One of the best parts of my role here at Tucows is being able to bring talented people into the company.

I’m thrilled to announce that Rohan Jayasekera has joined my team as Director of the Tucows Email Service.

At the risk of sounding like a stalker, I’ve had my eye on Rohan since I first met him at a BarCamp event here in Toronto a few years ago. I was impressed by Rohan’s deep insights on the topic our little “unconference” group was talking about (although I can’t for the life of me remember what exactly we were discussing) and when I got home I did a quick Google on Rohan and found a peer with an incredibly interesting background.

Rather than gush about exact how great a fit Rohan is, I’ll just point you to his blog post about joining Tucows so you can hear it from the man.

As James mentioned in yesterday’s post here on the Tucows Blog, Network Solutions Inc. caused quite a furor when they confirmed that they are “front running” (registering domains based on domain searches done by potential registrants).

After a contributor to Domain State broke the story, it was covered on Techmeme, Digg, Slashdot, and a host of individual sites and blogs, etc. and so on. Heck, it even made USA Today.

To be clear, Network Solutions officially denied they were front running:

Although Network Solutions does temporarily register a site a customer searched for, spokeswoman Susan Wade denied there’s anything nefarious afoot. “Network Solutions is not front-running,” she said. Network Solutions holds the domain for up to four days, during which time a customer can register it only from Network Solutions and after which it again becomes generally available if unregistered, Wade said. But that feature, she said, is a “pre-emptive” measure to protect customers–from front-runners. That’s because front-runners can tell when a customer has searched for a domain at Network Solutions, for example because Network Solutions then must check availability at other sites when a customer searches, Wade said.

Respectfully, this is spin. As many of those up in arms about this have pointed out, Network Solutions is effectively saying “we’re pre-emptively front running to help prevent others from front running”.  My guess is most people would say “thanks but no thanks”. I’m concerned however about an aspect of Susan Wade’s statement that others haven’t made much of, namely that registries are involved in Front Running.

“This search data is captured at the various registries. We believe there are registries and/or Internet service providers that may be selling this data to front-runners. So, by holding domains searched on Network Solutions, this pre-empts the search data being captured,” she said.

If Network Solutions has evidence of registries  - or any service provider for that matter - actually being involved in front running, I urge them to share this information with the Internet community so that we can all make sure that these people are called out for the practice and our customers can be told to avoid them in the future.

I was just thrilled that we finally got to make it official earlier today and announce that Bill Sweetman has joined Tucows!

Bill and I have known each other for about eleven years now - since the very early days of AIMS (the Association for Internet Marketing and Sales). Interestingly enough, Bill presented at one of the first AIMS events and his topic was domain names as marketing tools. Back than it was rare that anyone gave much thought to the domain name they associated with their “web page” and fewer still treated domains as the marketing machines we know they are now. Bill saw the opportunity when few others did.

Since then Bill and I have collaborated on various projects, including writing for One Degree where his domain-related posts where always the most popular on the site. He’s been blogging at Sweetmantra and podcasting at Marketing Martini.

I’ve come to have a very high respect for Bill’s opinion and I’m really pumped about being able to work with him on making our entire domain name portfolio a force to be reckoned with in the industry.

So Bill, let me make it official - “Welcome to the herd!”

On the second day of ISPCON I managed to stop event organizer Jon Price for a few moments and asked him about why he's been blogging up a storm at the ISPCON Blog.

(If you're reading this in your feedreader you won't see the video, but you can catch it by clicking here.)

I've long been impressed by the success of Dreamhost's affiliate marketing program, so when I had a chance at ISPCON to talk to Josh and Dallas - co-founders of Dreamhost - I had to ask about the program. They gave some really candid insights. Enjoy!

(If you are reading the feed you won't see the embedded video, so click here to see it.)

A few weeks ago, over at One Degree I had the good fortunate to interview co-author of the Cluetrain Manifesto David Weinberger about misperceptions people have of the message Cluetrain was meant to deliver. ISPCON gave me a chance to ask another cluetrain author, Doc Searls the same question…

(Apologies to Doc for cutting his reply short. The memory card in my camera seems to have given up the ghost. Sad yes, but this gives Joey and me a chance to check out the local Frys).

At ISPCON earlier today I talked to HostMySite.com CEO Lou Honick about how you use great customer service to attract new business.

Tucows as a large contingent at ISPCON in Santa Clara this week. Along with taking in the sessions, doing presentations, hanging out at our booth and generally connecting with customers and community, we're also looking forward to sharing much of the conference experience with you oh humble Tucows Blog reader. Watch for videos, podcasts and blog posts from and about the conference.

