I have seen various reviews and pretty detailed summaries of just about every educational session from WebhostingDay 2009. The fifth annual edition of the conference ended last week in Bruehl near Cologne, Germany at the Phantasialand theme park. Rather than rehash the talking points from the sessions, I thought it would be more effective to simply list a few lessons I learned at WebhostingDay.
Lesson 1 – Everyone is interested in the Cloud. I wish that I had one Deutsche Mark for every time I heard or read the expression ‘Cloud’ or ‘Cloud hosting’. Not that this is the end-all be-all definition of the Cloud, but Cloudmark described Cloud Computing as: ”Cloud computing broadly describes off-premise, on-demand computing where the end-user accesses applications, computing resources and services provided by the Cloud operator via the Internet”. You can compare that to the Wikipedia definition of Cloud computing here.
Lesson 2 – Hosting professionals like to party and can drink an incredible amount of German beer. Okay, so this wasn’t exactly news to me – but there were a number of great social events at WebhostingDay 2009. The first evening prior to the show was the Get Together party. This networking event featured incredible food, tons of great beer, and music from the 70′s and 80′s performed live. The second evening saw a VIP party – smaller, with more expensive alcohol – but essentially the same. The final evening saw the African themed hotel on-site (Hotel Matamba) host a party for everyone with the theme Deep in Africa. The only complaint that I heard out of anyone was that occaisionally the crowd was too deep to allow one to grab a quick beer. I think that may be a compliment – now that I think about it.
Lesson 3 – European hosting is very different than its counterpart in the U.S. This was my first time attending WebhostingDay. The event has been getting stronger and gaining more traction each of its five years. There were many first timers like me there this year. When you examine the markets and specialization required in each geographical location, you quickly realize that hosting is not the same in Europe as in the U.S. Here is one example. I met the CEO of a custom managed server company in Switzerland. In addition to being able to speak English, French and German fluently, he also knew tons of technical jargon in each language. It turns out that Swiss companies are required by law to host their servers in Switzerland – giving this company a real advantage over outside competitors.
Lesson 4 – The worldwide financial crises hasn’t yet hit hosting. Time and again I heard glowing outlooks and reports about where the markets are headed in hosting. Here are a couple of examples. Keynote speaker Shannon Poulin, Enterprise Marketing Director at Intel said multiple times during his talk, ”hosting is a big growth area”. Similarly, Allen Clark is Industry Director Worldwide Software+Services with Microsoft. Mr. Clark mentioned during his talk that we are ”still in the early days” of this industry. Also, the show itself was completely sold out. There were 2,500 attendees, 50 speakers and 45 exhibitors.
Lesson 5 – Email security is actually halfway interesting. If there was one educational session that actually seemed to transcend the confines of the conference, it was the keynote address delivered by Jamie de Guerre the CTO with Cloudmark. Using cool lingo like ”fingerprinting algorithms” Mr. de Guerre pointed out that over 90 percent of spam originates from botted computers. That’s because botnets have infected up to 30 percent of all home computers. Mr. de Guerre also reminded me of something that I hadn’t thought about much – that a web hosting company’s brand can be negatively impacted by poor email services. Oh yeah, that’s right. I forgot that email is still the killer app. Great talk.
Lesson 6 – There are many great friends in hosting that I have yet to meet. It is just fantastic to meet with old friends and to be introduced to new friends. One small story. I was catching up with my friend Phil Robinson who is a brilliant developer with UK hosting company 34SP.com based in Manchester. Phil introduced me to a couple of new acquaintances to him – CEO Neil Barnfather and Operations Manager Gary Thomlinson from ehosting.co.uk which is also based in Manchester. We had a great time talking about hosting and walking over to get each other free beer. I know that we’ll be friends in the business from now on. This is what great networking at a hosting event is all about.
In summary, WebhostingDay 2009 was a great hosting trade event with quality content, great food and thousands of web hosting professionals from around the world. If you are a hosting professional that has any ties to Europe, I would highly recommend attending next year. Don’t forget to sign up early too – as it may be once again sold out.
