSite, on the other hand, is designed to be private labeled. So a hosting provider can set up a lower-cost house-brand hosted messaging and collaboration solution they can offer to customers who decide the Exchange solution is to expensive an alternative for about 50 percent of the cost. He says the host's margin is about the same as Exchange when charging the customer half as much.

The example he gives for this particular two-pronged approach is the ever-used-as-an-example Rackspace, which offers a hosted Exchange solution alongside a house-brand mail service (in Rackspace's case, the house brand is Mailtrust, which is the re-branded Webmail.us, acquired last year by Rackspace).

It's a cool idea. Offer the hosted Exchange service for the customers who are committed to the brand, and supplement that with the house-brand alternative for the customers who don't want to spend the extra money.

AstraSync is something else altogether. It's a plugin application for Blackberry phones that enables them to accept the Exchange ActiveSync protocol, creating a direct connection that eliminates the need for the email host to operate a Blackberry Enterprise Server.

The application is a separate product form MailSite fusion, but is a cool little app nonetheless. It hasn't launched just yet, but should be available in the next few weeks for about $50 per mailbox per year. You can sign up to receive more information about it at the AstraSync website.

Certainly the most challenging discussion of the show, purely in terms of the amount of information to absorb and the breadth of understanding required was the conversation I had last Wednesday with Michael van Dijken and John Zanni of Microsoft, the company's main ambassadors to the hosting business, at least as far as conferences (and my own experience) are concerned.

The key point in their message at HostingCon this year was the emergence of the company's Hyper-V technology - the hypervisor virtualization engine for Windows Server 2008 that became officially available just a few weeks ago.

Most hosts are already aware of Hyper-V and its intended purpose. It's a virtualization technology designed as a core component of the Server 2008 operating system. Unlike a software-layer virtualization technology, such as Virtuozzo (which obviously has its hosting implementations), a hypervisor virtualizes a server at the hardware level, creating individual virtual instances of the operating system, so virtual machines can function fully independently of one another. Performance problems, errors and even attacks won't affect the performance of the other virtual machines hosted on the same server.

It's worth pointing out that while there is a huge amount of compatibility between many Microsoft and Parallels products, Virtuozzo and Hyper-V really represent two different visions of a "virtualized" environment. And while they aren't really intended to work together they are also not meant to compete.

The most apparent comparison for the Hyper-V technology is VMWare, which has been making its way into the hosting market for at least a year now, and represents an obvious challenge to Microsoft on the virtualization front. But Microsoft says there are certain up-front advantages to Hyper-V, among them being the deep integration with the operating system (Hyper-V is technically a part of Server 2008), its ease of operation through the System Center platform (particualrly through the Virtual Machine Manager, currently in beta) that controls most of the other server OS functions - and Microsoft's own considerable involvement, and investment, in the service provider space.

Hosting providers have their own initial impressions of what Hyper-V ought to mean to the hosting market. Its introduction has undoubtedly been as a tool for creating VPS-style hosting packages - we've reported on a handful of early offerings here at the WHIR from hosts with Hyper-V based VPS packages in various states of completion (including Layered Tech and SoftLayer). A lot of hosting providers develop for-free testing-ground type hosting packages using new products through Microsoft's "Go Live" licensing, and several brought Hyper-V solutions out that way.

But Zanni and van Dijken were careful to point out that the usefulness of Hyper-V to the hosting community definitely does not begin or end with VPS hosting packages.

The Hyper-V info section on the Microsoft website has a lot of information on the ways the technology can be used in a data center environment. Some of the ways it can be used by hosting providers include serving both Windows and Linux environments from the same machine and testing upgrades and other changes before bringing them live, as well as running multiple applications of the same physical server, or otherwise consolidating data center resources onto fewer machines.

Obviously, Hyper-V is important to the hosting space - it's just a function of the kind of clout that a company like Microsoft wields that when it launches a product like this, it quickly becomes sort of universally relevant, if not from a "deploy it immediately" perspective, then at least as an interesting aspect of Windows, worth noting and understanding.

