October 21, 2005 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- After an activity-packed three days, the fall 2005 installment of ISPCON (ispcon.com) concluded Thursday at the Westin Santa Clara hotel in Santa Clara, California.
Organizers estimated attendance at more than 2,600. The three-day event featured more than 100 exhibitors present and almost 50 informational sessions spread out across five topic tracks - wireless, hosting, technology and customers, VoIP and business.
The event continued a trend in the planning of ISPCON events to include an ever-increasing focus on the Web hosting side of Internet services. Jon Price, the event's chief organizer, says hosting's role is obvious. Very few ISPs, at this point, are unwilling to expand beyond the pipe with new services.
ISPCON Fall 2005's hosting focus was manifest in a series of hosting discussions spread over the three days, including presentations from Hostopia's Paul Engels, Jamcracker's Brent Arslaner, Flyingservers' Hans Kind, Microsoft's Morgan Cole, Delaware.Net's John McKown, HostMySite's Lou Honick, Perimeter Internetworking's Brad Miller and Superb Internet's Haralds Jass.
Wednesday's keynote address, and possibly the conference's most enthusiastically attended event, was "Hosting 2.0: Building the Über-host," a panel discussion that featured Robert Marsh of EV1Servers, Warren Adelman of Go Daddy, Paul Stapleton of I$P HO$TING Report and Mark Teolis of Peer 1 Network, and moderated by Internet lawyer and regular WHIR contributor David Snead.
Wednesday's events concluded with a dinner reception sponsored by 01 Communications, followed by the informal Open Source Communications Exchange and ISP-CEO Exchange events.
ISPCON concluded Thursday with the giveaway of a car - a new Chevy HHR - to an attendee selected by drawing a ballot stamped by a series of sponsors during the show.
Attendees embraced the Web hosting focus at the fall ISPCON, highlighting the extent of the unity between the two very complimentary areas of business. And many of those said the event appeared to be the biggest in years, a fact that bodes well for the greater inclusion of Web hosting material in future events.
