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The lengthy title of the blog entry is taken from the title of the presentation given this afternoon by Paul Hirsch at 2:30 in the presentation theater area of the exhibit hall.

I’ve gotten to know Paul as the founder of Equentity and as a WHIR blogger and regular contributor to WHIR magazine. He’s also a moderator on WebhostingTalk. But this year, he’s at HostingCon representing the nascent hosting association of which he is one of the early architects - the Association of Internet and Hosting Service Providers.

Paul says the idea was formed at last year’s HostingCon, and came from a conversation about the needs of the business that could be addressed by something like that. The conversation led to a real determination by a few of the people involved that they were going to do something about it.

The other people involved in the project at the moment are Dan Garon, who does media, marketing and PR work for hosting providers, and Michael Yablonowitz, CEO of hosting provider Uplinkearth.

He was very careful in the presentation to make the point that what he’s discussing isn’t a matter of “us” and “you,” or rather that he’s not out to dictate the terms, but to invite the people here to take an active role in shaping the organization.

He outlined the “lacks” that he feels make it necessary for there to be an organization. Saying that smaller businesses need a means of acquiring benefits, insurance and accounting, tax and legal resources. Larger businesses lack crisis coordination, a body of research and technical certification. And all businesses lack a unified public voice, political representation and standardized recognition of good business practices.

He listed what he anticipates will be the priorities of the organization (more specifically, of its members) in this order: employee benefits, business standards, technical certification, public/media relations, legal resources, research repository, broad political representation, an upstream crisis network, accounting resources, a certified employment portal, insurance.

I’ll admit I have certain negative feelings associated with the “high hopes” sort of optimism that can’t help but be going into this organization at the moment. And of course there have been several failed attempts to organize similar organizations in the past.

Paul says the main reasons those past efforts failed was simply that the project is a lot of work, and at this stage it’s a lot of thankless work. To his credit, Paul is pretty obviously committed to the cause and is determined to put in that work.

I’m not so sure that was the only reason they failed in the past. Earlier efforts at forming hosting associations have also been determinedly and unmistakably small-potatoes. And I think the emphasis on things like benefits and legal resources - necessary things that would definitely benefit the smaller organizations - have the effect of turning off the larger organizations that might consider being involved.

I’ll admit I’m very intrigued by the idea of an industry organization with the power to create and dictate policy for the industry - policy in the sense that it could determine standards of practice, or verify certain common claims. For instance, it would be great if somebody could explain precisely what “green hosting” refers to, or at least assemble some unanimous thought about what could rightfully claim that distinction.

It’s going to be a difficult battle though. He says the association is in the process of pulling together volunteers at the moment, and that he expects it to begin accepting actual paid membership at the beginning of next year.

Right now, he says, they’re working (and need help) to create committees, write the standard of conduct, establish certification standards, help establish the dues structure, help develop technical systems, help recruit and donate money.

Long-term the success of the organization is obviously going to depend on its legitimacy, and its legitimacy is going to depend in large part on the ability of the people involved to convince certain of the big organizations in hosting to get on board.

Obviously, there are certain companies that are just never going to see the benefit in getting involved in an organization like this. I’d imagine Go Daddy would be a pretty tough sell, since that company has a pretty solid tradition of doing things on its own. Not bothering to attend HostingCon, for instance, is a good indicator of a general lack of any drive to get involved in something like this. And companies like these would probably also hesitate to make themselves accountable to the policies of an organization they can’t control.

But there’s a kind of chain of influence they’ll have to climb. And I can see it being possible. With each company they bring on board, it’ll become easier to get the next, bigger company involved.

Hopefully they’ll get to the point where they’re actually able to do some good work.

Paul says people interested in getting involved with the association can fill out a form on the website.

He says filling out the form basically says “I’m interested in learning more and basically helping out in some way.”

If you’re at the show and are interested in getting more info from them or getting involved, they’ve got a booth that was donated by George Roberts and the conference, number 221.

Conventions aren't just about the meetings, the exhibit floors, the deals, the lunches, the drinks, the food or that business card whereon you wrote those important notes in SandScript. It's about bathrooms.

No, not Navy Pier, they understand “restrooms”.

I am talking about the W, not as in George W, but as in W Hotel. The HostingCon 2008 Convention hotel of choice.

My room came with a 50 page annotated instruction manual; everything is named with a “W”. The room is like a Zen garden. It has a therapist’s couch in the corner and a black square pillow on the bed.

Back to the bathroom: About four feet from “my side ofthe bed” is the wall between the bedroom and the bathroom. No problem, except some moron decided us Zen Buddhists must like windows in the bathroom – I did not say glass – it is a Zen hole in the wall. Yes hole in the wall. It has caused a few problems in my otherwise blissful marriage.

If you are staying at the W and need dinner reservations dial ext. 8 for the Woncierge.

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NCC - New Commerce Communications 

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ONE DAY LEFT - On Wednesday attend my M&A Seminar Flip that Hosting Company at 4:30 PM.

