First and foremost a great big thanks to all who attended the show and had a chance to stop by our booth or visit with us at various networking events.   This event provided a venue for us to meet clients, visit with vendors, and of course meet a series of new people in the industry.    Don’t hesitate to give us a call or email to discuss any of your dedicated server, grid hosting, or virtualization needs, now or in the future!

The setting was once again The Navy Pier in Chicago, Illinois and HostingCon 2008 brought some familiar faces and new faces to the event, which provided an unusual surprising and great event for those that attended.   This year also brought prizes, giveaways, drawings, and even a board game that was introduced by TechPadAgency last year called “ServerMania“.

HostingCon started it’s pre-show game show by announcing that it had been acquired by iNET Interactive.  iNET Interactive is the company behind such properties as WebHostingTalk.Com, Hotscripts.Com, and a series of other tech related properties.    The show was sprinkled with iNET Interactive staff members and I was informed that next’s years show will be held in Washington DC.    I am speculating that the keynote will be either Obama or John, but only time will tell.     I recently read, Obama loves to hang out on WebHostingTalk to keep up on the latest trends in the Web Hosting Industry and his plan for offshore drilling, might also include some offshore data centers!

As expected a line up of super star speakers took the stage with a change in theme.   Last year at this time the buzz of the industry was Software As A Service and a shift has taken place to discussions centered around Cloud, Grid, Elastic, and Virtualization platforms.    John Pozadzides, CMO of LayeredTech spoke on these technologies with a session called “Every Cloud Has a Silver Linking” and booth #301 engaged with ongoing conversations about this technology.

A few companies stepped up the schwag wagon with Nerf guns, game console giveaways, champaign, root beer floats, cash money, beer tickets, and even a chance to win a Harley Davidson motorcycle.    The conference hall was filled with WII’s, Playstations, and XBoxes with live games including RockBand, Basketball Shootouts, and WII Sports.      LayeredTech also brought some a console, which consisted of a Live Grid Demo, and giving away the best prize of all:  KNOWLEDGE (just a quick plug and opinion here).

For the second year in a row the night ended with a rooftop networking event that included fireworks and yet more games! My night ended with a very competitive game of ServerMania, a board game focused on acquiring the most money and highest number of servers possible.    While I was defeated in my quest to conquer the board game as I had the least amount of servers and money, I did notice that the winner seemed to have a distinct advantage over his competitors as he CREATED the game!