Hostingcon - Second Day
The second day of the conference was a little better of an experience. Maybe it was a change in my realization of the type of conference this was going to be and the audience that is here.
It’s primarily audience (from what I can tell) is, a lot of sales people, managers and CEOs. Not necessarily the everyday sysadmins and developers. I could be completely wrong about this but that’s what I’ve noticed so far. The other group of people are just small 1-3 man teams that are just getting into web hosting but don’t necessarily have a lot of business or web experience outside of servers.
One thing the conference has made me realize is how important it is for me to take my own advice. I spend so much of my time working on other people’s brands and projects to make them successful and almost no time doing the same thing for myself. Why is that? Well, it’s hard to look at yourself in the mirror and it’s even harder to work on non-billable work.
Whether the conference had this agenda or not - I need to figure out how to have the team do more of the billable work and I need to focus more on the business and not only growing the brand but being more articulate on what we can do and making sure that falls inline with the business objectives of the people we support. Whether that be through hosting or consulting.
Another thing I think the conference has been doing a good job at is telling people to think about hosting outside of just “web” hosting. You can host images, you can host videos, you can host company collaboration. There’s quite a bit to explore in this area. This is also where applications are being either developed or people are partnering with other software vendors. For example, hosting images is Flickr’s job. Are they a hosting company? Quite possibly. What about video (YouTube) or company collaboration (Microsoft Exchange, Zimbra, Google Docs, etc…). Are these companies really just hosting companies specializing in hosting specific data?
It wasn’t the part of the original focus for Eventable to be a place to host your event but maybe it is? Or maybe we partner with other people like Upcoming.org or Eventful to fulfill our overall service or offering. Something interesting to think about and how we can provide virtual real estate for people and companies in niche areas.
Brian Says:
Philosophical questions pertaining to hosting? Is Google a hosting company for keeping my search history, storing my emails, and their Google Apps stuff?
I went back to the latest Business 2.0 this morning and read up a little more on the semantic web. How will that be incorporated into hosting?