It's not a company we're especially familiar with at the WHIR, but with TrendPoint's fairly singular focus on data center energy efficiency and carbon monitoring, it's an organization that ought to be thoroughly on the radar of the hosting business.
Along with its TrendOne, EnerSure and EnviroCube products, which are generally hardware offerings designed to monitor environmental conditions and energy efficiency in enterprise data centers, the company appears to be actively publishing white papers on the general subject of data center efficiency, which makes it especially relevant to just about anyone operating a data center.
I know at the WHIR, we've got a pretty heavy appetite for published "green data center" information at the moment.
The TrendPoint data sheet can be downloaded in PDF form from the company's website, so I won't go into exacting detail about the plan itself.
In introducing the four-point plan, the press releases on several of the more important widely held truths regarding data center efficiency. Namely, that data centers are well on their way to becoming one of the world's largest consumers of energy (and subsequently producers of carbon emissions), and that as a result of that, we're not far from seeing some tough regulatory attention to carbon emissions worldwide.
The release includes a quote from TrendPoint CEO Bob Hunter, who offers an in-a-nutshell view of the current energy near-crisis facing data center operators.
"Data centers will soon be hit with a 'perfect storm' in terms of coal and natural gas driven utility cost increases coupled with the new carbon caps. These sites already have energy densities that are ten times greater than that of commercial office buildings, and their energy use is doubling every four years. The combination of rising energy usage coupled with significant electricity price increases and carbon caps creates a very troubling picture for data centers."
Before we get too far along, here, I'll warn you that there most likely isn't going to be a "eureka!" moment for any of you in reading the four-point plan. It's a pretty straightforward list of common-sense tactics responsible data center operators (especially in the service provider business) will most likely already have investigated, if they're not already implementing them to some significant degree.
Unsurprisingly, and understandably, the four-point plan is liberally populated with TrendPoint sales pitches. This ought not stun anyone who has ever read any white paper ever produced by any company.
Set an energy budget
Companies, says TrendPoint, should have an energy and carbon budget that can be broken down among users, departments and sites. "Colocation facilities, in particular, need to be able to provide each customer with the ability to manage their own energy and carbon usage and to provide a system to bill back customers appropriately."
Virtualize servers
The oft-repeated point - consolidating your physical resources and trimming away unused capacity is a data center energy saving tactic of the "do it right now" variety. TrendPoint's interesting add-on: "TrendPoint has seen that virtualized servers generate significantly more heat visa-vis the under-utilized machines and, therefore, need careful attention with their cooling management. Without proper cooling, virtualized servers, like all highly utilized systems, can develop 'server thermal inversions' within a data cabinet"
Equalize heat and cooling balance
TrendPoint says matching cooling resources to the needs of each individual cabinet can save 25 percent or more on their cooling energy use. And you can conserve more by balancing heat loads through grouping servers into zones within cabinets and working toward equalized heat loads.
Manage to the metrics
One of the more overt TrendPoint pitches in this section, but an interesting point - as data center equipment changes, managers need to continually monitor and manage heat and cooling. The company makes solutions that manage energy use according to The Green Grid's PUE standard.
In the press release, TrendPoint describes how a couple of its customers are seeing fast ROI from using the company's products.
The PDF is worth going through. It includes a lot of study-supplied supplemental information. And the great thing about energy efficiency is it has that potential to impact the bottom line of your data center operations. If the ideas (or even the products) discussed in the document have the potential to do that for your data center, you can definitely afford the 15-or-so minutes it will take to read.
One more note - there's a link at the end of the press release to a site with more information about some of the proposed energy regulations.
Cisco's TechWise TV is set to "air" an episode called "Energy Efficiency in the Data Center," this Thursday, August 21 at 11:00 a.m. Eastern, which ought to be enough of a reason for a blog post.
It took a little bit of digging for me to figure out exactly what TechWise TV is, and apparently I'm a little bit behind on the subject, because it's been running since September of 2006.
It's a TV-show style web broadcast produced by Cisco and covering a range of technology topics. Most of the time it deals with Cisco products, but apparently not always.
I think I was tipped off about this particular episode because it's especially relevant to the hosting community. Anyone who reads the WHIR regularly knows we've put a lot of energy into covering green technology and its place in the data center - with our "green issue" of WHIR magazine, among other things.
Cisco is keen to get its energy efficiency message to hosting providers, which could be good news for hosting providers, depending on how effective that message is.
There's a lot of information on offer from the company regarding energy efficiency, and part of the episode is given over to a discussion of the company's efficiency assurance program, which includes planning and assessment tools for determining the efficiency of your facilities, as well as a ton of video content relating to efficient data center design. There's a lot of material on this section of the company's website, but check the "access interactive tool" link in the far right column of the page to pull up most of it.
There's a trailer for the episode hosted on YouTube. It's short, but it gives you a sense of what to expect from the episode.
In particular, the episode (I've previewed a good chunk, but haven't had time yet to watch the entire thing) discusses the fact that energy efficiency is a goal in IT operations not simply for altruistic reasons, but for the sake of its bottom-line impact. We've discussed this before - server power and cooling together make up most of the ongoing cost of operating a data center. And employing more efficient technology can reduce that cost considerably.
The program covers some key steps that data center operators can take to increase the efficiency in their businesses immediately without an overwhelming amount of investment - virtualization (in the network, in the storage area and of course on the server) being a key element in efficiency.
