EPhost Attends HostingCon Global 2015

August 5, 2015 by Joe Rebis 0 Comments
Categories EPHOST, Web Hosting

This year’s HostingCon Global 2015 (July 26-28th, 2015), was held in San Diego, California. It enabled us to bring additional staff to enjoy the conference. We had a great time connecting with our existing vendors- many of whom we’ve never met face-to-face. 

The four-day conference, dedicated to the web hosting industry, featured many interesting speakers and vendors. Topics included privacy & legal issues to “how to” classes on customer satisfaction and customer retention. 

Here are some take-aways:

1) One industry-wide theme was on the topic of working with Massive Scale Cloud Providers. It was interesting to note that while much of the web hosting industry has experienced some loss to large public cloud services- there was growth in private cloud utilization. The magic combination is in providing lower cost cloud and dedicated servers alongside of the storage and compute power of large providers- a hybrid solution. This, coupled with personal customer service, and the innate privacy that comes with a “private cloud” like the EPHost Cloud, seems to be an ideal combination.

2) DDoS attacks are on the rise. There were probably five or more large vendors offering a variety of DDoS scrubbing services both in the cloud and on appliance servers. Though most providers are trending upwards in terms of price- we were pleased to see that some providers had done more to align themselves with the monthly nature of hosting. We will be looking into this space some more in the coming months.

3) Lastly, we started to see some changes in the way datacenter facilities are working with hosting providers in terms of the cloud. Most datacenters offer cloud services as an add-on to their clients. The problem is that these datacenters are not “customer service” friendly for the average user and pricing has been aligned in more of a retail fashion. In our case, they indirectly compete with our cloud services. That said, we are seeing a shift with some of the nation’s largest colocation providers as they begin to grow from within by helping providers acquire new customers through referrals.

HostingCon was pretty fun and a great team-building opportunity with the guys.  It was great to have some beers  with our vendors and to get to know them on a personal level. We are looking forward to next year’s conference in New Orleans.