June 26th, 2007 |

You may have read about the new calling plans that AT&T announced today for use with the new iPhone. There’s really no debating that the iPhone is the red hottest tech gadget to come along for a while. But with the price tag at an eye-popping $499 or $599 to own one - what to do?

Well…why not stop by Booth #304 at HostingCon and sign up to win an new iPhone for FREE?

Website Magazine, who’s mission is to “help our readers and visitors succeed by providing helpful and valuable information about online business trends, industry insights and best practices” will be providing live session coverage of panels and exclusive interviews with many of the presenters and exhibitors during HostingCon 2007. Another point of interest, the company is headquatered in the city of Chicago (so they can give you pointers at the show on local eateries and diversions).

The company which publishes both a print and digital edition of its magazine is also currently working on an invitation-only showcase of a new user-generated social news and commentary section of their website which will be available during HostingCon.

According to Mr. Peter Prestipino, Editor in Chief at Website Magazine, “We’ve built many successful relationships through previous appearances at the show and believe that HostingCon is a perfect fit because of its core focus on the Internet’s best and brightest.”

You can check out the magazine’s digital website at: www.websitemagazine.com.

This content was written by Derek Vaughan and provided courtesy of the hosting experts at The Hosting News.

June 22nd, 2007 |

Earlier this year, as one of the members of the HostingCon Advisory Board, I had the opportunity to travel to Chicago and view the facilities at Navy Pier - the site of HostingCon 2007. Our gracious hosts during this trip were the folks at Interjuncture. I had the pleasure of staying at the W Hotel on Lakeshore for the duration of the trip.

I have to be honest and tell you that there were some snags with our stay - mainly a bit of confusion over switching rooms after one night of our stay. Nothing really major. But the point I wanted to get across was that the facilities at the W are absolutely first class in every respect. Very stylish and comfortable with magnificent views of the Lake. Cool furniture in the lobby and a very interesting bar in the entry as well. Notwithstanding the fact that it is very close to Navy Pier and convenient to downtown shopping and restaurants.

So I was going to recommend that during your visit to Chicago for HostingCon - you consider staying at the W. Well…there’s just one little problem with that plan: according to Sue Church with Interjuncture (Director of Operations for the show) there is a 72 person waiting list to get in during that period - at the discounted HostingCon rate. I am pretty sure that myself and the TechPad Agency crew reserved the last rooms. You may still be able to reserve a room at the normal full rate.

It’s too bad that they are now full - it really is a great hotel experience.

So while I have not yet stayed at the other hotel which is giving a great rate for HostingCon - The Sheraton Chicago Hotel & Towers - I would recommend getting your rooms reserved sooner, rather than later. The Sheraton Chicago is discounting their rooms for HostingCon participants. The normal room rate is at least $259 per night. For HostingCon attendees the rate is just $179 per night. you can click through this link to reserve your room online now.

With the show now just 4 weeks away - and many attendees and exhibitors now making travel plans - be sure to get in early and support our HostingCon partners at The Sheraton Chicago Hotel & Towers.

See you in Chicago!

This content was written by Derek Vaughan and provided courtesy of the dedicated server hosting experts at The Hosting News.

June 19th, 2007 |

Due to the fact that some people were experiencing some issues registering using the Firefox browser we have decided to extend the early bird registration rates to June 29th, the same day that the group discounts at our conference hotels end.  If you missed the June 15th deadline to get the discounted rates, you’re in luck!

If you are having issues registering using the Firefox browser, please let us know.  We may suggest that you use Internet Explorer or another browser to complete your registration.  We have not been able to track down the cause of this issue since it does not appear to happen to everyone using Firefox (we can’t replicate it here).

June 19th, 2007 |

For those members of the press and analyst community who have been waiting for registration to open, the wait is over.  Please visit our press/analyst registration area to get your press passes to HostingCon 2007 today.

June 19th, 2007 |

A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to speak with Mr. Bill White, Vice President of Sales and Marketing with Roaring Penguin Software. Roaring Penguin will be a second-time exhibitor at HostingCon this year.

The company will be discussing and demostrating it’s anti-spam solutions for web hosting companies.

I spoke with Bill about what he and his team would be up to at this year’s event. Here’s what he had to say:

”We will be exhibiting at Hostingcon and hopefully setting the bar significantly higher for best practices in anti-spam within the web hosting community. We have created an anti-spam solution that meets the specific needs of the Web Hosting industry. Right now the anti-spam solutions in most Web Hosts are home grown. They have anti-spam solutions that they are not happy with but the alternatives out there are too expensive. They are trying to protect their customers from spam in what is a very complex and demanding environment.

