TheWHIR Blogs - Derek Vaughan Web Hosting Marketing

Website Hosting CEO's

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 11:30:21 -0500

By Derek Vaughan I have had the pleasure of speaking with several website hosting small business CEO's in the past few days and I have come to realize that there are four basic types of small business CEO's in my experience. Of course there are CEO's with multiple characteristics mixed together, but they almost always seem to fall under one of the four basic types. Here are my categories - based on real-world experience and conversations. I'd like to acknowledge the help of a small business CEO who helped to formulate this model, Mr. Daniel Foster, co-owner at UK website hosting company 34SP.com. Here are the four basic website hosting small business CEO personas. The ''People Person'' CEO - All CEO's have charisma of some description. People are naturally drawn to those individuals who make people feel good about themselves as well. The ''People Person'' CEO is at the highest end of this scale. I was speaking in a conference call this week with a small business CEO and he was constantly asking those on the conference call questions like, ''Do you remember that guy? He was really fun. Remember how he used to do this thing and we would all laugh?''. His point of reference was clearly on the people side of the equation. Which brings us to his opposite - The ''Number Cruncher'' CEO.

HostingCon Puts Website Hosting in Focus

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 18:01:25 -0400

By Derek Vaughan This is the second day of HostingCon 2009, and there have been many great educational sessions, a sold out exhibit hall filled with hosting vendors, and plenty of opportunities for networking with other web hosting professionals - many of them from other countries. The WHIR networking booth saw heavy activity as the exhibit hall opened today. According to show organizers, iNET Interactive, this year's HostingCon event attracted fully ten percent more attendees than last year - no small feat in this down economy. While I'll let others get into the specific details of the sessions, there were excellent presentations over the last day on metrics and how to use them to mange a hosting operation, how to manage a web hosting business for success in this down economy, and what's to come for the future of cloud hosting. Many of web hosting's biggest names have presented and delivered tremendous value with practical and actionable information.

HostingCon Morning Day 1 Summary

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 10:42:27 -0400

By Derek Vaughan It seems only a brief time since the last HostingCon in Chicago, but HostingCon 2009 has now arrived. On Saturday I went out to get a jump start on things near the Gaylord Hotel which is the show hotel just outside Washington, D.C. A short shuttle trip takes you into downtown Washington near many of the nation's monuments and national museums such as the Smithsonian. In the evening on Saturday I met my first fellow HostingCon attendees at a local piano bar. The owners of UK hosting company 34SP.com - who had traveled to Washington, D.C. from the United Kingdom. and also some friends from SpamExperts - who had also traveled from overseas to attend. We talked a bit and enjoyed a great night of piano playing and fun.

It's Official - Twitter is a Search Engine

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 08:52:46 -0400

By Derek Vaughan As I among many others have speculated recently, Twitter has now essentially become a real-time search engine. The transformation was completed today with the introduction of a new homepage design with the search box front and center.

The Google Outage According to Twitter

Fri, 15 May 2009 02:21:25 -0400

By Derek Vaughan News flash - Google suffered an outage. You wouldn't have been able to read that information on Google News though, it was down too. In fact, from all indications every single major Google service was broken for a while yesterday. And that spelled trouble for any web hosting company that uses Google Analytics. That's because since Google Analytics is hosted by Google, with code embedded in the web hosts' website and potentially the order form. The effect is a slow down in site performance and ultimately - orders. If you want to see a graphical representation of just how huge our dependence on Google is - check out this graph on bandwidth usage from Wired Magazine.

HostingCon Speakers Selected

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 04:14:05 -0400

By Derek Vaughan I have been a speaker at every single edition of HostingCon since its inception. Thanks to an email that I received the other day my string will be unbroken. The email read in part:

Cisco to Enter the Web Server Market

Sun, 15 Mar 2009 13:55:59 -0400

By Derek Vaughan It is widely reported and expected that within the next 24 hours networking and communications technology company Cisco will announce its entry into the blade server market, thus extending its expertise and revenue from switches and routers in the data center to web servers. The original speculation regarding this move began to emerge in January after a blog post by Padmasree Warrior on the official Cisco blog about something that Cisco calls ''Unified Computing''. Just what is this? According to Cisco, ''Unified Computing is the advancement toward the next generation data center that links all resources together in a common architecture to reduce the barrier to entry for data center virtualization. In other words, the compute and storage platform is architecturally ''unified'' with the network and the virtualization platform.''

WebhostingDay Nearly Sold Out

Tue, 03 Mar 2009 02:52:41 -0500

By Derek Vaughan According to event organizer, Thomas Strohe, the fifth annual installment of WebhostingDay is nearly at full capacity. This is quite a shock, given the current state of the world economy and the fact that the conference is still weeks away. WebhostingDay 2009 is slated to be held from March 18 to 20, 2009 at Phantasialand in Bruehl near Cologne, Germany. Mr. Strohe has confirmed that there are currently over 2,000 attendees pre-registered for the event. This represents an 80 percent increase over last year's conference. Additionally, the venue itself holds only 2,300 people, indicating that this year's WebhostingDay event will sell out. I am planning on attending this year, and I came to find out a couple of weeks ago that the primary hotels inside the park for the event were already full. Therefore, the only rooms currently available are those about 2 kilometers away from the event. It is likely that these rooms will be completely reserved soon as well. The bottom line for anyone desiring to attend WebhostingDay 2009 is this: get signed up right away or risk not being able to get a spot.

Gmail Worldwide Outage

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 07:21:09 -0500

By Derek Vaughan Earlier today I was using Gmail and had some trouble logging in. This was just before lunchtime here in Europe where I am currently living (before any decent waking hour in the U.S.). After being frustrated and checking all the usual suspects - connectivity, browser lockups, rebooting - I came to the conclusion that *GASP* Gmail is down!