HostingCon, the premier conference and trade show for the hosted services industry which attracts the best and brightest every year was set in Boston, Massachusetts for 2012.
Date: July 16 – 18, 2012
Venue: John B. Hynes Veterans Memorial Convention Center, Boston, Massachusetts
Number of speakers and panelists: 100 +
A main hosting event that drew over 2,000 Internet professionals from over 30 countries, the 2012 show featured a total of 52 conference sessions and provided around 150 providers with the opportunity to showcase their products and services.
Conference sessions were divided into 4 different tracks:
Sales and Marketing,
Industry Trends,
Technology and
Management.
Noam Wasserman from Harvard Business School was the keynote speaker for day 1 on “The Founder’s Dilemmas – Tackling the Key Decisions Faced by Entrepreneurs” while Eric Hanselman from 451 Research was the keynote speaker for day 2 on “Building Your Strategic Vision – Hosting and Cloud Market Overview”.
Do you know who is the cPanel guy in the above picture? Yeah, he is Founder of cPanel – J Nick Koston.
Exhibition started on day 2 with exhibitors of various providers mainly divided into:
- data center providers
- domain registrar
- software security providers
- all kinds of hosting control panels, hardware and software providers
To witness one of the most important and resourceful events for web hosting providers around the globe, four Exabees including CEO Chan flew into the US two days before the event. During the long distance flight, we were anticipating to learn the best information from the best industry practitioners.
The first conference session started on July 16 at 9.00am, by one of the most esteemed speakers from Exclusive Concepts Inc, Nik Raipal who spoke on “Some Content Helps, Some Content Hurts”. Conference that were taking place at the same time were “Hosting Industry Market Overview” by Philbert Shih from Structure Research, “Integrating Your Products to Take Your Company to the Next Level” by Dreas van Donselaar from SpamExperts and “Partnerships Done Right” by Lance Crosby from SoftLayer Technologies. For the rest of the conference sessions on the day, four sessions featuring four different tracks (Sales and Marketing, Industry Trends, Technology, Management) were held simultaneously.
Lunch was readily served from 12.00 to 2.00pm, when everyone has the chance to refresh their energy and get to know each other better. On a side note, there was also an additional opportunity for everyone to mingle around in the opening networking reception which was scheduled from 5.00 to 7.00pm, after the keynote by Mr. Noam Wasserman.
Day 2 of HostingCon 2012 started when registration was open at 7.30am. Breakfast was served from 8.00 – 10.00am so that latecomers would also have the chance to fill up their empty stomach before another exciting day started.
The first four conference sessions of the day were
– “How to Talk to Non-Technical SMBs in a Language They Can Understand” by Rob Duffy from mindSHIFT Technologies, Inc.,
– “Understanding the ISV/SaaS Market – Overview and Trends” by Jeffrey Kaplan from THINKstrategies,
– “Build vs Buy: Operations & Billing Automation” by Nathan Day from SoftLayer, Jordan Jacobs from Phoenix NAP and Raj Dutt from Internap.
– “Navigating Your Business through Change, and Keeping All Hands on Deck” by Elliot Noss from Tucows Inc
The second day of the event of also when the exhibition kick-started. At 11.00am, four of us rushed into the exhibition hall to meet some old friends in the industry and get to know more about other highly respected players. The meaningful day two ended at 6.30pm, after the exhibition hall happy hour.
Day three was indeed a special one, with a total of six esteemed speakers addressing the audience on the keynote “Legislating for the Global Good: How We Can Help Lawmakers Understand the Internet” from 4.00 – 5.00pm before the event came to a close. There were only 16 conference sessions on day three, although all had successful attracted a sizeable audience. The exhibition hall opened again at 11.00am, and only 8 conference sessions were left after the delicious lunch.
HostingCon 2012, one of the momentous events of the year came to a perfect wrap at 9.00pm, after all event goers seized the golden opportunities to get acquainted and engaged in many fruitful, small discussions among one another in the final networking reception.
Exabees after attending HostingCon three days in a row had truly benefited from the various conference sessions, aligned with Exabytes’ mission to always providing the latest and most innovative products and services to our customers.
Goodbye HostingCon 2012, and we are definitely looking forward to see you again in 2013!
