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The Association of Internet and Hosting Service Providers introduced itself this week at HostingCon. I emailed Paul Hirsch, the group's Founding Committee head, for his thoughts on how the announcement went. His responses are below. [MD]: How did the AIHSP debut at HostingCon go? [PH]: The debut itself went very well. Our booth received steady traffic the entire event. We were answering questions and collecting information from interested attendees even while we were tearing our booth down the last day. People tell me the launch speech I gave on Tuesday on the exhibitor's hall stage was very rousing and successful. It wasn't taped, so I haven't seen it and I don't know for sure, but it's encouraging to get this sort of feedback. Many vendors of all sizes expressed interest in taking an active role in ongoing formation efforts, and a few larger companies have expressed a willingness to consider publicly endorsing our efforts.
[PH con'td]: I think what surprised me the most was the amount of optimism people shared with us. I expected more mixed reactions, some people completely on-board, others skeptical or downright opposed. While I'm sure it existed, we met with very little of the negative side, and we tried hard to canvas the entire convention to ensure we got reactions from as many different people and businesses as possible. We came into this with realistic and at best cautiously optimistic expectations, and we were rewarded with a much warmer reception than we expected. Those who did have some reservations were very open about them. Just to give you a little additional perspective, Liam Eagle from The WHIR expressed his mixed feelings here [link]As you can see, even his reservations are expressed with a degree of optimism and support. The industry has every right to be skeptical. I'm glad it is less so than I thought it would be! [MD]: How was the experience for you personally, Paul? [PH]: HostingCon was a blast for me. It was nice leaving my own personal business agendas at home and concentrating on both AIHSP and on representing WebHostingTalk.com. I'm a moderator in the WHT community, and I was brought in to be a part of their booth as well as to have the opportunity to evangelize for AIHSP. The two other principle AIHSP founding committee members, Dan Garon and Michael Yablonowitz were on-hand to handle a lot of the booth responsibilities and to pass out literature to attendees. This left me plenty of time to handle both obligations (WHT and AIHSP). This is the third year iNet (the owners of WHT, and the new owners of HostingCon) has asked me to represent WHT at this convention, and it's an honor every time. It's also a lot of fun, since roughly 1/3-1/2 of the conference participants have been active on WHT at some time in their lives - the community has nearly 200,000 registered, so the odds are in favor of this. Related Story: Trade Association for Web Hosts Unveils Monday Interview by Nathan Hawks |