Following my previous day one report ,here are my thoughts on the second day of the two-day Tier 1 Research Hosting Transformation Summit.

Hosting Success Strategies - How the Evolution of CDNs, IDCs and the Internet effect hosting and content today and tomorrow

Phew! I think that might the longest title of the conference.

Tier 1's Dan Golding presented this session. He noted that we are seeing an unprecedented explosion in traffic - it's growing 5-6% per month. That means traffic is doubling annually. This is happening because of the rise of P2P, broadband and (in particular) online video.

His feeling is that this is what is driving network neutrality challenges. People now really want to use their DSL to the max and they still want more. Or as Dan said, “they're slammin' DSL” and access providers priced based on less use. That means increased costs while at the same time the market is getting more competitive so retail prices are going down.

A few random comments from the session - “Hopefully “Internet Engineers” will find ways to handle traffic on the backbone”, “content providers are now changing their transit buy strategy as pricing stabilize” and “The gigabit is the new megabit”.

How does this all impact IDCs (Internet Data Centers) and CDNs (Content Distribution Networks)?

For IDCs it's good times - colos are full, product is in demand, demand drivers not slackening, capital available for growth. But challenges are power/cooling, cheap IDC space is gone, if a recession comes what happens? Scaling is hard - customer service is harder. Scaling is the trickiest part of the business. Operating procedures and customer service sound easy but aren't. Demand is way up and supply is not keeping up. And high power density users are not welcome.

Some customers are not profitable (”demon customers” a la Best Buy) and some hosts are “de-selling” by using price increases and premiums for activities that aren't profitable.

How does it all come together? OpEx (Operating Expenses) have bottomed out - transit not getting cheaper, IDC same, CDN is still dropping but has logical limit.

Dan's Predictions? Growth continues. The CDN/hosting line is blurring. We need a “CDN Me” button for hosting customers so they can go to CDN without leaving host. IDC space crunch will ease up - new entrants in hot market.

Importance of Partnerships in the Hosting Ecosystem

Jon Zanni, MD, Hosting Business for Microsoft gave this presentation subtitled - “The software plus services continuum: Partner Opportunity in the “Live Era”

I spoke to a few people after Jon's session where he improvised over standard Microsoft slides outlining some of the roadmap and strategy around Live. Generally the things that jumped out for hosts in the audience were quotes like “Office Live is Sharepoint”, “When we started Office Live we didn't think about hosters, and to be honest we didn't think about developers either”.

One frustration for me (even as a non-host) was that Zanni often presented the Microsoft-oriented view of “Partner”, which means VARs, ISVs, Developers, Web Consultants, etc. Much of what I saw in the presentation in terms of the “ecosystem” made little sense for hosters.

I found it interesting that the latest iteration of their CRM has a single code base used for all deployments - On Premise, Partner Hosted, or CRM Live. There is only one thing a customer cannot do on all platforms (server-side .NET assemblies on CRM Live is a no go).

Jon finished with a “tip” for those in the audience - Check the SPLA - Service Provider Licensing Agreement - around November 1. Look for a new SKU that will help with virtualization and expect “unlimited instances” to be part of it.

During the A&A someone asked “Won't Microsoft want to own the whole pie eventually?” and Zanni replied (roughly), “partners are in our DNA. 85% of revenue is through partners. Models that don't follow that will be very foreign to us. We modelled doing all of Exchange ourselves. Multi-tiered won out as a model. We don't want to do another Hailstorm. There will be a big part for partners. I'm pushing for a MS-wide hoster strategy. The model we're looking at is that it depends on relationship model - if you get a bounty - we own, if you host them - you own, and if it is adCenter supported - we share.”

Is Shared Hosting Destined To Look Like An Ad Agency?

Morgan Lynch, CEO LogoWorks and Jeffrey Stibel, CEO of Web.com announced a partnership allowing Web.com customers to buy logos from LogoWorks. 60% of web.com's customers are new businesses so they see the fit as natural.

Lynch stated that, “Hosting” is a technology and that's not what small businesses need. They need a web presence. That's why the LogoWorks thing makes sense to web.com customers. “Hosting” is only as good as the content found there. Email, syndicated content, search, etc. web.com wants to partner with the best to offer these things to their customers.

Continuing on the theme of talking to your customers in their own language he pointed out that we should be saying web address, not domain - a domain is a technology and web site not hosting, which is once again a technology.

