HostingCon 2006 Met With Enthusiasm

• By The WHIR, July 21, 2006

•   Digg
    Delicious
    Reddit
    Newsvine
    Stumbleupon
    Twitter

  (close)

  From:

  To:

  (close)
  Share | Send | Print | Comments (0)

HostingCon 2006 Met With Enthusiasm

By Anastasia Tubanos, theWHIR.com

July 21, 2006 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- After three action-packed days of keynotes, educational sessions and schmoozing in the city of sin, North America's largest Web hosting conference, HostingCon 2006 (hostingcon.com), wrapped up at the Mirage hotel and casino located in Las Vegas, Nevada.

The second annual conference, held from July 17 to 19, saw more than 1100 attendees from all over the world, approximately 25 percent of which were from outside of North America. On the exhibitors end, some 73 ISV's, software vendors and Web hosting providers showcased their brands and products on the showroom floor.

George Roberts IV, executive director of HostingCon, says already having the know-how of putting together an event from the last year's event made this one go a lot more smoothly.

"We had the experience from doing it before and that helped us a lot," says Roberts. "We had a lot of contacts from the exhibitors before, whereas last year we were starting fresh and had to make a lot of these contacts, so this year we already had that built-in base.

"But in other respects, when you move to a new venue in a new city, there are a lot of other challenges associated with that as well, but all in all, it was a fun process. The Mirage has been great to work with. It's an excellent facility and we're pretty confident we're going to be coming back here next year."

Attendees enjoyed the three-day event filled with vendor educational presentations, conference sessions organized under categories such as business, shared services, data center and application hosting, and a keynote for each day of the conference.

Monday's audience saw a presentation by executive director and dean of the IT Leadership Academy, Thornton May, who offered insight on how to understand and connect with the future computational mainstream.

Although some questioned the reasoning behind choosing this keynote, Roberts says he wanted to show people in the hosting industry that the gap was closing between traditional IT and the hosting world, and that the two elements were becoming more co-dependent.

The second day saw a keynote titled "Lessons from the Trenches - What Works Now," a panel discussion in which CEOs from numerous companies had the opportunity to share their insights on what does work and what does not work in today's market.

CEOs from Web.com, HostMySite, FastServers and C I Host engaged the audience with discussions about how to organically grow their companies from the ground up, what new technologies each of the companies launched that they considered truly novel and their views on the impending downfall of the dedicated market.

Andy Schroepfer, president of Tier 1 Research, wrapped up the third day with an eye-opening speech offering his perspective on the state of the industry and the drastic change it is about to undergo. Attendees were given insight on what the future's landscape might look like and how to succeed despite the change.

And a conference just isn't a conference without the after-hours entertainment. On Monday, cPanel sponsored an event where exhibitors and attendees danced the night away at Jet Nightclub located inside the Mirage. In following tradition from last year's HostingCon, FastServers threw another after-hours party on Tuesday night at Pure nightclub in the infamous Caesar's Palace on the Vegas strip. However, regardless of the sponsored parties, people found a plethora of ways to keep themselves entertained with co-workers and clients in the city that never sleeps.

"Our vision for the show covers a couple of things," says Roberts. "First, the people we were talking to before we put on the first show, they always knew that they were hosting providers but they didn't feel like they were part of an industry. Without a forum like this, you don't get that sense of camaraderie, and I think that's one element of what we're trying to do here.

"Secondly, we want to be able to show what's going on in the industry, but we also want to be able to impact what's going on... We don't necessarily want to shape the industry, but at least bring the people together and get some dialogue going to sort of get everybody on the right track and the same page."

Considering how well this year's show turned out, Roberts says people can more than likely look forward to another event next year. He says he wants to increase attendance to roughly 1500 people. Roberts feels that if the conference grows any larger it will begin to lack its initial focus.

"You know, people are still learning about us. I think that's why we had so many late registrations this year, because there was a lot of word-of-mouth going around with people asking, 'hey are you going to HostingCon? Is it worth it?' then realizing, 'hey I should probably go!'"

Tags:  Asia  Appro  Attenda  cPanel  ETT  FastServers  Hostingcon  HostMySite  Iona  NEC  THUS  Web.com 

• Print | Comments (0)

• (0) Comments
• View Post