By the sounds of it, that understanding is coming. The folks at Microsoft's HostingCon booth said the interest from attendees was encouraging. And you can pretty safely assume Microsoft isn't done promoting its virtualization technology (for one, it's promoting a launch event for its virtualization products on its website).

You can also count on the fact that we're not done covering Hyper-V here at the WHIR. There will be plenty of information to come, but I can really only remember so much from one conversation, not to mention a whole conference.

HostingCon was last week, I'm aware. But by the end of the show I had talked to more people, and absorbed more information, than I was able to blog about. So I-ll be filling in a few holes this week before all is said and done.

Normally I'm not one for hosting conference swag. I already have a stack of memory sticks I don't use, and enough t-shirts to go jogging every day from now to eternity without doing laundry (note: this is a slight exaggeration).

But when I stopped by the MailChannels booth at HostingCon last week to set up an interview with CEO Ken Simpson, I was surprised to find myself coveting their swag. I filled out a quick survey, and I walked away with one of these. The WHIR office is now considerably more rad.

MailChannels showed up at HostingCon with a veritable armory of Nerf weapons, and they were a hit - gone long before the show ended. As it turns out, this was one part of a confluence of facts that enabled the company to walk away from the conference with considerably more interested that it had expected.

According to Simpson, MailChannels- Traffic Control product was never designed as a product for the hosting business. He says a customer with a deep understanding of the anti-spam market got in touch with him, and let him know that the product was "perfect for hosts."

The Traffic Control solution uses "traffic shaping," which prioritizes and slows down suspicious traffic before it reaches the mail server. Some of the results of this is that bot-nets attempting to deliver spam tend to move on from the slow or unresponsive connections, and the slow-down gives more traditional filtering technologies more time to react, which massively lightens the mostly-spam workload of email servers.

I'll get more into the technical aspect of the application in an upcoming WHIR feature (and there's plenty of information - and a download link - on the MailChannels site), but some of the effects are massive reductions in the amount of email server hardware required, and (for hosts) enormous drops in the volume of support calls received about email and particularly spam.

This was enough to generate genuine interest from just about every hosting provider that stopped by the booth, according to Simpson. And on top of that he had a more hosting-oriented revenue-sharing model devised for hosts that want to incorporate the service as more of a paid-for offering to customers.

Assuming they threw away my survey (me being useless to MailChannels as a sales lead), they still walked away from HostingCon with something in the vicinity of 300 solid leads, said Simpson. And that, out of a field of roughly 1,500 attendees, was much more than satisfactory.

Apparently a very big stack of excellent swag and a genuinely intriguing proposition are a recipe for a successful HostingCon. Hopefully that-ll lead to the availability of more excellent stuff in years to come.

Also, by way of a further update, apparently the Nerf-related promotions aren't over for the company, which sent out an email last week following up. According to MailChannels, you can upgrade your "spam cannon" (which was how they were describing the toys they were giving away) to a THIS, via a couple of methods.

One of those methods was "attend a webinar next Wednesday at 12pm Eastern," which is my real reason for discussing the email.

That "Wednesday" it mentions is tomorrow. Sorry for the short notice, but if you-re interested in MailChannels or Traffic Control you still have time to check it out.

The show is over, but the WHIR's coverage of HostingCon 2008 isn't quite complete.

I was blogging feverishly from the show, but at a certain point I began having more meetings and discussions than I could keep up with in print. So I'll be posting observations on a few more things today and early next week before I'm done.

Of course, Anastasia Tubanos was hard at work shooting interviews for WHIR tv at the show, and that content should start showing up some time next week.

Finally, there are a few photographs from the last day of the show that we haven't had a chance to post to our Flickr photoset just yet. And those should be going up in the next couple of days.

That's about it. I was thinking "short informational post" with this one.

It was a fun show. A lot of hard work and good times. I'm really glad this weekend is a long weekend in Canada.

It was a few hours ago now, but this afternoon we held the draw for the 50" HDTV that has been brightening our networking lounge since Tuesday morning.