The first session I moderated yesterday morning revolved around SPAM and new trends in dealing with this problem.  One of the questions I posed to the panelists was whether new ways of dealing with SPAM are simply RBL’s that you pay for.  I think, however, that that is not the case.  Dealing with SPAM and the way it affects your network is one of the key ways of dealing with, and minimizing risk, for your company.  Advanced methods of addressing SPAM are a great way of doing this.

From a legal perspective, SPAM poses two risks to your company.  The primary risk is that a  SPAM outbreak cripples your network.  Network outages lead to large contract claims, and may affect your ability to get reasonably priced insurance – the linchpin of any risk mitigation strategy.  The second is more of a nuisance issue:  e-mail outages are the largest source of  letters demanding “$100,000 for missed business opportunities”  because of a missed e-mail.  Assuming you have a decent TOS, these claims are typically easy to deal with.  However they take an inordinate amount of legal time to handle, and, depending on your settlement profile, may actually involve some outlay of cash to address.

Another convention, another time, another day. It started off like so many days before. That half a**ed shower, the Monster Loco Mocho energy coffee drink and obvious Nigerian cabby talking without a breath on the cell phone until heard "$7.30".

Yes I’m back the toddling town, the city of big shoulders, that windy city…yes - Chicago.

HostingCon 2008, you could smell it in the air.  Like locusts the attendees tried to find the back end of  Navy Pier. Registering they produced two forms of positive identification and matching business card to obtain their tricked out badges. You would almost think they were trying to vote or something. I call it organized.

 Working against the clock we poured coffee (Got to give Navy Pier a  thumbs up on the coffee) and chose from a wide selection of assorted do-nuts and Danish. On to a 9 AM panel. It should be an interesting day.

 PS…If are trying to call me at the office this week I am not there.

 More about Tom:

NCC - the Hosting Business Broker

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At HostingCon attend my M&A Seminar Flip that Hosting Company

Speaking of Tucows (I was speaking of Tucows and its OpenSRS rebranding in an earlier post, which you have almost certainly read already, but which you can reach by clicking here), I sat in on a presentation by Adam Eisner, the domains product manager at Tucows, this afternoon.

Full disclosure - I like the guy, so I had a bit of a rooting interest going into this session, but it was pretty commendable in a couple of ways.

First and foremost, it was only just barely an ad for Tucows, which is always nice to see in this kind of venue, where presenters far too often veer into sort of shameless self promotion.

As much as I appreciated the delivery, the content of the session was nothing really cutting edge. That’s not a criticism of the content, really. To his credit, Adam’s angle in presenting it was basically “I’m surprised more hosts don’t get this.”

Anyway, to paraphrase the presenter, I suppose, I’m surprised more hosts don’t get this.

His advice for building a buyer friendly hosting business was mostly tips for designing your website, messaging and strategy to produce an offering that speaks to the kinds of problems that the people that buy hosting are trying to address.

For example, a chart listing features and pricing doesn’t really speak to a small business owner that wants to bring their business online.

He also expressed surprise that hosting providers don’t put the tools for domain registration (and discovery) front and center. As kind of the platform on which just about every hosted service sits, it doesn’t make sense for the domain name function at a web host to sit anywhere other than first on the agenda.

And not having a full suite of services like SSL certificates and email hosting (all of them available from private-label partners like, say, Tucows) just makes it necessary that each of your customers that needs one of those services has to go buy them from another provider that is probably going to try to up-sell them on the other services they provide, which may cost you a hosting customer.

No earth shattering revelation in any of those - just a lot of common sense. But it’s surprising the number of hosts that appear to need to sit through that kind of advice.

On top of all that, he made a couple of points that resonated in particular.

First, that hosts in general seem to be inclined to sell to a selection of customers he summed up by saying “webhostingtalk.com.” Those are the customers (and the general audience for the popular hosting message board) that buy based on capacity and pricing and almost nothing else, and would probably be attracted to the kinds of numbers-and-features marketing that fails to address the real customer problems. Those capacity-focused customers, should you succeed in attracting them, are almost certainly going to leave your company as soon as someone else offers them a better deal on bandwidth.

Secondly, it’s surprising how many hosts’ domain name search function punish customers for not using the proper url syntax in typing in their search, and completely ignore the possibility of steering those searchers in the direction of aftermarket domains, or a functioning domain suggestion tool.

That last point, I’m certain he made in a presentation at last year’s HostingCon. But I’m surprised that with all I hear about the growth of the domain aftermarket, there are a lot of hosts who haven’t got around to building those functions into their offerings.

That’s sometimes the thing that strikes me most significantly about HostingCon each year. Not the amount of repetition that seems to be going on, but how necessary that repetition seems in a lot of cases.

The first panel I attended this morning was the marathon two-hour marketing forum that ran from 9:00 a.m. until 11:00 a.m. and featured six panelists along with a moderator.

Specifically, those panelists included Amy Armitage of Lunarpages, David Dunlap of WebHostMagazine.com, Ben Fisher of TechPad Agency, Aaron Phillips of Layered Tech, Hartland Ross of eBridge Marketing Solutions and Derek Vaughan of HostMySite.com. The moderator was Brett Tabke of WebmasterWorld and PubCon.

