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This is a no-brainer that can be hard to do. Family, friends, schools, pets all figure into the situation. But is should be on your plate.

Here are some of the top rates for state income taxes; Vermont 9.5%, Oregon 9% and New Jersey 8.97%.

Now there are many other states with high state income taxes. The California State Motto is Eureka "I have found it!" is aptly stated. After all California has a 9.3% state income tax rate plus a 1% kicker imposed on taxable income over $1 million. If I read the tax codes right that equals 10.3%.

Since it makes my case, let’s look at the worst case. You net $500k from your hosting business. In California you pay about $45k in state income taxes and another $155k in Federal Income Tax. So 40% goes to the government. Not to mention FICA, 8.5% sales tax etc.

So you decide to sell the business, it sells for $5 million. In California that adds about $500,000 of your money to the state coffers. You get $500k less. Your retirement fund just dropped $500k. That Ivy League school for the kids is a bit tougher to handle.

Do some family planning. Move to Florida, it has zero, nada, and no state income tax. So does Alaska, Nevada, South Dakota, Texas, Washington and Wyoming.

Now the M&A Part – Buyers don’t make up for the sellers shortfall. It is just as easy to buy a company in Texas as in California. Think this one over for a while.

So talk to your attorney and accountant, make sure everything’s legal and makes sense. Then come on down to Florida a couple years before you sell. You could add some $600k to the retirement fund. Oh yes, real estate is a bargain since the bubble burst.

Written from Cape Coral, Florida - Rather than our old Milwaukee diggs (6.75%)

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Parallels’ third annual hosting summit kicked off Monday with a record turnout and a warm welcome from Doug Johnson, Parallels’ director of marketing - service provider division.

He went over the various aspects of the summit attendees could take advantage of over the next two days, which consist of several sessions broken into three tracks: Business, Technical and Industry, as well as what has turned out to be quite a bustling exhibit hall, a schmooze-friendly networking lounge (which is sponsored by theWHIR, by the way, so come by and say hello to the friendly WHIR ladies!) and a hands-on lab where attendees can demo the various Parallels solutions.

The summit has been an eventful one so far, for me at least. I have had quite a few interesting conversations with some of the attendees (which have arrived from around 20 countries) and interviewed a couple of companies that are doing some uber cool things in this space, so look forward to our WHIRtv interviews with SolarVPS and SoftLayer in the next few weeks.

The general feeling seems to be one of contentment. Attendees are pleased with the presentations they’re sitting in on and many have said there is definite value in being at this event. Although it was closer to the end of the day, Dan Golding’s presentation was relatively well-attended as people eagerly tuned in for Tier 1’s insight into the managed hosting space.

In his presentation titled “Cloud Computing, Virtualization and On-Demand Services: Trends in the Managed Hosting Space” Golding discussed the various developments in Hypervisor and OS Virtualization and how each has been evolving. He stressed on the much-repeated mantra that virtualization was a MUST for hosting providers and the idea that OS virtualization was more of a “transitional” stage to be in. “The future will belong to hypervisors,” says Golding.

He believes it is very probable, in the next three to five years, to see every server with a hypervisor. And considering the industry’s particular interest in “green” technologies, hypervisor virtualization seems to be a great way of reducing some of that energy expenditure. Hypervisor apparently collapses server sprawl by about 20 to 1 and energy savings by about 20 to 3.

On the topic of cloud computing, Golding says it is definitely the area that managed hosts will be transitioning into with on-demand storage being the way to go. Golding was very enthusiastic about this and eagerly encouraged everyone in the audience to get the ball rolling on an on-demand storage offering, even if was only as a “protective” measure to keep their customers from turning to Amazon’s extremely popular S3 solution. “This is the time for on-demand storage” says Golding.

One other brief, but interesting point that has been mentioned at the summit is that Parallels will more than likely be holding another event in January (no real details about it yet) but it is highly encouraged that all attendees fill out the feedback form so they can have a say with where it occurs and how it turns out.

And now it’s off to Day 2 of the Summit!

As I mentioned last week theWHIR team is in attendance at the 3rd Annual Parallels Summit 2008. The event is taking place at the lovely Art Deco Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C. The day began promptly at 8am with a bit of a line up at the registration desk but the folks at Parallels were sure to sort that out before long. The attendee list exceeds 700, so I am certain that this event is the largest since its inception.

