WebhostingDay 2009: heavy clouds, hefty crowds

Getting into a new city always carries with it certain risks…for me anyway. The TopHosts team seem to have an affinity for attracting outspoken, if not outright weird cab drivers. So we get into Cologne, Germany, hire a taxi and provide our destination hotel address in nearby Bruhl, all the while anticipating another well-orchestrated and eventful WebhostingDay.

The cab driver, of course, comments on us bringing in the rain after the weather had been pleasant prior to our arrival. Good one, cabbie. Then he goes on to tell of his heroics of driving for Mikhail Gorbachev and Francois Mitterand when they attended special events on behalf of their respective governments. To cut to the chase, he brought us to the wrong address and left me wondering if Gorby had fared better in making his destinations on time.

The WebhostingDay team must have had some inklings about the cab situation as they made arrangements to shuttle hundreds of attendees to the event and thus began a smooth start to jam-packed day that would have any Web hosting enthusiast saying: "Danke schön!"

The docket, as you might expect, was dominated by Cloud Hosting even though maximizing and improving your data center and hosting architecture were the themes used to get that discussion under way.

Intel's Enterprise Marketing Director, Shannon Poulin, drew first blood with encouraging Web hosts to use the tight financial market as an opportunity to optimize their data centers with the latest virtualization technologies. By doing so, Web hosts could satisfy the needs of many customers with less hardware and extend their services to include data recovery and backup.

A-Server's Director of Product Management, Arvid Fossen, followed suit and after discussing the confusion behind the actual definition of Cloud Computing, he said that Web hosts have to get in right away. He resolved, if you don't somebody else will. A show of hands indicated very few in the audience were conducting Cloud Hosting and just as few had plans to get into it in the short term.

Fossen struck the note well when he said Web hosts have the relationships in place now and should make known that they have control of their data centers and service level agreements. That makes sense as many users now employing cloud computing services have no real idea where their data is stored and in the event of the cloud going down will end up joining a long waiting list in line to get answers.

Jack Zubarev, President of Parallels Service Provider Division, took us on a tour of what the IT scene will look like in 2020. Clouds are here to say folks, whether they are Horizontal Platform Clouds, Horizontal Channel Clouds, Application Centered Clouds, Aggregation Clouds or Value-Added Clouds.

The bottom line is that SMBs will continue to need domain services, Website applications, messaging services, file server and document management. Web hosts have to formulate a cloud strategy and survival will favor those who can deliver these in a one-stop shop framework.

With my head in the cloud, I had to get away and get inspired from the just plain old Web hosting. That came from Lisbon, Portugal-based Rackport which decided to launch a brand new dedicated server offering at WebhostingDay. The company's Marketing spokesman, Jose Lopes, said, "Any day is a good day to launch a good company... it can't get worse in this market, it can only get better."

As the cloud talk softens and fog is lifted from probably way too much fine German beer, a bigger and better WebhostingDay 2010 will be on the horizon.