Las Vegas was Awesome! Don’t think for a minute that the PLETH guys didn’t work, because we did, we met with every vendor attending HostingCon and sat through a big majority of the panel discussions and seminars they had this year and learned a lot… Not only did we learn a lot but we also left feeling pretty good about our company and where we are at as a service provider…

Even though we worked hard the entire trip we still found time to take in the sites and sounds of Vegas. Thankfully Kegal had been out to Vegas several times, while wearing his other hat as a corporate pilot, and he knew all of the places to go and things to do because I would have been lost. I think that you could probably take the Tunica, MS casinos and set them inside the lobby at some of the bigger casinos in Vegas. Their size was surprising. I couldn’t get past the size long enough to really appreciate the architecture that was all around on the strip. 

We stayed at the Mirage, where the conference was being held and it was unreal. You could literally get lost on your way to your room. Inside the casino there are numerous restaurants and buffets as well as shops all over the place. There is a Rolex, DKNY, Swim, etc. all inside the Mirage lobby. Every evening on an hourly schedule the Mirage has a special blast of their Volcano outside. We timed it just right and were able to check this out one night before heading out for Dinner.

Also, just down the strip at Treasure Island, they have an hourly showing of the TI Sirens, which is a realistic battle between two pirate ships. You might have seen this in the movie Miss Congeniality with Sandra Bullock. We made it down to see the show but due to all of the pyro involved they were forced to cancel because of high winds that had blown in. I was a little dissapointed but seeing the Fountains in front of the Bellagio go off while they played “Fly me to the Moon” made the whole trip worthwhile… (These are the same fountains that are shown at the end of the Movie ‘Oceans Eleven’) Since my wife and I are both Sinatra fans I really want to take her back there sometime soon to see this.

We really didn’t make it to any of the big shows there in town, not because we didn’t try… Alot of the ones we wanted to see were already booked, off the night we had time to go, or we were just too pooped to move. The Mirage, where we stayed, had Jerry Seinfeld, Wayne Brady, and Jay Leno signs up the whole time we were there. It is definitely a show town, and they are all big time shows.

The food was also pretty good, I don’t think that we at anything we didn’t like the whole time we were there. Even the omelet’s and biscuits & gravy from the buffett downstairs was good. Probably the best food was the last night we were there when we went to a Brazilian restaurant where it is pretty much all you can eat and they bring you an assortment of cooked meat. It was great and you guessed it I am now on a diet!

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Another very informative session at the conference for me was the Growing Trends session that was put on by a top representative from Hostway, Inc. They had spent a considerable amount of money this past year surveying their clients and identifying the top trends among todays businesses. I was surprised to learn that 43% of small businesses today still have servers and try to host their websites internally. This figure drops every year but is still surprising to me to learn this. I don’t think that this figure is completely accurate, but that’s my opinion. I find that a lot of the clients we see that have hosted their websites elsewhere have predominately all been in another data warehouse or hosting provider and very few try to manage their own servers, etc. I guess a few of the larger clietns we see today that have a full time IT department might still be hosting internally but I bet that they are likely looking to outsource to cut costs and reduce the workload of their already overworked IT departments.

Another trend that couldn’t be ignored was that Text messaging had become a vital part of a lot of todays operations. There was a lot of talk about how email was still considered by many to be the killer app, but there was no real email solution providers in attendance, other than Microsoft, that I could see. We felt pretty good in learning that messaging was earning it’s place in the service offerings arena because we had already been there for over 6 months with our PLETHWARE product.

Disaster Recovery and Offsite Data Backups also were popular buzzwords during the conference, and PLETH is already in talks with a software firm to create the ultimate CYA (Cover Your Assets) type of software application that will completely automate the tasks of backing up critical and sensitive data such as Quickbooks, Microsoft Money, and Microsoft Outlook contacts as well as a host of other software applications popular to todays small businesses and entrepreneurs. Offsite Data Backups for personal use also make a lot of sense to us. Take for example the fire-proofed safe that weighs 600 pounds that our parents use to house important documents and family photos inside their homes. Since most of the photos taken today are digital, it only makes sense to have digital safes to store these items in. A computers hard drive can fill up pretty quick w/ digital photos. Many of todays digital cameras will default to approximately 4mb or higher resolution per image, with the higher the resolution the higher the quality of the picture. This is a sharp contrast to the size of digital images even just a year or so ago, most of which were in the 2mb range with some defaulted to even smaller file sizes. In the event of a fire, or even a stolen computer system, an entire lifetime of digital photos would be lost forever, but with the offsite data backup solution in place, digital photos can be stored a mouseclick away…