One of my favourite asides was that “there is no small business market”. Just because they are the same size doesn't mean a pizza place, a florist and a doctor's office are all the same and have the same needs.

Damn, only one functional outlet for almost laptop wielding geeks!

Is Virtualized/Utility Hosting Just A Pricing “Thing” After All?

OK, I'll be honest, this session pretty much went over my head. Apparently I need to do some research on this space and how it fits into the overall hosting mix.

On the panel were Vladimir Miloushev , CEO at 3TERA, Todd Abrams, COO at Layered Technologies, and Mike Tardiff, SVP Product Engineering and Development at Savvis.

Vlad was the most forthright of the bunch and had some really great observations, including - “Utility is when a service stabilizes. All utilities end up at self-serve. Therefore Utility Computing needs to be self-serve.”

Discussion around pricing models pointed out that while maybe utility computing should be about “pay as you go”, what is the “as you go”? Memory? Transactions? Speed? Vlad says “per transaction is a way to go” but that we're not ready yet.

This was probably the best session in terms of conversation between panellists and the audience.

Hosting Isn't Just Web Pages Anymore

The final session of the conference was lightly attended but probably an important one for hosts to get their heads around.

Colin Corbett of YouTube, Jim Corelis from STATS LLC, Anil Dash of SixApart, Dena Levin from SocialText and Michael Sawtell from The Family Post all took the stage to talk about their businesses.

YouTube - 100 million downloads a day, 40,000 uploads a day - got praise from everyone on stage for their transcoding of videos (upload anything, they'll convert to Flash which is easily served and seen by all).

Anil talked about personality and connection vs. “two business people in suits shaking hands in front of a server” stock photos.

These guys don't really think of themselves as hosts (Dena said “Hosting is not our core competency”)or see themselves as competing with web hosts. But consider how many of the millions of TypePad and LiveJournal users might have built hosted sites. Despite that I didn't get the impression the hosters in attendance thought of these companies as hosts either. I guess no one wants to be a host these days.

Oddly, the panel were also potential CUSTOMERS for a lot of people in the audience. Funny that. In fact, you could even think of someone like SixApart as a “reseller” of hosting provided by their colocation company. YouTube started with Managed Hosting but now co-locate. You could see dollar signs in some folks eyes as they thought about hosting YouTube or TypePad.

At this point the session kind of turned in to a focus group for big hosting clients. The general consensus was that “server in a closet, to managed service, to colo” was a natural path for web 2.0 businesses.

Someone asked, “how did you make a decision about your provider?” STATS made the jump in 24 hours once they realized they had to. Successful disaster recovery test and good relations was the strategy for Six Apart. When asked about certifications and their importance to the buying decision, Six Apart's Anil Dash said that ISO was nice to have and price was slightly important but by far the most important consideration was references. In fact he said they were the only thing that mattered. He wrapped up by admonishing that, “If someone came in to sell me now not knowing what a blog was, I'd be terrified.” YouTube looked for someone with a lot of capacity, transit, multiple networks, and “peering fabric”. Certification wasn't an issue.

I'd be interested on feedback on whether folks found me sharing these notes helpful. Originally I was doing them for internal consumption but then thought others might benefit. If you did let me know. I'd also be happy for feedback on how we can do even better coverage of upcoming events like ISPCON next month.

I spent the last few days in Las Vegas at Tier 1's Hosting Transformation Summit getting a taste of hosting in the 21st Century.

Rather than just pass around my notes internally I thought I'd share them with you faithful Tucows Blog reader. A word of caution - despite being in the business for 12 years I'm a relative newbie to hosting as a business so this was very much a “figure out what our partners are up against” kind of thing for me.

Hosting 2.0 Keynote

Andrew Schroepher President and Founder of Tier 1 kicked off the event with a keynote called “Hosting + Web 2.0 = Hosting 2.0″

Andy's core message here (and for much of the conference) was that “functional hosting” (companies that provide hosting for a particular type of online content - think TypePad, Flickr and Google's Gmail) are a significant threat to “traditional” hosting firms.

Essentially, such sites (while they might not see themselves as hosts) replace the need for traditional web hosting for some situations and the number of such services are increasing every day. Andy points out that a “web site” is not important to most people or businesses, but a “web presence” is. Hosts need to think about presence and how they can creatively help their customers be creative. He also nixed the suggestion that Web 2.0 concepts are just for consumers noting that most technologies adopted by consumers become business applications a few years later. Consumer adoption leads to business adoption because we're all consumers.

