HostingCon 2011 has just ended – and this being the 7th year of the event, and it having record attendance, I believe we can all agree it is a must attend event for every Web hoster or vendor.
Last week I wrote a blog post on the WHIR where I stated what I wanted to learn about the latest in shared, VPS, Dedicated and cloud hosting. during the four days of HostingCon I met dozens of passionate hosting company representatives, vendor representatives and industry experts. in this post I am going to share some random insight and thoughts on what I learned at HostingCon 2011.
Shared Hosting – seems to be in a transition – and not just because of the fast growing new hosts like Squarespace and Webs.com. First one of the best sessions I was able to attend was by the CEO of Webs.com Haroon Mokhtarzada where he shared the ultimate methodology of optimizing the funnel from website to registered account to paid user.
The more interesting thing for me was how many shared web hosts are looking for new vendors to give themselves a fresh approach to acquiring new customers or keeping existing customers. I heard many a mention of the importance of site builders. I am all for it! Modern looking websites with social widgets should be the output of any site builder. unfortunately some of the site builders in use today at many hosting providers are old and did not update with the times. Luckily there are some cool new vendors and some well established CMS platforms for shared hosting companies to build on. Site builders bring the customer in the door and these customers are likely to be interested in additional services – all good things for the shared host.
I also was super happy to hear from so many hosts that they are interested in the website acceleration services of Yottaa. [disclosure, I work for Yottaa] having run product management teams for some great hosting companies like Affinity Internet (now Hostway) I can say that without question – add on services like search engine marketing, SEO, ecommerce and web design are the best ways to add additional revenue per customer, reduce churn and build trust with your customer base. I don’t want to go on about this here, the slides of my talk titled “Every Millisecond Counts! Faster Websites Matter – Help your company and your Clients get Better ROI from their Websites” will be available from HostingCon’s website.
VPS, Dedicated, and Managed hosting are alive and well. in the face of the rapid growth of cloud and consumption based IaaS services there is still significant growth in traditional VPS and dedicated solutions. during Antonio Piraino’s keynote he shared that the growth rate for dedicated hosting is around 5% per year and managed hosting is around 20% per year. in a highly commoditized space – the key to growth is to tap into and/or create an ecosystem around your offerings. there are several new vendors in the hosting community that can help drive additional revenue and reduce churn – in particular managed security and shared backup solutions.
Cloud and the future. HostingCon 2011 was full of talks to inspire future strategy and vendors to builf and deliver it on. I met some great people from Hexagrid, Atomia, OnApp, 1h.com, Morphlabs, Citrix, VMware, Microsoft, Fuscan, and others that offer hosts a path forward. a path to offer cloud services – where infrastructure is a base upon which to build elastic and orchestrated products to deliver on the promise of the cloud – whether it be public, private or a hybrid. some companies said they felt the cloud was too complex and too early to jump into – and this is why some hosts are using existing clouds like SoftLayer or Rackspace.
In summary, HostingCon 2011 will be remembered as the year where many hosts were expanding their existing offerings to drive revenue and reduce churn while planning a future in the cloud. while this may seem a rather generic statement – I believe there are many factors in the market today that are driving these strategies vs. an all out quest for innovation and re-invention for most hosting providers.
What did you learn at HostingCon 2011? Please share below.
