The HostingCon 2012 took place in Boston, MA and had the biggest number of participants this year. Over 1,900 web hosting industry experts gathered at the John B. Hynes Veterans Memorial Convention Center to share their knowledge about new trends and technologies in the industry.

Presentations

While attending HostingCon, Spark::red’s team was able to enjoy numerous presentations and panel discussions that covered such wide topics as new technologies and services for web hosting quality optimization, marketing strategies and tools to promote web hosting related services/products, management tips for startup IT companies and much more.

The presentation that really impressed me personally was the one given by Noam Wasserman, the author of the book ‘The Founder’s Dilemmas: Avoiding the Pitfalls that can Sink a Startup’. Noam was talking about the most common challenges founders face and ways to overcome them. You can get a better idea about the topic from this video.

This was the first time we attended the HostingCon. That’s why it was a great honor that our founding partner Devon Hillard was invited to share his experience with different hosting providers along with other experts from Yotta, Crashlytics, Vsnap, ProfitBricks and Chargify. During that discussion the panel primarily talked about the pros and cons of hosting with SoftLayer, Amazon, GSI/Layered Tech and Rackspace. You can find more information on that topic from this video.

Exhibition

A great part of HostingCon 2012 was an exhibition of web hosting related services and products. Along with well-known and established companies such as Trustwave, SoftLayer and Parallel there were some new impressive technologies presented by new market players. For instance, CloudFlare’s web performance and security optimization services as well as the Coyote Point’s load balancer appliances definitely caught our attention.

Entertainment

One thing that we really noticed at the exhibition was the creativity of its participants – starting from the way their booths looked, to the various forms of entertainment that were provided. Video games, air hockey, mini car racing and much more made this networking event unique and created an environment that allowed seamless communication to occur.

Besides learning a lot from the educational part of the program, we also were able to have a lot of fun and even won two nice remotely controlled helicopters!

We want to give a big thank you to the HostingCon 2012 organizers, sponsors and participants. We really enjoyed that event and hope to see YOU there next year!