At HostingCon 2006 I had the unique opportunity to attend as both an exhibitor and as a panel member in a keynote round table discussion. Our interactive “Jeopardy-style” game show was an overwhelming hit and earned two out of three awards from TopHosts.com, including Best of Show. A more in depth look at the convention and our booth itself, as well as a fun overview of after hours partying, will appear in an upcoming blog.
This update is going to be my chance to speak about topics which most of the industry generally agree on, as well as some notable points of debate. Our friends at WhirTV were on hand and now have video of the entire round table online.
You can find part one at: http://www.thewhir.com/tv/aug202006/.
Part two is located at: http://www.thewhir.com/tv/aug272006/
A general theme at HostingCon was the quality of customer and technical service. No one will ever claim that impeccable service is anything but an absolute necessity, but I believe FastServers goes about offering that service differently than many others in the industry. I was the only CEO on the panel who is the head of a dedicated-only company, which in our particular case has always been a plus. We’ve been able to redefine the exact way dedicated server customers are able to obtain whatever levels of support that are appropriate for their particular strengths and limitations. At FastServers.Net, we’ve always felt that if we expanded our scope of hosting options, our ability to pinpoint exactly what support is appropriate for this particular segment of the market would decline.
A point of strong disagreement I had with some individuals at HostingCon, including a few on my panel, was the commoditizing of the industry as a whole. As with any industry in existence there will always be a commoditization of sorts to cater to customers who base their buying decision solely on price. While these customers could theoretically contribute to our revenue stream, it would be extremely hazardous for the remainder of our customer base, which is paying for, and receiving high-end service and support. There is simply no good way to commingle bottom feeders into the exact same support system as our customer base who have come to expect our enterprise level service and top notch support replies and response times.
My final area of disagreement with others at HostingCon this year was the notion that virtualization was going to sweep the industry and be the hottest product for years to come. There are instances where a VPS solution will work and many times work well -no arguments here. As you our valued customer very well know, most of the solutions that FastServers deploys are both very inappropriate for a VPS solution, and very necessary to deliver the end needs of our customers. The ability to share resources and infrastructures is always a vital necessity for any type of hosting, that argument was absolutely correct. A fact that often times gets overlooked is that the cost of delivering a server with enough resources to handle a few VPS accounts could many times be more than the equivalent dedicated boxes translating into similar resources per server. While we never rule out future offerings don’t look for a major VPS push from FastServers any time soon!
Although we didn’t have the exact same ideas for all existing and future industry trends, it’s always amazing to hear how similar most of our stories are as we grew up in this industry. It’s also very refreshing just how much we all do agree upon, and at the end of the day one statement is very safe to say. We’re all working towards a continued evolution and respect of the hosting industry itself both in the tech sector and corporate world alike. Our philosophies as a whole are far more similar than they are apart and that can only be a positive for this industry.
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