Andy made a logical argument that low-price services (he suggested less than $5 per month) might be better suited to ad-supported models. He also suggested that many services could “throw in the domain for free” as part of the overall cost rather than looking at it as a separate sale or line item.

One passing quip (in relation to consumer generated media on sites like YouTube made my ears perk up - “Everyone gets two and a half minutes of fame. 2.5 minutes is the new 15 minutes.”

Note to Andy from another presenter: You seriously need to rethink your slides. They're killing the impact of your presentation. You had a lot of great ideas here but the slides didn't support what you were saying - they were what you were saying. Take a day or so and read everything on Presentation Zen and Beyond Bullets.

Leadership Perspectives

This session included Kevin Rose from digg.com, Ben Horowitz of Opsware, Jonathan Crane of Savvis, Tony Klockenbrink of Egenera, and Anand Vridhagiri of AMD.

Anand at AMD started by stating that hosting company's concerns are costs vs. increasing computing demands, energy efficiency, IT manageability, resource utilization, and security. He then gave a pitch for AMD as a solution because it has 1P-8P scalability, best performance/watt/dollar, platform stability, open standards.

One interesting element of his presentation was a comparison of AMD's product mix to Intel's. He showed Intel's processor roadmap and pointed out that right now they have twelve different processors in the market, compared to AMD having one processor being phased out and another being introduced. Actually, he fudged it a bit since there are three or four variants on each AMD processor so there are actually six to eight processor types at AMD.

Ben Horowitz at Opsware, a data center automation service, talked about the companies origins at Netscape (1.0). After they were acquired by AOL, Ben worked on AOL Shopping and found they had a real problem because when they “turned on the AOL traffic” they would bring sites like Barnes And Noble to their knees. They started LoudCloud to answer that problem and then found that manual labour was an issue in hosting big applications. Hence Opsware which automates much of the manual labour related to software.

Ben made an interesting correlation between “manual” and “quality issues” essentially saying that manual processes lead to configuration errors and therefore required far more QA.

Tony's pitch was positioned as “Business Value Through Utility Computing” and talked about “achieving data center nirvana”. Key “opposing forces” to said nirvana are power, quality data center space, rigid infrastructure (one app per server, “server hugging”), proliferation of servers (physical and virtual), and software licensing. He talked about creating a “PAN” a Processor Area Network, similar in structure to a SAN (Storage Area Network).

Kevin Rose gave a quick explanation of Digg and showed digg swarm and digg stack. I'm not sure what he thought he was getting into as part of this session but it was clear that most of the others - particularly Savvis' Jonathan Crane - saw him as a customer.

Kevin shared some digg.com stats. The site is now getting a million visitors a day and daily page views range between 10 million and 15 million. He noted that they started with $99 shared hosting in the early days and while they have a MUCH more sophisticated hosting set-up now, they get real benefits from the nature of Digg. Since most of the site is text with lots of little AJAX calls, digg is very efficient. Serving up the site is not a significant headache.

On the other hand, the Diggnation podcast is a big hosting problem. Each weekly DiggNation episode is 200 - 300MB and they are getting over 300,000 downloads per week. And of course everyone hits the file at the same time. Apparently they use as service Cachefly to deal with this.

Kevin talked about how hard it was to deal with big companies when you are a small company (like being on hold for hours Sun vs. overnight shipping from Penguin Computing)

Jonathan talked about five things important to hosts and introduced what Savvis does. He also provided me with a new word for buzzword bingo - “MASP” meaning Managed Application Service Provider.

Someone said “IT is a “hair on fire” business” - they don't plan and strategize as vendors might like/expect.”

Kevin was all too correct when he said “I feel like that “I'm A Mac” guy from the TV ads”. He's much younger than most at the show and casually dressed in a sea of suits. I'd also note there were VERY few women present. Out of 200 attendees I doubt there were 20 women.

Power Huggers Are The New Server Huggers

This panel session moderated by Tier 1's Dan Golding featured Chris Dolan of 365Main, Tesh Durvasula at NYC Connect, Jason Starr at Equinix and Bill Minkle from TelAxis. I just caught the last bit of this session but they seemed to be having some really good interaction with the audience. Apparently “server hugger” is not a complement. Someone later told me they hate server huggers at Hooters too.

