HostingCon is taking place this week in Los Angeles, California. The event is in its 13th year. I’ve personally attended it for the last few years, though I’m not in attendance this week due to it being held so close to WHD. This year will be the last time the event takes place.
According to a statement issued by the organisers earlier today the event doesn’t fit with the new owners overall strategy:
As you may have recently heard, Penton Information Services, including the HostingCon brand, was recently acquired by Informa. Operating at the heart of the Knowledge & Information Economy, Informa is a leading business intelligence, academic publishing, knowledge, and events business. The combination of the two businesses adds balance and breadth to our portfolio, further expanding upon valuable insights for the hosting space and provides increased opportunity to learn, network and grow via a robust lineup of technology events. Due to this change and substantial shifts in the market we have made the strategic decision that HostingCon Global 2017 will be our last HostingCon Event.
Informa organise a large number of other events that serve the technology space so there won’t be any shortage of events in their own portfolio to fill the gap.
It’s not clear if the HostingCon brand will be acquired by anyone else or if it will be simply extinguished.
It’s 2017, so with other companies such as WHD organising big events in both Europe, the US and further afield maybe the market no longer needed HostingCon. Or at least not the event in its current form.
WHD Global, which was held last week in Germany, attracted over 7 thousand attendees from the four corners of the globe. With HostingCon now officially gone there might be space for the company’s event WHD USA to grow.
Either way, while it’s always sad to see an event be cancelled there are always plenty of other ones to take their place.
That kinda sucks. I was planning on going next year.
Seems to be plenty of other hosting conferences.