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If you didn't attend the 4th annual cPanel Conference this month, you missed out. Attendees enjoyed some serious learning, great hospitality, and an overall fantastic time.
2009 was by far our largest cPanel Conference ever, with over 180 attendees registered. Folks came from places as far away as the Netherlands, India, South Africa, Japan, the UK, Ireland, and Bulgaria. The cPanel Conference was, as it usually is, representative of the webhosting industry: international in scope, friendly, and professional.
The event took place at the Hilton Americas in Houston, Texas. The Hilton was a step up from our past venue and, by all accounts, did not disappoint.
The first day's activities gave everyone a chance to meet up and relax before the start of the Conference and 2 days of nonstop learning. We kicked off the festivities with a networking reception held on the 24th floor of the Hilton. From there, Conference-goers saw commanding
views of downtown Houston, sampled great drinks, and enjoyed the most delicious hors d'oeuvres you can imagine.
From the 24th floor, the action moved to the hotel lobby bar, which Softlayer graciously kept open as long as anyone was willing to hang out.
On Tuesday, the first day of the Conference sessions, we provided breakfast and unlimited amounts of much-needed coffee. Then we kicked off a boatload of advanced technical sessions from the cPanel technical analysts, quality assurance staff, sales personnel, and
developers. Topics ranged from DNS clustering, to cPanel's customer service philosophies, to Enkompass, to the effective use of strace on Linux servers, and everything in between.
Tuesday culminated in a sumptuous feast at the Hilton. The food was excellent, the company was even better, and a lot of good discussions took place. From there, we took the party to Joystix. For those of you who missed it, Joystix is an old-school arcade with a phenomenal
collection of vintage and new video games and pinball machines. As is the cPanel way, we made sure everyone had a great time by means of an open bar and cPcache handouts (more about that below).
Post-Joystix, R1Soft was generous enough to hold their own after-hours networking event at Pub Fiction, which was just a short cab ride away. This event lasted until the wee hours of Wednesday morning. It was a great opportunity for networking with industry peers.
Informative exhibitor sessions were another way that the cPanel Conference 2009 set itself apart from other conferences. We only allowed exhibitor talks that provided useful information and relevant topics, rather than a sales pitch. The sessions were well-attended, as folks presented material that our attendees found genuinely useful.
Throughout the event, everyone who attended sessions was paid with cPcache, the official currency of the cPanel Conference. cPcache was spendable at the cPanel Gift Shop at the registration desk, and allowed attendees to purchase all manner of cPanel-branded goodies,
from messenger bags to Callaway sunglasses and Fossil sport watches. It was a great way for Conference-goers to get some seriously cool (and more importantly, useful) cPanel schwag.
After the event, we asked attendees what they liked, what they didn't like, and what they would like to see next year. As always, we plan on acting on the desires of our customers and will make sure that cPanel Conference 2010 is just as great as, if not better than, 2009!
cPanel would like to close by thanking all the exhibitors at the Conference for their participation. Our sincere gratitude goes out to:
The WHIR, Microsoft, Layered Tech, The Planet, R1Soft, ServerTune,
Softlayer, Trustwave, CentOS, OpenSRS, Commtouch, Bobcares, Spam
Experts, SingleHop, Comodo, Codero, HostDime, Soholaunch, VPS.net,
GlobalSign, and NetDepot.
You can find all the conference session slides here.
If you're active on our forums, you may vote in our poll as we're trying to determine which days of the week work best for attendees. It's a great way for you to influence our planning for cPanel Conference 2010. The poll is located here.
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