Webhosting Day 2008 - What's New This Year?

I've personally attended each of the three Webhosting Day events, now. And things have changed mightily since the original in 2006. What hasn't changed, of course, is the event's oddball setting.

I'm trying, I assure you, to keep from writing too much this year about how "weird" my surroundings are. It's a given at this point that Webhosting Day is held at an amusement park. That it is an always odd, occasionally bizarre setting for a Web hosting conference should just be part of the scenery.

In defense of my own over-attentiveness, I really would challenge anyone to put themselves in these circumstances - sit down to cover the event and expect the incongruous images (a Windows Server 2008 banner hanging next to a stack of pirate treasure chests, for example), and the general weirdness, to just drop from their mind.

But I digress.

Right now I'm sitting six feet away from a human-sized birdcage with a disco-ball bottom, all of which is hidden behind a sparkling gold curtain with a fringe. Things like this are just all over this place.

Okay, now I'll stop. Really.

What's most notable about this Webhosting Day is the event's ongoing progression in the direction of credibility. That's not to say that it hasn't arrived at credibility, but that it's a growing concern. For an event that really seems to be learning as it grows, Webhosting Day is showing a lot of progress.

Some of that is apparent just in the layout of the thing. Last year's (perfectly sufficient) registration area is now a (perfectly sufficient) coat check. This year, registration took place at the amusement park's own entrance. That is, things are happening on a bigger scale here now.

According to the opening address, the event is dealing with close to 1,000 attendees, several hundred more than organizers were expecting even a week or two ago. That was apparent at registration, and beyond. There was a bit of a bottleneck signing in, as organizers handled the extra people, and the sessions saw the same roughly 30-minute delay as registration.

The attendance has led to Internet connection problems, too. Webhosting Day has had connection problems in the past. At last year's event, a connection was hard to come by - particularly because the venue doesn't have much an Internet connection to speak of. This year, Intergenia brought in a satellite link (it did last year, but that link caused some serious problems), and is working to provide a working, if over-taxed link.

(Keeping that link alive means blocking out certain bandwidth-intensive sites, such as YouTube and, unfortunately, Flickr, which has put a hold on me posting event pictures online. I will have use of an unfettered connection at some point, so keep checking back.)

The other big change is in the exhibit hall. Like the registration area, it has moved on to bigger and better things, located now in the "Wuze Town" area. While the exhibit hall at last year's event seemed more like an afterthought, this year's area is the real thing, dominated by elaborate displays from primary sponsors Microsoft and Parallels.

Finally, the sessions have been divided up differently. This year there are no "main" sessions overlapping with the workshops, forcing attendees to choose between workshops and main sessions. This year the main schedule takes place in the morning, with workshops in the afternoon. Attendees still have to choose between overlapping workshops (four are scheduled for any given time slot), but it's certainly more possible to feel like you've attended the whole event.

Webhosting Day 2008 - My Generalization Debunked; My Suspicion Confirmed

Approximately an hour and a half after being driven to my inspired "just let them pitch it" conclusion, which I described in a blog entry yesterday, I saw a presentation that went against my feeling that presenters in general are unwilling to make (or are discouraged, directly or indirectly, from making) a sales pitch, and confirmed my feeling that an outright sales pitch would serve the presentation better.

At yesterday's 4:45 session "Server 2008 and IIS7 - New Hosting Opportunities with Microsoft Hosting," Microsoft Deutschland's Web platform architect evangelist Bernhard Frank took the opportunity to deliver a pretty unfettered sales pitch.

Granted, he had the built-in advantage of being scheduled to deliver a session on the features of a piece of software that is generally of interest to Web hosting providers, which sort of fundamentally made the "infomercial" feel more like information and less like a commercial. But an even more fundamental fact of the situation was the simple fact that it was a good presentation.

That is, it was interesting and engaging throughout. And I believe that a lot of that had to do with Mr. Frank apparently not feeling like he was under any pressure to carefully soften the message with a lot of possibly-irrelevant contextualizing. What we got instead was an unapologetically straightforward look at the features and functions of Microsoft's new products. No harm done.

There was a bit of PowerPoint, which I suppose is pretty inescapable as far as seminars go, but he cut that off at one point to project his laptop on to the big screen as he logged into a remote server and updated a website to include a FastCGI module by changing config files, and apply an application to a live site.

And the presentation concluded with a video showing how Mambo could be set up on a remote Windows server in about seven minutes, using the advanced Windows hosting package, in a process that did away with a lot of time-consuming troubleshooting and many pages of documentation-reading.

Maybe this is no real revelation, but I couldn't help but feel impressed with the degree to which we'd actually been provided practical information. Then again, maybe that's an indictment of typical boring tradeshow fare. I think I'll hold off on making a sweeping generalization either way this time.

And yes, I realize that the intricate workings of the newest Microsoft applications is not interesting information to everybody. But as I mentioned in the other post, the name ought to be enough to steer the profoundly uninterested in the direction of a different session.

Losing Sight of the Little Things?

This post was guest blogged by Alan Johnson, who has just started to accept private ads over at The Rating Blog.

For online entrepreneurs, just like for anyone else, the little things play an extremely important role. You will, for example, end up remembering more than a few moments you’ve spent with your beloved ones down the road, even if, at that point, you didn’t necessarily see them as something special.

Far too many entrepreneurs end up letting their busy lifestyle get the best of them and, unfortunately, most end up realizing just how wrong they were when it’s far too late. Everyone knows that success has its price, but how much are you really willing to pay?

Take it from a person who has “been around the block” for a while: you should never make the huge mistake of underestimating the importance of little things, and helping you understand just that is what the article is all about.

Too Busy Is An Excuse, Nothing More

First of all, I’ll start with the little things most people end up neglecting in life, such as the quality time you spend with your children, wife or husband. In today’s world, it’s easy to use the fact that you are busy as an excuse but really, who are you trying to fool here?

If you think that the only thing you represent to your children is a walking paycheck, you couldn’t be more wrong. Do you know what your children actually need? They need you, as a father or as a mother, they need your personal involvement and they need you to listen.

Do You Really Listen?

So you’ve had a hard day at the office, it isn’t the first time and it will most likely won’t be the last either. A lot of people make the mistake of using their busy lifestyle as an excuse for not listening. They come home tired, too tired to get involved and too tired to listen. They think that, compared to their own issues, the problems their children are facing at school or in everyday life are not really that important.

But guess what: they may not seem important to you, but they are most definitely important to your children, and that’s the only thing that counts. “I’m tired, please don’t bother me”, “Daddy has had a hard day”, “I’m far too busy, maybe next week”, does this sound familiar?

I will tell you this much: you will, at a certain point, regret each and every time you had such an attitude. So you’re making a killing and are able to secure a certain lifestyle for your family? Sorry to burst your bubble, but there are far more important things than that. Your children need you, they don’t need expensive gifts.

Money Can’t Buy Everything

Down the road, you won’t remember tax season and you most definitely won’t remember the TV shows you’ve watched. Treasure each and every moment spent with your beloved ones because, in the end, that’s really the only thing that counts.

You see all sorts of seemingly successful people who would like to make you think that career is everything but, in fact, most of the times, they are empty inside and that’s not a pretty picture. It’s the little things we experience everyday and, a lot of times, don’t pay attention to which make everything worth it. Family, that’s what counts; everything else is scenery.

I’d like to end this article by telling you this much:

You can deplete my bank accounts, you can take away my home, you can take away my car, you can take away every single thing I’ve ever bought and I will not be afraid to start over. Money can be made, properties, cars and all sorts of other objects can be bought. But on the other hand, take away my family and I’m a nobody.

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