HostingCon 2007 opened its doors yesterday at the Navy Pier, here in Chicago to an enthusiastic and record-setting crowd of web hosting professionals.

The show debuted with a full day of conference and educational sessions which were attended with vigor by the audience which show organizer George Roberts estimated at well over 1,000 first day attendees.

Many exhibitors were spending at least a portion of the day putting the finishing touches on their display booths in anticipation of the opening of the exhibit area at 10:30 am this morning. As I was transporting our booth materials into the exhibit hall I was struck by the central (massive) display booths of the two Platinum advertisers for this year’s show - Microsoft and FastServers.Net. Both booths are in the middle of the floor with impressive teams of trade show experts working for hours to finalize the displays. I happened to bump into Aaron Phillips with FastServers.Net and he graciously gave me a tour of the FastServer booth’s ”inner sanctum” which only rarified HostingCon attendees will ever see!

On the conference front, the educational sessions were concise and impactful. The variety and quality of the speakers was appreciated by the attendees. Yesterday’s speaking sessions included yours truly, speaking on the Future of Web Hosting Marketing, and the likes of David Snead, Neil Patel, Isabel Wang, David Snead, Joe Bardenheier, Jeff Stibel, Hillary Stiff, Richard Rosenblatt and (for reals!) Carson Daly. Yes that Carson Daly (Total Request Live and Last Call with Carson Daly).

Today’s keynote will feature an expert industry panel discussing the Future of Service Enablement. David Snead will moderate as participants, Serguei Beloussov of SWsoft, Lou Honick of HostMySite.com, David Koston of cPanle, Sean Richards of Touch Support, and David Wippich of Ensim discuss the direction that the industry is headed.

I’ll see you out on the show floor today if you’re in town. Otherwise I’ll try to get an update in later today.

This content was written by Derek Vaughan and is provided courtesy of the server hosting experts at The Hosting News. Derek will be manning the TechPad Agency display in Booth #200 on the show floor.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 24th, 2007 at 8:46 am and is filed under HostingCon Connect Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.