WorldHostingDays - the largest hosters conference (report)

By the nature of their work, they often come to various conferences to keep abreast of everything new in the field of IT. This time we hit the world's largest hosting conference - WorldHostingDays. We will try to tell a little about this conference for the Russian-speaking audience, who goes there, how it happens and what can be learned there.

The conference, without exaggeration, is the largest in terms of the number of participants. It takes place every year, in Germany, in the small town of Rust, on the territory of the amusement park Europe Park. This year we are participating in the conference for the third time. For now, as participants, as our potential customers do not go here yet.

Worldhostingdays, further WHD, last year gathered about 4,200 participants. This year the number of participants is about 4,500 of which more than half are top managers and heads of major companies. So this is a great place to make new, useful acquaintances and establish the necessary arrangements.
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The conference takes three days. The first half of the day - the session in the main hall, then a free lunch + rides in an amusement park, paid for by sponsors. In the afternoon session in different rooms.

It can be noted that most companies use the time of their reports solely for the promotion of their services and products. Especially large companies are sinning with them, their reports are usually the most boring and it is quite difficult to extract something useful from them. Whether business, the company is less which just begin the climbing. They can already hear about some interesting technological innovations, techniques and useful tips from personal experience.

A little about the reports themselves

Most of the reports in one way or another are devoted to the subject of clouds or cloud services. It is worth noting the two most interesting, in my opinion, companies in this market.

Onapp and Flexiant - these two companies provide a comprehensive solution for launching their cloud, focused primarily on small hosting companies, the so-called SMB sector.
In Onapp, the solution includes support for three Xen, KVM, WMware hypervisors, as well as an integrated storage system that allows you to run a small cloud, even without buying expensive SAN solutions and a CDN system.
Based on this platform, we soon plan to launch our own clouds.

From the Russian-speaking companies or immigrants from Russia attended Ispsystem, Parallels, Cloudlinux.
By the way, Cloudlinux has a rather interesting solution for hosters that allows you to strictly share memory, apache and mysql resources among users within a single server. That allows to avoid the most frequent problem of beginner hosters, when one user can "eat" all the resources of the server.

The full schedule can be viewed on the conference website.
www.worldhostingdays.com/en/agenda-130319.php

Exhibition

In addition to the reports on the forum, there is also a large exhibition hall where companies present their new products, play prizes and communicate with visitors.
This year the exhibitors were:

Video conference reports

Parallels report: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrjaZ-ynBIg
Official video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXuMh--9XTc

Presentations from the conference

Download presentations from the conference here: www.worldhosting.com/ru/whd-2013.php

Conference photos

Stand Supermicro. At the participant’s right shoulder bag - every WHD participant received one. Conveniently enough, there to collect useful materials from the conference and all sorts of nishtyaki.

The stands of large companies, as for me, were big and boring. As a rule, they didn’t take any action, and the communication basically came down to the exchange of contacts.

HP

Intel

Microsoft

Samsung

AMD - their booth was nicely decorated, in the form of a board covered with formulas

Cloudlinux.

But these guys a special thank you. Their solution made it possible to significantly increase the density of clients on servers and at the same time allocate them with a guaranteed amount of resources. So we have on the hosting, now almost like at the UPU, each with its own dedicated resources and alone no one can put the entire server.


Also from companies with "Russian roots" were

Ispsystem

and

Parallels

Almost on every stand there were some jokes. Unfortunately, there were very few really interesting actions, most of them were reduced to “leave us a business card, and in the evening we will win prizes.” At the first WHD conferences, there were contests and more interesting, for example, on the speed of server assembly.

Prizes for the most part were Aipads of all versions, but there were exceptions.

Nikon D5100 raffle

The drawing of the watch Pebble watch. Those hours on E-Paper.

On the left in the photo is Thomas Strohe - founder of WHD conferences.

Symbolic photo turned out. Cpanel and WHMCS build a tower together.

Let me remind you recently that Cpanel has acquired perhaps the largest developer of billing for hosting companies.

This year, finally, they organized the Internet Lounge - a special area where they could work on the Internet.

Between the restaurants in which dinners were organized and the place where the sessions were shuttled by train.

P.S. The conference was held March 19-21, but we only got to publish the report now, as far as I saw, except for us, no one published the report.
In addition to the large WHD.Global conference, there are a number of small, local conferences. Last year, on November 15, one of these was held in Moscow. This year is also planned, so if you're interested - follow the schedule.