The Last SaaS vs. Hosting Discussion You Should Ever Need

Ah, a real panel session moderated by Andrew Schroepher from Tier 1 featured:

- Ravi Argawal, GroupSPARK

- Rob Bernshteyn, SuccessFactors

- Elliot Curtis, Microsoft

- Ian Wening, Zoho

- Treb Ryan, OpSource

- Dave Hofstatter, CallWave

The group talked about “ecosystems” surrounding services and “displacement” is a key issue with adoption. If people can't start quickly it's hard to overcome hurdles. Ease of use, and business value quickly delivered is key. Uptime is critical but to a certain extent it is determined by the type of customer you have and how critical they are.

Not a lot of time for questions left. I wish we'd had more conversation with the audience and more cross-talk between panel members - they basically took turns or said “I agree” and then repeated what the last person said. I think I'm getting spoiled by BarCamp and CaseCamp.

How To Succeed In E-commerce Hosting If You Aren't eBay

(Goodness Tier 1 likes loooong session titles)

Tier 1's Phil Shih moderated a panel with Jim Collins from Affinity Internet, Stephan Schambach Demandware, Andrew Schroepher subbing for Jackie Fisher of Digital River, and an unannounced addition of someone from GeoTrust/Verisign whose name I didn't catch.

Some random notes from the discussion:

Yahoo! coming into the market for hosting and e-commerce is a good thing (”validates the market”) and the panel generally felt that they'd never do a good job on small business support. Big Amazon partners (retailers using a white labeled Amazon site) are moving away from it. There was discussion about Target being able to drive traffic to a site that has not only products that directly compete with Amazon, but also digital downloads and other online services.

A real estate agent (for example) doesn't know about mash-ups and doesn't even want you to teach them about mash-ups. They just want they're listings to appear as bubbles on a map on their site “just like you see on Google”.

Schambach talked about brand. Small guys might want homegrown to build own brand, to differentiate, have a unique user experience etc. Companies need to “replatform” every 3 years - AOL, to web, to web 2.0. Demandware is SaaS ecommerce provider that allows people to customize their sites heavily. You wouldn't know one of their sites if you saw it because they all look so different.

Collins says lots of companies don't want (care?) about brand and differentiation. He made a bad joke saying that your nine-year-old neighbour isn't reliable as a web designer because he's now off doing his own web start-up (and suggested Kevin Rose was such a nine-year-old).

Analytics - Demandware has an analytics package - it's built in and does 80% of what stand-alone services do, but it doesn't require an analyst, it needs a merchandiser. Traditional small business owners don't care about analytics - they don't know what it is. They're more likely to say “that's your problem, why should I care?” or “If you are down a lot you don't deserve to be in the business”.

Can we help walk-in traffic for very small businesses? More and more even small providers are starting to drop out of the yellow pages.

Google and Intuit - Could Google Maps replace simple hosting? Not sure but Yellowpages.com might. But really you need an online presence where your customers are.

Lots of retailers graduate from Yahoo, eBay and Amazon because they want to do more and those guys can't offer it. “Those sites get a lot of people started but a limited mass market product doesn't meet all retailer's needs and we help them then”. “Yahoo is one of our best sources of new business.”

There are differences in Net retailing once you get outside the US. Schambach notes that Yahoo Stores aren't generally available outside North America. Europe is about two years behind US. Multilingual sites are a key driver - European companies are more interested in being multinational at the outset than US ones. Some differences in data privacy and currency conversion but they are not as big an issue as some people make out. Greater demand for integration with mobile services. Automatic translation just doesn't work - particularly for retail. But there are “human based services” that can automate through APIs.

Temperature Check: M&A and Investment Climate for Hosting Services

Andrew moderated this session that got moved from Day 2 to Day 1 (for no stated reason). The three panellists were Peter Hopper, DH Capital, William Charnock from EV1/The Planet, and Douglas Webster of Signal Hill Capital (with a name like that I was expecting Newfies.)

The EV1/Planet was a merger of two dedicated hosting providers. They both respected each other and often emulated each other. Having the founders out of both firms made it easier to get the deal done.

“Founder's Syndrome” - bubble had a big impact on people's vision of themselves and where their business can go. This time people are more realistic.

Pick any part of the market - valuations are up. Public companies have performed well and that makes a better market, but people still have a long memory and the bubble still impacts people”. “Multiples of revenue are really multiples of cash flow in drag”. “Watch that “public comps” are really comparable - sometimes they aren't”. “I can't believe all the healthy companies out there”.

The day ended with some Q&A and thoughts on the day with the Tier 1 analysts. Phil Shih made my day when he, without prompting or much context, recounted our buying Kiko on eBay.

I'll post my thoughts on Day Two in a few days. I was a bit more concise on Day Two, so don't expect an opus like this again!