Given the all-star cast and the monster time slot, the session got off to a pretty slow start - a bit of a repetition of an almost-the-same session with almost the same cast from last year’s HostingCon.

Partway through the discussion, though, things got hung up on this “social media” issue. That is, it veered away from questions like “how do you divide your budget between PPC and organic search?” and started to focus on how these companies incorporate things like Twitter, Facebook, Digg, LinkedIn and all of the many various things that fall under the social media umbrella.

There was a split over that question, with several people (particularly Tabke) singing the praises of Twitter and urging hosts to use these new tools to drive traffic, and several panelists (particularly Vaughan and Phillips) saying they don’t see the returns from this kind of effort.

I’m not going to rehash the conversation wholesale here. But it seemed like a good jumping off point for some discussion of some of the big social media tools and their possible marketing impact on your business.

First of all, there are certain things that might not fall under the general umbrella of “social media” but that do effectively serve some of those functions. Blogs and forums are great ways for companies to interact with customers and maintain and strengthen those relationships. Sure. This much is pretty much a given. But I’m skeptical about the extents to which those efforts need to be expanded to include every possible venue for pursuing that kind of contact.

Is Twitter cool? Maybe. It’s definitely popular. But it’s probably worth noting that some of the most successful hosting folks in the room (Phillips, Vaughan and HostMySite’s Lou Honick) were all pretty vocally skeptical of its importance.

The community building features of social media seem, to a certain extent, to enable a hosting company to market in a somewhat new, somewhat interesting way to its existing customers. Whether that turns into a real tangible ROI is where I have my doubts.

On top of that, there’s a real question of how genuine these efforts by Web hosts to involve themselves in social media might be. Do customers really crave “Facebook friend” style access to their hosting providers? If these hosting providers just pay lip service to their social media efforts, there’s not much value in that at all.

I think that’s an important point, too.

I ran into Ben Fisher in the hall a couple hours after the presentation (he mentioned, by the way, that the session was organized largely by TechPad and that they purposely set out to sort of pit the marketing company people against the web hosting company people). And I told him that I wished they’d given the proponents versus opponents of social media disagreement a little more room to grow. But he pointed out that companies like LunarPages and DreamHost have carved out a real niche as companies that embrace these kinds of technologies - that there’s an actual market for companies that make a genuine effort to use this stuff.

That’s part of it, but there’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg question there. LunarPages and DreamHost are companies that are appreciated specifically for their efforts to be transparent, and to be engaging and to make themselves available to customers in a personal-relationship sort of way. I think their success, and their niche, is more a function of that attitude than of any particular tool being used.

One more thing I took away from that conversation, however, surprised me in that it left me feeling more positive than I expected about the marketing potential of these social media tools. Basically, I started thinking “why not?”

Why not make yourself available via LinkedIn? Why not create a Facebook group, even if it’s just for those few people who want to engage with your company in that specific way? Why not use Twitter? None of these things is particularly difficult to do, or requires an overwhelming amount of investment of labor to maintain. It might be pretty simple to create a return on investment when the investment is so small.

I might not be 100 percent convinced, but I’m not quite as dismissive as I was this morning.

I’d be pretty interested to hear if there are any readers out there that have had really positive experiences trying to market their hosting businesses with social media tools. Post in the comment section if you have.

On my most recent peek at the budding exhibit hall, I noticed an exceedingly colorful display I hadn’t seen before. It turned out to be the in-construction Tucows booth or, in this case, the OpenSRS booth - a bit of a monument to the big branding move the company is making starting today.

The look of the booth coincides with an announcement the company sent out over the wires this morning about the re-launch of the OpenSRS brand, though it has been the name of the company’s domains platform for years.

I’d heard a bit about this, but today was the first official word on it. According to the press release, the company is announcing “the return of the OpenSRS name for its wholesale reseller services group,” which as far as I understand it is the large bulk of Tucows business.

Along with domains, the OpenSRS brand now covers SSL certificates and email, along with its new “personal names” service. That is, as far as resellers are concerned, Tucows is now OpenSRS.

Tucows seems to still be operating the same software download site at tucows.com, but the reseller.tucows.com domain is now redirecting to the nice-looking new site at opensrs.com.

According to the posting on that site, the company feels “we feel this name best captures our heritage as a provider of services to hosting companies.”

As you can see from the pictures, the imagery involves a cute little milkman type character and an old-fashioned looking logo. It all seems intended to evoke the company’s history and reputation among resellers, as well as a sort of friendly service approach. The press release says it’s meant to recall a 50s-era company and “a time when service mattered most.”

The character they describe in the press release as “iconic” might actually be a little bit more generic, but it’s a nice looking booth. I like it.

I’ll have to find somebody and ask them today, but I also get the sense that we’ll generally be referring to Tucows as OpenSRS from now on.

Justin Lee is going to be talking to Tucows tomorrow about the change, so we’ll have a more informed discussion of the change up.