Tier 1 Research's fourth annual Hosting Transformation Summit saw a fairly dramatic growth in attendees this year (more than 475 attendees from over 240 companies). Over the three-day event we bumped into several new and familiar faces and gathered some of their feedback, positive and constructive, on how the summit went for them and what value they felt it brought to the industry.

Over the next few weeks, we'll also be bringing you interviews with HostMySite, NetMagic, AT&T, SoftLayer and TATA Communications so keep an eye out for those.

Tier 1 Research's fourth annual Hosting Transformation Summit in Las Vegas (well, fifth if you count the first European summit they held earlier this year in the UK) drew over 475 people from three continents and over 240 companies. Certainly the largest HTS we've seen to date, which is indicative of the continuous growth (and expanding financial interest, in this case) in our ever-evolving industry.

While we were at HTS we sat down with Dan Ephraim, the ever energetic and witty VP of business development at Tier 1 Research, and got his thoughts on how this year's summit went as well as some of the new events we can expect to see from the company in the coming year.

Over the summer while at HostingCon, Internet services provider Tucows announced in a rather flashy fashion (we're talking a brightly colored booth with a cheerful illustration of a '50s-era service man and delicious ice cream floats for each attendee!) that it was returning to its OpenSRS name for its wholly-owned wholesale reseller services group.

The company says OpenSRS provides wholesale services for hosted email, domain name registration, personal names and SSL certificates, all while rather enthusiastically abiding to reseller-centric mandate, which is based on the core values of service, friendliness, willingness to help, community service and reliability.

Although all this seemingly embellished goodness may sound like some slick marketing-speak (and much easier said than done), once you meet the team of people behind OpenSRS, you begin to see that this is a philosophy that is genuinely ingrained in the people and there is a real, honest-to-goodness passion for technology and service.

In an effort to fortify this re-branding initiative we had the pleasure of going to the Tucows headquarters (yes, in Toronto, Canada, and in quite a trendy area at that! Think bohemian meets technology) and producing a series of videos titled "Inside OpenSRS."

It features six of the of the people who work in various areas of the OpenSRS team - like product management, network operations, security and compliance, reseller support and development - to give customers a better sense of the names and faces (and personalities!) behind this reseller-friendly service.

You can check out the videos here.

Managed dedicated hosting provider SingleHop recently launched LEAP, what the company considers the first "webtop" or browser-based dedicated server interface (in other words, a fancy, schmancy control panel) that enables users to have complete management access to their dedicated servers.

We recently spoke to Dan Ushman, the co-founder and vice president of SingleHop about the company's latest innovation.

You can get a closer look at LEAP with the demo on SingleHop's website.

In June, application delivery optimization company KEMP Technologies launched a version of its load balancing and delivery control solutions designed for managed hosting providers.

While at HostingCon 2008, the company took the opportunity to elaborate on this while discussing the challenges facing today's managed hosting providers and how to better address the growing application delivery needs of SMBs.

We sat down with Peter Melerud, VP of product management at KEMP Technologies to learn more about the company's latest LoadMaster solution, it's recently launched technical training program for channel partners and its upcoming virtualization-friendly offering.

A few weeks back, the WHIR conducted an email interview with Mark Klein, director of business development at Sedo, and asked him to make the case for his HostingCon 2008 session titled "Tapping the Exploding Secondary Domain Market: How It Can Increase Your Revenue and Customer Loyalty."

Afterwards, I caught up with Mark at Sedo's booth and asked him to give us some further insight into the maturing secondary domain name landscape and how web hosts could take advantage of it.

In the weeks leading to what is considered the web hosting industry's largest event, the WHIR reported that iNET Interactive, a social media company that owns the popular web hosting community Web Hosting Talk among other web properties, rather unexpectedly announced that it had acquired the HostingCon conference and trade show from Interjuncture.

Although the "feel" of conference remained relatively unaltered this year there were several iNET folks running around the event to answer questions about the recent acquisition and to gather information on what they could keep the same next year and what they should consider changing.

We sat down with Troy Augustine, the CEO of iNET Interactive, to discuss some of the motivations behind the acquisition and what we can expect to see from next year's event.

Having an association to call all our own isn't a new idea in the hosting industry, especially since we've seen various attempts at achieving this uber challenging goal in the last few years, all of which have, rather quietly, disappeared.

The last time I remember hearing about an initiative like this was in June 2006 when a gentleman by the name of Tony Holloway became one of the driving forces behind what he hoped would be the first official industry-wide association (the tentative name for it at the time was the International Providers of Internet Technologies and Hosting Association).

There seemed to be some definite interest and discussion stirred up at the HostingCon that year (yes, this was the one in Las Vegas) but after all was said and done, from what I gather, there just wasn't enough overall support from ALL the different players that would have to be on board for such an organization to effectively work. And as Liam pointed out in his blog post "earlier efforts at forming hosting associations have also been determinedly and unmistakably small-potatoes." The association has to not only be there to serve the needs of the smaller players, but of the giants in our industry as well. Of course, this all goes without saying, though.

This brings me to the present HostingCon 2008 that just passed a few weeks ago. We took a moment to have a chat with Paul Hirsch about a new initiative he and a couple of others (specifically Dan Garon, who does marketing and PR work for hosting providers and Michael Yablonowitz, CEO of Uplinkearth) have been working on to help create, what could be, our very own industry-wide association. More specifically, the Association of Internet and Hosting Service Providers.

Earlier this year in May, one of the largest hosting providers in the world, 1&1 Internet, rather unexpectedly announced that its CEO and chairman of the board, Andreas Gauger, was stepping down after 13 years and was being succeeded by Oliver Mauss, a veteran in the telecom industry.

While we were at HostingCon 2008 we had the opportunity to sit down and chat to the new CEO and gain some insight into his new vision for the web hosting giant.

My apologies for taking some time to churn these out. I assure you the rest will be coming up much faster. It's just that THIS interview in particular was quite the challenge to edit (for obvious reasons once you watch it).

But, the wait is worth it my friends because you get to see Michael van Dijken, the lead marketing manager for hosted solutions at Microsoft, talk about the company's recent Hyper-V technology launch (Microsoft's hypervisor virtualization engine for Windows Server 2008 that officially became available a few weeks ago. Liam wrote a great post about this here.) and Microsoft's cloud computing strategy while simultaneously playing the drums in a game of Rockband! That is talent!

Needless to say, it may have been one of the most challenging interviews he's been in and I've conducted, on a "having to focus on two things at once and not mess up on EITHER task" kind of way :)

We'll be bringing you an interview with Oliver Mauss, the new CEO of 1&1 Internet later this week as well, so keep an eye out for that.