The winner was the lovely Dianne Stayton of Web Your Business, who seemed more than a little excited to have won the prize.

Congratulations to Dianne. We had a lot of fun at the networking lounge this year.

A while later, at the other end of the exhibit hall, most of the exhibitors who had prizes to give away took the stage at the presentation theater to announce the winners (the TV was a little bit big to bring over there).

At the conclusion of things, Keith Duncan of Ping! Zine took the stage. After a little grandstanding and the obligatory good-natured potshot at the WHIR, Duncan proceeded with the much-anticipated showstopper, giving five lucky winners the chance to sit on a motorcycle for a couple of seconds.

Nobody wins! Goodnight everyone!

I suppose it was understood in advance that there was really a very slim possibility that somebody would actually win the motorcycle (about 2 percent, I believe - five people each drawing a key from a bowl of 250, one of which apparently unlocked the box containing the actual key to the bike). But it was still a bit of a lame duck promotion, and it should have been apparent to everyone hyping it up that it could be a let-down as big end-of-show prize drawings go.

Sure, it would have been fun if, against all probability, somebody had actually won that motorcycle. As it turns out, there was a bit of "how do we know there's a real key?" and "let everyone take one more key." Nothing too serious, but it wasn't much fun. I'd rather have a Nintendo Wii.

Kudos to Keith for making a big to-do out of what basically amounted to nothing. I suppose it was a pretty good promotion at the end of the day.

By the way, you heard it here first: at HostingCon 2009, anyone who can throw a baseball from Navy Pier to the W hotel wins 100 spaceships, courtesy of the Web Host Industry Review (a challenge made all the more difficult by the fact that the event's going to be in Washington DC).

We ran a bit in the latest issue of the magazine about the new appointments in the marketing department at Verio, and the new marketing strategy ushered in across the company by that move.

The new faces are Ken Giffin, director of marketing, and Wendy Pearson, director of makerting and communications. While Giffin focuses on the Via Verio partner program, Pearson will focus more on the company-wide marketing effort.

Yesterday I met with Wendy Pearson to discuss some of the content of that revamped marketing effort, or the part of it that is complete at this relatively early stage in the redesign.

The new blood in the marketing department starts with Steve Renda, who was made VP of sales and marketing in January of this year. And he brought many of the company's new faces on board.

But the shift, says Pearson, comes from a mandate at the company to reinvigorate a business that has been not quite stagnant but certainly coasting for a period of a few years.

Verio is one of those hosting companies that deals with the small to medium-sized business market, which can be a pretty broad and vague term when you start to really think about the kind of business that describes. Part of the process at Verio in the last 60 days, says Pearson, has been to really narrow the focus within that realm, partly by trying to characterize those hypothetical customers.

At the very high end of a chart she drew that described the importance of IT to a given customer and their competence with IT, she identified a sophisticated, demanding customer that Verio has acknowledged that it just isn't the customer it is best suited to serve, or most interested in serving.

At the low end, they've identified the basic domain-name-and-one-page-website customer that also isn't really in the mould of what they're best suited to, or most interested in, serving.

The customers they're looking at targeting are the kinds of small businesses that are looking toward growing online, changing positions on that chart to move toward more importance of IT, and in some cases a higher rate of competence.

It's an interesting discussion, this idea of a host narrowing its focus and, if not getting rid of certain customers than at least admitting that "these aren't the customers we're interested in serving."

For Verio, the next step in this process - now that it has really polished the notion of what it means by "SMB" - is identifying the means by which it will target these better-defined SMB customers.

I'll keep this one brief. As many of you may already know we're giving away a really excellent tv this afternoon. It's pictured below. Just to give you an idea of its scale, I can say without exaggeration that the laptop sitting next to it is ten hundred feet tall.

Yeah. It's huge.

Anyway, we're doing the draw at 3pm. So you have about two hours to come over to the networking lounge (booth 627 - it's really big) and drop your business card in the fishbowl.

That really only takes about one minute. So you definitely have time.

Good luck!