We will be showing off significant improvements in our CanIt-Domain-Pro anti-spam software for Web Hosts. We have added two major new features that will be announced at Hostingcon.

I also asked Bill about why Roaring Penguin had chosen HostingCon 2007 to discuss their products and services. He commented, ”The Web Hosting marketplace is a significant opportunity for Roaring Penguin. We came because this is where the Web Hosts are.

We come to Hostingcon because it is the premier North American event for Web Hosts. Companies like Roaring Penguin have a responsibility to help support events that further the education of our customers and help spread best practices throughout the Industry.”

You can see Roaring Penguin Software, Inc. and their anti-spam solutions in booth #319

This content was written by Derek Vaughan and provided courtesy of the hosting experts at The Hosting News.

June 13th, 2007 |

One of the great panels at HostingCon this year will be the Keynote panel entitled, The Future of Service Enablement. It will feature an all-star cast of hosting professionals including: David Snead, Attorney, W. David Snead, P.C., Serguei Beloussov, CEO, SWsoft, Lou Honick, CEO, HostMySite.com, David Koston, Operations Manager, cPanel, Sean Richards, Technical Director, Touch Support, LLC. and David Wippich, Chief Executive Officer, Ensim.

As CEO of HostMySite.com, Lou Honick has always been a staunch advocate of outstanding customer service. His contribution to the Keynote panel will be surely be felt in his customer-centric approach.

HostMySite.com is also doing something interesting in the hosting product area prior to HostingCon. The company has launched the new beta of the most recent release of Adobe’s ColdFusion - formerly code named ‘Scorpio’ now named ‘ColdFusion 8′. The new beta release has been available since May 30, 2007. At this point the full commercial release of ColdFusion 8 is anticipated to be in a couple of months. Adobe hasn’t set a specific date yet, as the company is leaving a bit of time to react should they discover anything through the public beta. According to the company that puts the estimated delivery of the full releases at pretty much dead center of the calendar year.

When asked to distill the key features of the new ColdFusion 8 into a brief statement, Tim Buntel, Senior Product Marketing Manager, ColdFusion at Adobe stated, ”The tip of the iceberg on new features is already a pretty long list. I think if I had to say one thing about the release, this is Adobe ColdFusion. ColdFusion 8 shows what happens when you inject ColdFusion with Adobe’s DNA. It’s really about making this great experience for the application user, with a whole slew of new features: PDF’s, rich Internet applications, and multimedia presentations - simply a much more meaningful experience for users. There is also a lot more integration in the enterprise. We’re Doing for .NET what we’ve done for Java in the past. Plus Exchange integration. Then also enhancing the developer’s experience.”

To get started, if you feel comfortable installing ColdFusion on your own computer or workstation – all you have to visit the Adobe Labs and they will provide you with the full product along with all kinds of documentation and helpful articles to get you started. You can also access multimedia demonstrations as well. That is all free. According to Tim Buntel, ”A developer can just grab that and go to town”.

He continued, ”If you don’t want to install or are unable to install the product on your machine for any reason, then with a ColdFusion hosting partner such as HostMySite.com, you’ll be able to go sign up and have a small account that is running on ColdFusion 8 that will allow you to start writing code and use the features that environment. Those accounts are free as well.”

With regard to the beta accounts mentioned above, Monish Sood, Director of Marketing at HostMySite.com explained the details, ”The ColdFusion 8 Beta comes fully loaded with features including a 600 MB MS SQL Server database, 4 GB of disk space, and ASP.NET 3.0 framework access. We want developers to be able to test the newest release of ColdFusion in real-world situations with features that are available with our ColdFusion developer edition plans.”

Mr. Sood continued, ”We have worked closely with Adobe throughout the beta process to transfer all feedback from participating developers. The developers get access to production level features to test in a beta environment. HostMySite.com provides the same level of support and service for the beta as any production plan.”

For futher details on the new beta release of Coldfusion 8, please visit the Adobe Labs at: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/coldfusion8.

To sign up for the free ColdFusion 8 beta account with HostMySite.com, please visit: http://www.hostmysite.com/CF8. And be sure to check out HostMySite.com CEO Lou Honick in the Keynote panel at HostingCon entitled, The Future of Service Enablement.

This content was written by Derek Vaughan and provided courtesy of the dedicated server experts at The Hosting News.

