Yesterday I attended the HostingCon 2013 Australian Symposium, having never attended one of these and being somewhat new to the hosting business I wasn’t sure what to expect.

Most of the speakers talked about Cloud, a subject for me that has always been somewhat vaguely defined especially once the likes of Microsoft got involved and made the term non-IT specific (we all know the TV ads : Want to share your file/video with your parents… Put it in the cloud).

From private cloud to public cloud, from Microsoft Azure cloud to Amazon cloud people spoke about them all, buzzwords floating everywhere. Surprisingly though no blatant adverting from any of the speakers. It was interesting to hear that all of the Cloud hosting companies were all struggling with the same thing: Competing with the big guys (Amazon/Microsoft). These companies have such a massive infrastructure and the ability to run up machines (in the cloud) within a few clicks or even as an automated process using APIs that smaller cloud hosts could never compete.

This turned the conversation to reselling Amazon / Microsoft cloud, working as a value add as opposed to a competitor. An interesting concept for the cloud guys but not really relevant to us here at Sanity.

Mid-morning saw a different topic: Miwa Fujii from APNIC speaking about the importance of being IPv6 ready, a topic that all Data centres and business should be aware of.

Post lunch saw Jon Eaves from Indigo with by far the most entertaining presentation of the day, during which he mocked an industry report for contradicting itself, mocked a few other things then put Ross Cheetham (of Crucial Cloud hosting) rather amusingly on the spot (my assumption was they were friends but it turned out later that they’d never ever met).

Ross from Crucial Cloud didn’t fail to entertain with his “Next big thing”, stating that his belief was the next big thing will be an AppStore for cloud hosting. An environment where you can not only select what apps you want to run in the cloud but also where you want to host them, with the ability to easily swap hosting providers with a single click if required. To me this seemed crazy, I’m old school! Software runs on a computer, what do you mean I can change that computer and the datacentre it’s in by clicking somewhere on a screen?

In summary the day was very enlightening about “The Cloud” and how everyone saw it and how different companies are rolling it out for different customers, with insights on where they saw it going in the future.

It was great to get to talk to people afterwards about their hosting data centre experiences and it was great getting to tell people about what’s going on here at Sanity with our expansion. The requirement of the cloud hosting guys is something we’re definitely going to take into account with the expansion. As the industry moves forward “In to the Cloud” Sanity aims to be at the forefront of the datacentre industry for Cloud hosting companies and going forward we hope to have the opportunity to work with these companies to ensure that we are the data centre of choice when somebody is looking for somewhere to put their “Cloud”.

Kris