<img src=”http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3229/2505029603_0db9e477ce.jpg?v=0″ alt=”theWHIR Lounge at the Parallels Summit 2008″ border=”0″

The red shirt clad Parallels team is in full force because they seem to be everywhere. The Web hosting industry who’s who is also in attendance and includes Platinum Sponsor Microsoft as well representatives from SoftLayer, Comodo, Bobcares, SmarterTools , PlusServer and so many more.

<img src=”http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2026/2505860022_9b2c163210.jpg?v=0″ alt=”Exhibit Hall at the Parallels Summit 2008″ border=”0″

The sessions are well attended and the feedback I have received so far is that they are quite valuable, especially for the folks traveling long distances to network and learn more about the Parallels portfolio of products. If you are at the event be sure to stop by theWHIR networking lounge and leave your business card to win an 8GB iPod Nano. Look out for additional blog posts on this event as the day progresses as well as additional coverage tomorrow, along with WHIR TV video coverage in a couple days.

<img src=”http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2390/2505859668_088a932a6a.jpg?v=0″ alt=”Breakfast Day 1 at the Parallels Summit 2008″ border=”0″

May 19th and 20th is the highly anticipated Parallels Summit 2008. The 2008 event will focus on SaaS, Hosting, Virtualization, Automation and Green Computing. theWHIR team along with WHIR TV will be present and we are pleased to be sponsoring the Networking Lounge. A spacious and inviting networking space complete with wireless internet access and refreshments.

It is our pleasure to help facilitate important connections in the WHIR Networking Lounge and we hope to create the perfect environment for such connections. Feel free to reach out to theWHIR team as you visit the lounge, we will have our May Green Issue of WHIR Magazine on hand.

You will also have a chance to win 1 of 2 8GB iPod Nano’s that we will give away on each day of the event, in celebration of our 8th Year of Excellence. Stop by our table located in the WHIR Networking Lounge and leave your business card for a chance to win.

We look forward to seeing you bright and early Monday morning in Washington, DC. If you have not yet registered for the event you can do so here.

Have you been receiving emails from Eastern European women who want to sell you “enlargement” cream? Viagra? Perhaps someone has caught you naked on video lately? Or you’ve been contacted by Nigerian princes who want to give you millions of dollars if you just send them 50 grand?

As amusing as they can be at times (believe me, I get a good chuckle out of them once in a while), these are just a few of the messages you may be receiving by the hundreds, if not thousands, if your ISP or hosting provider isn’t using the right precautions to filter out and block spam from reaching your server and, ultimately, your inbox on a daily basis.

In comes a company like Cloudmark.

Cloudmark says it currently protects over 600 million inboxes across the globe through its advanced message fingerprinting technology and global threat network and is the most widely-integrated messaging security solution on carrier infrastructures worldwide.

WHIRtv recently sat down with Jamie de Guerre, CTO of Cloudmark (and fellow Canuck!) and got the inside on how the technology works and how big of an “epidemic” spam really is today.

In Superman III Richard Pryor is a computer programmer; he wonders where all those ½ cents at the end of payroll checks go. He puts them to good use…his paycheck. 

Charles WU - head honcho at CW Labs made one of those luncheon presentations that was actually interesting. In the middle of it I thought…this guy looked at something boring…and saw billions. All of a sudden it became very interesting. 

Unbeknownst to us he noted the slow death of dial-up. But sees dollars in that slow bandwidth…forget 56k…he likes 28k. Forget something in the future that may not work like 500 HDTV channels over the Internet, R&D is always a *itch…lets make some money.

During the presentation Charles used the word trillion…his graphics showed a bunch of lines connecting each other, sort of like a half circle, with arrows going back and forth. His R&D staff has invented some stuff, they want to put the ISP in this graphic. Somewhere near the top left, second dot down. He called it the money spot.  

Charles WU wants to put the ISP in the credit card processing system. He wants you to be part of that trillion dollar economy, the part that takes a ½% here and ½% there. Swipe that card and a bunch of people takes a slice of that swipe…someone has to do it.

Talk to WU if you want to understand the technical part, not my area. However there is hardware, software, intellectual property, licensing and other stuff involved.

In the evening Wu kindly gave away food and drinks as we gambled at a charity event. Everyone was happy.

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