June 5th, 2007 |

I remember entering the exhibit hall at HostingCon last year in Las Vegas before the show had started in order to set up the TechPad Agency booth. As I walked into the vast exhibit hall for the very first time I recall seeing a MASSIVE structure with video screens being hoisted into position by a team of workers. “Man that’s a HUGE booth!” I said. That was my first impression of Microsoft at last year’s event. When the booth was actually completed and open to the attendees - it was staffed by an army of Microsoft personnel from around the globe available to discuss any hosting topic.

So what will Microsoft bring to HostingCon 2007? Here is what a few of the folks at Microsoft had to say when asked what we can expect at this year’s show.

”At HostingCon 2006, attendees had a number of questions about our product and solution roadmaps. Since last year, Microsoft has broadened its hosting commitment on at least half a dozen fronts, including solution enhancements, software plus services enablement programs, and product investments, which will enable our hosting partners to easily and quickly deliver powerful applications and value-added services to end users in multiple segments. I’m looking forward to sharing information about these investments with the hosting community.” – Chris Samson, Senior Hosting Technology Specialist, Microsoft Corp.

”This year Microsoft aims for attendees to walk away with fresh perspectives on how to compete with the giants entering the industry, how to do more for their customers and where they should be making their investments. In addition, Microsoft looks forward to demonstrating its latest Web products, as well as exciting new offerings planned to come out in the next few months.

2007 is going to be another exciting year for Microsoft as we approach the launch of Windows Server 2008, and without letting the cat out the bag, we plan to have some interesting announcements at the conference, as well as demos of Silverlight, Expression, Internet Information Services 7.0 (IIS7), and SQL Server 2005.

HostingCon has proved to be an important forum for dialogue on important industry issues. Microsoft recognizes the invaluable opportunity that this provides and we are thrilled to be involved as platinum sponsors once again.” – Michael van Dijken, Lead Marketing Manager, Hosting Solutions, Microsoft Communications Sector

”HostingCon is the best hosting-centric venue for Microsoft to demonstrate its products and solutions that enable service providers to offer value add services while focusing on lower TCO.” – Chuck Ladd, Hosting Technology Specialist, Microsoft Corp.

Be certain to stop by Booth #309 at this year’s HostingCon to see everything that a world-class exhibitor brings to our event!

This content was written by Derek Vaughan and provided courtesy of the dedicated server hosting experts at The Hosting News.

June 3rd, 2007 |

Have you ever needed to scale up an online business very quickly? Have you ever wished that you could stop worrying about infrastructure and easily scale up on down your online operations to meet demad? Have you ever dreamed of having an online platform that had the same reliability characteristics as Amazon.com? Well if so, HostingCon 2007 presents a great educational and networking opportunity for your business.

Jinesh Varia, Evangelist with Amazon Web Services will be co-presenting the keynote presentation entitled, Hosted Services - What’s Next?. Jinesh will explain the benefits of Amazon’s Web Services products and how these concepts will change the landscape of hosted services.

I recently caught up with Jinesh to see what might come up in the presentation. Jinesh commented, “We will be showcasing our newest Infrastructure-As-A-Service offerings Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (still in beta) and Amazon Simple Storage Service from the hosting perspective and highlight its advantages over traditional hosting.”

According to the Amazon Web Services website, “Amazon has spent 11 years and over $2 billion building the infrastructure, technical knowledge, and operational excellence to operate a world class web-scale computing platform. Amazon Web Services has now released a variety of web services (programmatic access to its open APIs) that enable developers to leverage Amazon’s data and robust infrastructure, easily and inexpensively. These fundamental services allow external developers and businesses to build their web applications in a reliable, scalable, and cost-effective manner.”

The essence of the product is that one can dynamically scale an online system up or down and pay only for what’s used.

Jinesh went on to comment on his thinking on attending this year’s event, “HostingCon attracts the finest and brightest people from the hosting industry and it will be the right place to spread our vision. We feel that our infrastructure services - especially Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3 - will change the way people think about hosting. Features like the ability to consume hosting services in variable units (by the hour or by the GB), and the ability to spawn up an Amazon-class server by a web service call will not only give resellers, distributors, and hosting providers new ways to do businesses but also give developers new way to develop cost-effective applications.”

Jinesh also provided the following links for reference:

Here’s a good overview of the Amazon Web Services done by BusinessWeek Online.

The Amazon Web Services that will be the subject of Jinesh’s presentation -
Amazon EC2, and - Amazon S3.

This content was written by Derek Vaughan and provided courtesy of the hosting experts at The Hosting News.