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HostingCon Europe Review

8 October 2015

34SP.com Staff

Late September, 34SP.com colleagues made their way to Amsterdam to visit HostingCon Europe; the European edition of the world’s premier conference and trade show for cloud & hosting providers to gain insight on what’s new in the world of hosting.

With over 400 attendees, there was a lot to take in! Talks were held, covering a broad range of topics, stemming from the latest website builders on the market, another new wave of incoming tld domains and the impact this is having on the industry as well as a wealth of information regarding security and laws surrounding hosting practices.

With some great information coming from speakers such as Ludo Baauw discussing NaWas (Amsterdam’s national anti-DDOS scrubbing center) and Michiel Steltman, of DINL regarding data localisation and the best practices for handling this, it’s easy to see that a lot of great examples are being set here.

2015 as a whole has been an interesting year for the internet with many governments worldwide paying more and more attention to the way our data is handled. Panels with speakers such as ICANN’s Jean-Jacques Sahel discussing internet governance and a fascinating talk on interception law with panelists such as David Snead and Shelley McKinley from Microsoft were all highly informative, though it would have been interesting to see some further discussions on government policies regarding encryption (something which was briefly touched on).

Outside of the talks, there were a huge range of exhibitors with whom we met, not least our partners over at Weebly. Since our Weebly launch, a number of our clients have asked why, with so many content management options available to them they should opt to use Weebly over anything else, so while we had the chance, we asked them the exact same thing!

 

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34SP.com staff visit the Weebly stand at HostingCon Europe

What makes Weebly stand out?

Weebly is frequently described as the easiest platform with which to build a website, but what makes it so easy? Chris Sheridan spent time with our colleagues, showing us the ropes, demonstrating that with simple drag and drop tools, it was possible to build a completely customisable, professional looking website. No messing about with plugins or themes is necessary (though themes are certainly an option!) and there’s absolutely no need for accessing code at any time.

Weebly is the one of the few systems which empowers users with no technical experience to this extent. This is great news for developers too!

With Weebly, site designers can quickly and efficiently build striking websites (which are fully responsive, meaning they’ll be mobile ready from the outset) and then hand the reigns to their clients comfortable in the knowledge that their clients will be able to make simple adjustments without assistance.

As an owner, there’s not much worse than paying for a site to be built only to find you need to move 6 months later and the address needs updating on the website but having no facility to do this yourself.

With Weebly, there’s no need to spend hours working out which is the correct file to edit, worry about making a mistake and potentially breaking things or spend valuable time and money arranging for someone else to do this for you, it is quite literally a case of logging in, locating the page you want to change and editing the text by clicking it!

To put that in perspective, if you’ve ever written an email, made a post on Facebook or Twitter or even just edited a file in notepad, you’re ready to edit the text on your Weebly website!

This is great news and I’m certain that many of our clients can really benefit from this flexibility. Better yet, Chris let us in on some insider info about upcoming updates in Weebly and there’s a whole host of features that I’m really looking forward to getting to grips with.

Our thanks to Chris for taking the time to discuss the service at such length with us, and to our hosts in Amsterdam for an extraordinary event!