So things are finally back to normal for me after an AMAZING convention in Chicago. Alex and I were lucky enough to meet 90% of the FastServers.NET team and man was it fun. From meetings, and cruises to Chicago Style Pizza we had a blast. We pretty much hang with the same group of the industry leading individuals that attend these events. Some but not limited to would be Aaron and Shane of FastServers.NET, Ben Welch of WebHostingUnleashed/ResellerGuide, Sean and Dan from ModernBill/dNzoom, Steven from Insider Hosting and brother Brandon, Dave and Eric from cPanel, Tito of Microsoft, Todd of SwSoft, the crazy Devin and Jeremy from PingZine!, Dave and Sean of TouchSupport, Carlos and Jess of Applied Innovations, Hal from Netwisp, Matt from WebHostingBuzz, and new friends Amy of Lunarpages, Ben from TechPad Agency, Michael from Webhostingstuff, man we met so many people in Chicago it’s hard to list them all. We even had the chance to meet a few of our reseller customers which was great! It really gave us a good perspective of our our customers view our company and operations which is always a good thing in my eyes.

If you didn’t make it to this year’s HostingCon I highly recommend attending next year. Word has it that it will be in the same place the Navy Pier in Chicago (Wonderful area). This show just keeps getting better and better every year.Definitely wouldn’t miss it for the world.

This year Day 1 was mostly traveling and getting situated so night 1 consisted of drinks with the fastservers team when we landed then we attended the networking reception outside the convention hall which was really nice.

Day 2 was the first day the exhibit hall was officially open so that consisted of a lot of networking with various vendors (Lots of great new things on the way for H9ers!). We also had some really neat postcards (I’ll post those at the bottom) we were handing out at the fastservers booth which were a big hit. So after a day of hard work the night came and we headed to the fastservers + tophosts networking cruise which was a huge hit. Three hours of relaxing industry talk on the lake was awesome. I was really blown away by the skyline in Chicago. After the cruise we all headed to a local bar “Leg Room” with the cPanel guys which was a ton of fun.

Day 3 was a ruff one after the long night on Day 2 so we pretty much took it easy most of the time on the convention floor. Around 6PM we headed to the rooftop BBQ after a meeting with modernbill and it was great. Live music with some of the leading individuals of the industry just relaxing. No phone calls, text messages, IM’s, just straight up relaxing which is what I think we all get to do about… once a year haha. Around 9PM or so the fireworks started which was really cool. Then we all headed back to the hotel and hung out with the FS.NET guys and got that Chicago Style Pizza ohhh yeah.

Day 4 I don’t really want to talk about because it consisted of horrible delays and traveling haha.

Well that pretty much sums it all up. I’ll leave you with some nice pictures of Chicago and of course a great picture of Alex and I on the Networking Cruise haha

Can you spot the H9?

This Web Hosting Talk review really made our day. LiamW, who’s been in the web hosting business for 6-7 years, signed up with HostNine last fall after reading an interview with Rick, our CEO. He says we’ve delivered on value, uptime, service and support - and he’d recommend us to anyone!

Thanks for giving us a chance, Liam! And happy 6 month anniversary!!

By the way, if you think you might possibly be interested in HostNine but aren’t 100% sure, here are some factors we hope you’ll consider:

1. Many hosting companies offer live chat and toll free phone lines just for sales inquiries. Not us! You can reach HostNine in real time, any time, both before *and* after you become a customer. We’re available 24/7/365, by live chat, phone, email and Yahoo!/MSN/AOL IM… At the moment, we don’t support courier pigeons. But we’ll consider adding that after moving to our new office next month.

2. As far as we know, HostNine is the only reseller hosting provider that takes care of migrating not just your website but your customers’. For free!

3. We won’t nickel and dime you. Our reseller hosting packages include *everything*. A free domain name. Free ModernBill. Free SWSoft SiteBuilder. Free Fantastico. We think it’s so not cool that some hosting companies charge you extra for each of these items!

4. We’ve got a special offer going on - use the “H9″ coupon code and get 50% off your first payment. We’re sure you’ll be as happy as Liam has been, but if for any reason you’re not totally satisfied, we offer a no-questions-asked 45-day money back guarantee.

So won’t you join us? Please?? We promise: you’ll be glad you did!

Ben Gabler, our Operations Manager, was a speaker at the ModernBill Administrators’ Workshop in Louisville last week.

He and Sharon Koifman (far left), CEO of Empire Host, led a session on reseller hosting. Here they are with (left to right) Carlos Caneja, CTO of Applied Innovations, Dan Kimball and Sean Stafford from ModernBill, and Steven Mizrahie, the Head Honcho at both InsiderHosting and HTTPme.

After the first day of sessions, everyone headed over to The Pub at 4th Street Live. Here’s a picture of cPanel Swiss Army Knife (that’s his title; it says so on his card!) Eric Gregory (left) with Dave from ModernBill. They’re the reason why cPanel and ModernBill work so well together. Thanks, guys!!

And here are Ben and Sean with Devin White (far left) from PingZine. If you’re in the web hosting business, you might want to subscribe to PingZine.

As the conference was wrapping up, the ModernBill folks gave us a tour of their HQ. Check out the sign above their developers office.

Lifehacker.com says two monitors can increase productivity by 20-30%. ModernBill’s developers get three. It’s no wonder they’re always announcing new features.

The event was a great chance to learn about our vendors’ development road maps (Microsoft, SWSoft, Ensim, Register.com and Enom were there, too) and network with ~100 other web hosting providers. Next month, we’re heading to Orlando for ISPCON, and Houston for the cPanel Training Seminar. If you’re planning to attend either event, please let us know!

If you walked into HostNine’s office on any other day, the music you hear probably wouldn’t be a symphony. But this afternoon we came across composer and pianist David Sosnowski’s website. Since he’s a customer of ours, we thought we’d check out his MP3s. We really like The Realization of Light. And Piano Sonata #7. And Lucifer and Gandhi.

Writing music is hard work; David says each minute of The Emergence of Time took over 24 hours to compose! Listening to his recordings made us really proud that we’re able to play a tiny role in making his music available to his many fans.

David’s been with HostNine since January. He says he’d high recommend us to other musicians because of our “uptime, support, technical excellence and value”. Thanks, David!!

In order to provide our customers with the latest and greatest at HostNine we have decided to start a company blog. This will allow us to not only keep you up to date with the Network and internal changes at HostNine, but it also allows us to really keep in touch with our customers as here at HostNine we’re a very customer oriented company.

What can you expect to read on the H9 Blog? You will find useful information such as Network and Company announcements, employee updates, server changes, important security announcements, Hosting Industry news, and much more!

We will also be adding a Staff Profile section to our website so you can get a chance to see who you’re working with on a day to day basis as we feel that’s very important for you as a HostNine customer. The Staff Profiles will include pictures, information, and interviews of our staff as well as our management team.

As always if you have any suggestions/feedback please do not hesitate to contact us at anytime.