HostingCon 2011 in San Diego may have been a huge success for SoftLayer, but I walked away with a different experience following my intense pursuit of building the PHIL’s DC brand. Apparently, the hosting industry wants to see my data center succeed before they believe it, and I think it’s really just fear rearing its ugly head. People are afraid of what they don’t understand, so the uninitiated would probably be terrified as they try to learn what I’m doing.

In an effort to help some of the bigger names in the hosting industry get in on the ground floor of PHIL’s DC, I took a stroll down the HostingCon aisles. Vendors like Parallels and cPanel were obvious choices to discuss business partnerships, and I was sure TheWHIR wanted the scoop on the next big thing in hosting, so I made sure to give them all a chance to speak with me. The documentary film team I hired (the guy I met outside the San Diego Convention Center who said he’d follow me with a camera for $3.50/hour) recorded our interactions for posterity’s sake:

I’d like send shouts out to thank Candice Rodriguez from TheWHIR, Aaron Phillips from cPanel and John McCarrick from Parallels for agreeing to let us film our organic interactions. They’ve further inspired me to build a data center that will make these apparent “snubs” and “rejections” a thing of the past. To Summer and Natalie at the SoftLayer booth: Please stop making fun of my Server Challenge attempt every time you see me at the office … I think I had something in my eye when I was competing, so it wasn’t a fair measure of my skillz.

Oh, and if you didn’t get a chance to attend our “Geeks Gone Wild” party at HostingCon, you’d probably be interested in seeing video from The Dan Band’s performance of “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” cPanel posted it here: http://www.vimeo.com/28160105 (NSFW language, The Dan Band take artistic license with profanity)

-PHIL