By Esther M. Bauer

This article appeared in the April/May 2005 issue of Web Host Industry Review magazine. Click here for a free subscription.

Trade shows have long been a hallmark of vibrant industries ? providing market education and the exchange of stimulating ideas to help business owners improve their efficiency and develop their operations. But despite Web hosting's role as a large and fundamental facet in the Internet's mosaic of commerce and communications, it has been without its own trade conference for the last four years.

Certainly, hosting has played a prominent role in larger technology events, but not since the Web Hosting Expo held in Washington, DC a month prior to September 11, 2001, has there been an event focused exclusively on the needs of hosting providers.

That will change this year with HostingCon 2005 (hostingcon.com), a trade show tailored to the hosting industry, and one of three conferences set to make a meaningful mark on the hosting business in a three-month period: DataCentres Europe in April,  ISPCON in May and HostingCon in June.

HostingCon is a dense two-day conference featuring industry-leading keynote speakers, 48 exhibitors in a 25,000-square-foot hall and panel discussions and presentations designed to help educate Web hosting providers on how to increase business. It will be held June 6 and 7 at the Hyatt Regency O'Hare in Chicago, Illinois.

The event is the brainchild of George A. Roberts IV, president and CEO of Interjuncture, an Aurora, Illinois-based provider of Web services, merchant services and application development services for small businesses.

"There has been a pent-up thirst out there for a while," says Roberts. "It's something that people have wanted and nobody has come out and done it. Now that we have, everybody is ready to get onboard."

One sign of enthusiasm for the conference is vendor participation, says Roberts. Exhibit space was sold out more than three months before the event, and attendees are expected to number as many as 750, at a sign-up price of $200. And Roberts says the organizers have worked to squeeze as much value into the event's two days as possible.

The lineup of keynote speakers for the conference includes Sandip Gupta, president and CEO of Ensim; Robert Marsh, president and CEO of EV1Servers; Serguei Beloussov, president and CEO of SWsoft; and Pascal Martin, general manager of worldwide hosting at Microsoft. Conference sessions will be divided into three tracks ? business, sales and marketing and technical and security ? all areas of particular interest to small to medium-sized Web hosting operations.

Just as the focus at Interjuncture is moving more toward the smaller hosting providers, so too will small to medium-sized hosts be the primary audience for the HostingCon. Roberts says the majority of attendees will be Web hosting or Web presence providers, data center or colocation service providers, application service providers, systems integrators and suppliers of hardware, software or services to the hosting industry.

Web hosting forums and postings on the Web have been a significant source of theme-related inspiration for Roberts . He says he has seen the same questions being repeated.

"What we've tried to do is bring in topics that address those questions," he says. "Obviously, everybody wants to grow their businesses. They may not want to become huge companies, but they want to be able to grow their businesses at a reasonable rate. We're trying to give them some ideas and options to achieve that."

Whether that means adding another product line, or another type of service, there will be plenty of ideas on how to begin marketing, or how to be more effective with existing marketing strategies. Web hosts unsure of how to invest their marketing dollars are likely to pick up some valuable pointers.

Whatever the particular business focus of an attendee, says Roberts, an effort has been made to ensure that its biggest areas of concern have been given attention in the makeup of the conference's informational sessions. He says a few planned presentations are generating particular interest by addressing some of the hot topics of the day.Session 102, entitled "Effective Performance-based Advertising," sets out to help answer the concerns of Web hosts wondering how well their online advertising is working ? a concern repeatedly addressed in postings on Web hosting forums, says Roberts. "What we did was go to one of the biggest companies, Overture [which has been re-branded Yahoo! Search Marketing], and say, ?Can you come in and talk to the people in the hosting business on how to more effectively do their pay-per-click advertising?'"

Session 112, a panel discussion entitled "The Hosting Price Wars and Their Effect on the Industry," touches on an issue of major relevance today. "A lot of smaller hosts compete on rock bottom lower prices," he says, "and I think people are interested to see what the viewpoints are on how that affects the industry. You see a lot of debates about it on a lot of forums about how it impacts other people's business, whether it's a sustainable business model for the hosts that are doing it and whether it hurts the industry as a whole."

Smaller companies often build up their hosting businesses to a certain point before realizing they don't want to be in the business anymore, and look to cash out and move on to something else. Session 211, entitled "Mergers and Acquisitions in the Web Hosting Industry," attempts to provide ideas for smaller hosts that might be looking to sell, says Roberts. "You might be a small company that has maybe 50 to 500 customers and you are looking for somebody to buy your business but there is not a whole lot of information out there on how to do that effectively."

Session 221, "Outsourcing Technical Support Operations," addresses another frequent question, dealing with the different models of technical support, such as pay-per-ticket and monthly flat fees ? and the options for outsourcing those responsibilities to a third party. A small host with a staff of one, or just a few, cannot be available 24 hours a day. "If you want to have 24-7 support for your customers," says Roberts, "you either need to hire people or you need to outsource your technical support to somebody else."

Perhaps the event's most promising ? certainly its most wide-ranging ? discussion planned is section 201, a panel discussion called "Issues and Trends in the Hosting Industry." The session will see moderators engage in a free-ranging discussion of the various trends, problems and success stories throughout the Web hosting industry. Attendees can benefit from the expertise each of the moderators has in a particular segment of the industry.

Ben Trenda, manager of telco and Web services at Yahoo! Search Marketing (searchmarketing.yahoo.com) says the session 102 presentation on pay-per-click marketing will feature practical advice Web hosts will be able to apply to their own marketing efforts.