Another trend in todays hosting industry that doesn’t really fit into the PLETH portfolio of business offerings was game hosting. Game hosting is extremely popular, probably moreso than any of us had really imagined. It wasn’t until I heard the new CEO from the PLANET, Doug Erwin mention that Insomnia365 was one of their popular offerings that it really sank in for me. In further talks with Julia Morgan, VP of Sales and Marketing for the PLANET, we learned that our network center was equipped with one of the most state of the art centers for game hosting in the world. Cortex, a gaming control panel, is already in place and available for our use should we decide to offer gaming as a service in the near future. We have been considering this pretty hard for the last few days and expect to have an announcement regarding gameserver offerings in the very near future…

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Don Best, from JamCracker.com was the guest speaker for this informative seminar highlighting one of the most popular buzzwords of the entire HostingCon 2006 Conference, SaaS. SaaS, an acronym for software as a service, is basically the wave of the future for hosting providers. For many years the hosting industry and development community have taken two seperate paths, but w/ the advent of websites like jamcracker.com, the roads have converged. Many hosting companies are now going to be offering specific software applications to their clients based on individual needs and not feeling the urge to hire out custom application work to development firms for various vertical applications. For instance, a development firm like PLETH, that has a particular application that is valuable to widget manufacturers, can really benefit by posting their software into the ecosystem of applications that are available and a hosting company w/out a design department or another development firm might have a client who manufactures widgets who could benefit from this product. In a sense PLETH has already been a part of the ecosystem, providing everything from Intranet solutions to Real Estate MLS IDX to clients across the United States, but I think that since the industry has decided to follow the PLETH business model, things will only be getting better.

In a seperate lunch conversation with Don Best, we shared our business model with him and how we service our clients and he immediately understood where we were coming from. That wasn’t a common thing at HostingCon in talking with service providers from other parts of the United States, in fact I would go as far as to say that most of the ones we talked to probably do not know their clients. The hosting industry as a whole is an inpersonal type of industry that strives to obtain quantity moreso than to provide quality of service. I have to also admit that prior to PLETH I was guilty of having this mindset, but I have seen that Hosting clients that are also development clients that trust 100% of their online presence to us are willing to outsource the technical aspects of managing servers, configuring dns, managing email configurations, etc. to a firm like PLETH than they are to try to hire a full time IT department. These clients also aren’t concerned in the least that they are paying a little bit more for web hosting since it also comes with support that is fanatical and around the clock. I can see many of todays larger firms eventually getting this and transferring the management of their web presence entirely to an outside firm as opposed to an internal staff of IT professionals who clock out each day at 6pm.
A couple of suggestions that we did hear that we will likely be incorporating over the next few months were:

- Offering Hosted Microsoft Exchange as a Service
- Providing a Disaster Recovery and Offsite Backup Solution
- Offering more Services geared toward Mobile Messaging / Applications

One of the other sessions we attended was for recognizing the trends that are growing in todays marketplace and one that I was a little surprised by but shouldn’t have been was mobile messaging. In fact, I was text messaging a friend as the speaker pulled up his powerpoint slide displaying a graph that showed many business’s today are using Mobile Messaging as well as bundled Mobile Applications in tandem with their regular management software. I was impressed that we had thought of this about 6 months earlier when we added SMS to our already robust PLETHWARE Groupware / Webmail solution.

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Today, we got a headstart on HostingCon by registering for our meetings early. Since the vendors booths didn’t open up until 3 or 4 in the afternoon we spent the morning in sessions w/ speakers from different companies in the hosting industry. It was very informative and we learned a lot about what the market is doing and where it is headed.

The first session we attended dealt with Business Continuity with an emphasis on Disaster Recovery. The speaker was the vice-president of ViaVerio, one of the worlds largest hosting providers. He touched on various things that could bring on disaster such as the blackouts in California a few years ago and also the events of 9/11. I think that the industry as a whole is shifting toward offering more offsite backup solutions for their clients, and PLETH is no different but instead of just offering space for storage in an offsite datacenter for sensitive data, we want to take it a step further, and maybe not appeal so much to the large fortune 500 clients that are out there but instead continue to offer our around the clock, world class support oriented service to the medium to small business sectors as well as the entrepreneurial community that might not have the luxury of having a fully staffed IT department but still realizes the need for offsite data backup of critical files and applications such as Quickbooks, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Money, etc. PLETH also realizes that for this solution to be totally effective it needs to be one that is totally effortless. By effortless, we mean that it needs to be one that is purchased by the client, software is downloaded and installed on their pc’s or servers, and a complete offsite backup routine is configured by asking a set of simple questions. From this point the software would run in the background by using simple FTP or SFTP protocol on an incremental basis. We also have discussed the fact that restoring data files should also be a painless process for our clients, or it is no good…

PLETH is currently in talks with a software firm developing a solution for offsite backups and disaster recovery automation software. Please check back to this blog really soon for updated information regarding this new startup from the same partners that brought you PLETH Networks, LLC.

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