Overall, it's good advice, but nothing you haven't already heard if you're attuned to the problems of energy efficiency you face as data center operators. The real value in the episode has to do with some of the specific solutions (from Cisco, and from a variety of other companies) that are addressed. Might give you something to think about.
Of course, nothing is specifically for sale at this point. It's a free presentation. And along with the "live" airing next Thursday morning, there will be experts on hand answering user submitted questions via the website.
Pingdom, a provider of uptime monitoring, put another hosting-related post up on its usually-pretty-interesting blog "Royal Pingdom" last week in which it used data from a couple of sources to try to identify the "largest hosting company," as well as point out which ones are growing the fastest and might end up vying for that crown in the near future.
"When we talk about the size of a hosting company we mean the number of real websites hosted by that company."
So says the blog. At issue here is the fact that certain standards of measure don't really produce results that match with what Pingdom is trying to describe here (that "number of real websites" thing):
"Webhosting.info and some other sites relate the size of a web hosting company to the number of domain names that point to their DNS servers. This is why dedicated registrars to whom hosting is only a side business can often end up at the top of these hosting lists, because all domain names, hosted or not, are taken into account. It doesn't tell us how many actual hosting customers they have or how many real websites they are hosting."
Pingdom's answer to this problem is a formula that takes into account, in this order: number of domain names, website traffic and google search volume.
Overall, the company's analysis places 1&1 Internet as the largest host, with HostGator and BlueHost/HostMonster as the runners up, with greater growth and gaining on 1&1.
It's interesting information, but I can't help but feel like some information was left out.
Obviously, it's very important to consider how they're defining "largest" webhost. It's pretty explicitly stated in the post that they're trying to determine who is hosting the most websites. That probably eliminates some of the large enterprise hosts, like Rackspace, from the running. A big company, but probably has well short of a million customers.
But there are still a couple of obvious questions, such as:
How do we account for dedicated or colo companies like The Planet, which last I heard was hosting the servers for HostGator? Does HostGator only count as one customer? If so, I might suggest that this "number of customers" measure doesn't really account for a few of the really important distinctions in the hosting business.
What about GoDaddy? Is it really not on this list? Are they not counting Go Daddy as a hosting company because of its original focus on domain names? I think that might be more than a little bit of an oversight.
Nevertheless, it's an interesting and thoughtful post, even if the conclusions might be a bit confusing (to me).
Last week the hosting provider Peer 1 ran an entry in it's blog about a couple of system administrators from the company that had put together a team to compete in the awfully amusing race "24 Hours of LeMons" the weekend of July 26-27 in Kershaw, South Carolina.
The blog post, made by Peer 1's "community evangelist" Charnell Pugsley is a follow-up to another earlier blog post that describes a few more of the details and rules of the event.
The event itself seems like a pretty cool race (there's a long list of rules and other various insights at the race's website). It's a two-day endurance race for which entrants have to buy and prepare a car for under $500 (the race title being a reference to the "24 Hours of Le Mans" endurance race and "LeMons," as in "lemons," as in a car that begins having mechanical problems immediately after you buy it).
Peer 1 sponsored employees Kevin Lee and Elson Rodriguez, and their team, to enter the event. They don't say specifically what that means, but if I had to guess I'd say it involved putting up some or all of the money to build the car and enter the race, putting a Peer 1 logo on the side of the car and making a video to post on the company's blog.
By the way, there's a video posted in the blog entry. It's about 10 minutes long. I didn't watch the whole thing, because there are a couple lengthy sections of somewhat-confusingly-cut-together race footage. I skipped ahead, and there's plenty of fun stuff in there too.
According to Pugsley, Kevin Lee and I share a determination to never visit another junkyard. Though, his comes several months spent sifting through junkyards looking for parts for his racecar, whereas mine is based more on a technically-unconfirmed suspicion that I just probably don't like junkyards.
The larger, more interesting, point here is that sponsorship, and the related blog postings and video are pretty bang-on "community evangelist" content. And I put the job title in quotations not to belittle it, but to sort of highlight the fact that quite a few hosting companies are currently working to define this role (The Planet, for instance, has a "web hosting evangelist," Kevin Hazard).
It's not something every company is doing, but it's definitely out there. And things like Peer 1 getting involved in the race, and the subsequent self-referential blogging, serve the dual purposes of making the company seem (to employees) like a cool or fun place to work, and giving the company a more personal public image, particularly among its customers, who might appreciate knowing that the people administering their servers could be doing cool, fun things.
Also interesting is watching the hosting companies work toward defining the roles for these evangelist positions. In Puglsey's case, a recent example is the work she did in communicating the status of the company's network to customers (via the Peer 1 forums) during the massive downtown Vancouver power outage that brought some of the servers under the company's management offline.
While that incident was a pretty big problem for the company, I think it was a pretty excellent illustration of the kind of positive impact the evangelist can have.
I'd be very interested in hearing from hosts. Do you have an evangelist on staff? Are you the evangelist for a hosting company? What's in his or her (or your) job description? Is the evangelist a blogger and message board poster? Facebook group operator? Twitter...er? What other venues for evangelism are there, exactly?
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Liam Eagle has been editor of Web Host Industry Review since 2003. Liam spots hosting trends and offers opinion on major developments and the motivation behind big announcements. Click here to read his full biography.