"We will be talking about a lot of tips and strategies at the actual conference," says Trenda. "We are on a panel related to search marketing and how to make that successful: best practices for search marketing for those people who are already doing search marketing and want to get better or those who are just getting into it right now."

Searches engine advertising is a cost-effective way to acquire customers and a great opportunity to capture customers who are actively looking for your product, he says. And while many Web hosts are already using search engine marketing, Trenda believes Yahoo! can provide Web hosts with some of the perspective gained from its work with keyword advertisers in general to help identify some of the things that work well.

The company has more than 100,000 advertisers, with hundreds from the hosting business. And though Yahoo! is careful not to disclose information about its advertisers, it's easy to tell who the clients are by examining the paid-placement results of a keyword search.

Roberts says a key to making the most of attending the conference is planning. Attendees should decide in advance which sessions they want to attend and which vendor booths they want to visit, in order to make the experience as valuable as possible.

"We have 24 sessions and we need to cram them into two days," says Roberts, but he insists that every effort will be made to make the event run smoothly. The sessions will be held in rooms according to their track grouping and attendees will have 15-minute breaks between discussions.

To Roberts' thinking, the more targeted the conference, the more successful it will be."For the most part," he says, "you can go in there knowing that most of the content of the conference or most of the exhibitors are going to have some possible role to play in helping grow your business."

The keynote speakers have been given the freedom to pick the subjects they want to address, and Roberts says he doesn't know yet what the topics will be.

"Mr. Marsh [of EV1 Servers] is likely to address his view of the hosting industry and where he thinks things are going," says Roberts. "It's nice to be able to come and listen to what he has to say and some of the lessons he has learned. He started with a small company and has really grown tremendously over the last few years."All of the keynote speakers are in positions of market leadership and will provide insights into how to ? and how not to ? address business objectives.

Roberts founded Interjuncture in 2002 after returning to the hosting industry following a two-year stint with a Fortune 500 IT organization. He has been involved in hosting since 1995, mostly as a Web hosting and Web design consultant. While Interjuncture offers Windows and Linux shared hosting, its primary focus is being a service provider for other hosting companies. That's what makes HostingCon 2005 a natural service fit, he says. While this year's event is the first edition of HostingCon, Roberts already has his sights set on 2006.

"We plan to make this an annual event," he says. "We are planning already for next year in Chicago. I don't know if the industry is at the point where it can sustain more than one conference per year. If we do more than one per year, we will probably do one in the United States and one in Europe."

He says he has no plans to launch into Europe just yet. Some people from Europe have registered to attend the conference in June, but most attendees will be from the United States and Canada.Before HostingCon arrives, however, hosting players are sure to be in attendance at ISPCON (ispcon.com/spring2005/). Sponsored by The Golden Group, ISPCON will be held from May 24 to 26 in Baltimore, Maryland. Though its focus  overall is far broader than just hosting, the event has, for years, included an agenda tailored to include hosting providers.

ISPCON is designed to help ISPs, hosts, WISPs, CLECs and other related Internet-based services firms learn about, understand and deploy technologies and business practices to improve their competitive positioning and deliver profitable, high-quality services to customers.

"We've done a decent job of this over the past 11 years," says Jon Price, managing director of ISPCON and CEO of The Golden Group, "but there is always room for improvement and plenty of new topics and technologies to address."

Price says attendees of ISPCON and conferences in general should set their sights on uncovering new services and new opportunities for existing services and ways to stand out and above the competition. They should seek ideas on how to improve and streamline any aspects of their businesses, like marketing, operations or technologies. And they may learn something new from peers doing the same thing a different way, or in different markets.

New products and partners can be uncovered anywhere at a show, says Price: over lunch, in a reception or in the hallways between sessions. Conference attendees should show up prepared to contribute to the success of others, in order to have the best experience.

The online ISPCON conference at-a-glance is a self-qualifying experience for the prospective attendee and is a helpful tool in determining the value of attending ISPCON.

"What we do is attempt to serve as many of those needs in depth as possible without becoming too generic or general," says Price, "and our advisory board does an excellent job of vetting the important and urgent topics to positively impact an attendee's business."

While HostingCon may eventually make its way to Europe, the torch has already been lit across the pond. Scheduled to take place April 28 and 29 in London, DataCentres Europe (datacentreseurope.com) will highlight the regeneration of the industry in Europe, says Nicola Hayes, director of marketing and public relations for the sponsoring BroadGroup.

"The main aim of the conference is to draw attention to the data center industry in Europe once more," says Hayes. "Very little has been seen or heard about this sector since the dot-com bust several years ago. Over the past few years, the data center operators have been quietly building up their businesses and most are now cash flow positive."

The main focus of the content-driven DataCentres Europe conference will be the relevance of its sessions to today's industry. Among the topics scheduled to be addressed in its presentations are power, which has become a serious concern in London, following a power failure in March; finance, a popular topic among data center operators, many of which need refinancing to build their businesses; and future market opportunities, a subject to be addressed by discussion of where the industry's revenues will likely come from in the next five years.

The Colocation and Hosting Association, a forum for debate and networking among specialists, has chosen DataCentres Europe for its re-launch, an event that should add some extra attention to the proceedings at the conference.

On both sides of the Atlantic, there is renewed interest in organized efforts to promote and further the hosting industry through industry events ? a good sign for the health of the hosting business.

And on the last day of HostingCon 2005, it's a safe bet the room will be full when panelists kick off one of the last sessions of the conference. In the program, it's the one marked Session 222 ? "Staying Relevant, Growing With and Leading the Industry."

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