The CloudFlare team is heading to HostingCon 2015 in San Diego next week. We are excited to meet colleagues from the industry, reconnect with partners, and make new friends.

This year’s conference marks a milestone of sorts. It’s our fifth time at HostingCon and we’ve come full circle - our first HostingCon took place in San Diego. Here are some fun facts on what we’ve accomplished since our first HostingCon in 2011:

• 25 new data centers expanded our network to a total of 36 worldwide

• 2M+ customers served

• 800+ conference attendees transported in our signature limo service. If you haven’t already, sign up to arrive in style.

• 2,500+ Nerf guns delivered. Check out the new models this year in celebration of Railgun 5.0 launch

• 3,000+ CloudFlare t-shirts bringing smiles to our partners

Today, CloudFlare is trusted by over 5,000 partners who offer performance and security to millions of customers accelerating and protecting websites, APIs, and mobile apps. We work hard to deliver real savings for our partners. For example, over the past month we saved our partners more than 25 petabytes in aggregate bandwidth (roughly equivalent to 3.7 million hours of HDTV video); stopped 65 billion+ malicious attacks that would have impacted our partners' infrastructure. To find out detailed analytics for your own customers, log into the CloudFlare Partner Portal and check out this Partner Analytics blog.

The past 12 months have been particularly productive. We’ve added a number of partners, some geographically far flung, such as Hostnet (in Brazil) and Web Africa (in South Africa). We continued to innovate our technology to serve partners better. We’ve made it incredibly easy to offer CloudFlare across all your customers, launched ServerShield Plus (our security-focused offering for Plesk users), enabled Universal SSL for partners using full DNS, rolled out Virtual DNS to strengthen partners’ infrastructure, and released Railgun 5.0 (the latest version of our dynamic content accelerator).

There’s lots to celebrate. If you’re in San Diego for HostingCon, join us! Here’s what to expect:

• Complimentary limo transfers from San Diego International Airport to the Marriott Marquis and Marina Hotel on Sunday, July 26. Reserve your spot.

• CloudFlare-sponsored breakfast each morning with music from local artists

• Our signature Nerf Railguns (limited quantity). Be sure to visit booth #307 early.

• CloudFlare t-shirts

Sunday, July 26

• Limo transfers from San Diego International Airport to the Marriott Marquis

Monday, July 27

• 3:30pm-4:30pm: Cybersecurity panel, featuring our own Nick Sullivan

Tuesday, July 28

• 9:00am-9:50am: ‘Clicks, Not Cash: Give Users a Free SEO boost’, presented by Maria Karaivanova

• 11:00am-6:00pm: Exhibit hall

• 4:00pm-6:00pm: Happy hour! Visit our booth while sipping your preferred beverage

Wednesday, July 29

• 11:00am-4:00pm: Exhibit Hall

You bring the sunscreen, we’ll supply:

• Complimentary limousine transfers from Miami International Airport to Loews Miami Beach Hotel on Sunday, June 15. Reserve your spot today.

• CloudFlare t-shirts

• Live music during breakfast each morning to start your day off right

• Our signature Nerf Railguns (quantity is limited: be sure to visit us early at booth #407!)

As it happens, this will be my first HostingCon, I've just joined CloudFlare as Partner Account Manager. Stop by to say hi to me and the team and learn about our new features and products.

If you’re interested in becoming a partner, please drop by the CloudFlare Booth #407 to learn how CloudFlare can reduce your server load; improve the performance of your network; block spammers, botnets, and other web threats; and provide DDOS protection.

Here’s where the CloudFlare Team will be during the show:

• Limo transfers from Miami International Airport to Loews Miami Beach Hotel. Registration is open, reserve your spot now.

• 7:45am-8:45am: Breakfast, sponsored by CloudFlare - Level 2 of the convention center (there will be signs)

• 5:30pm-8:30pm: Welcome Reception

• 7:45am-8:45am: Breakfast, sponsored by CloudFlare - Level 2 of the convention center

• 12:30pm-6:30pm: Exhibit hall is open. CloudFlare is booth #407

• 4:00pm-6:30pm: Happy hour! Visit our booth while you sip on your preferred beverage

• 7:45am-8:45am: Breakfast, sponsored by CloudFlare - Level 2 of the convention center

• 12:30pm-4:00pm: Exhibit hall is open. CloudFlare is booth #407

We’ll see you in Miami!

The CloudFlare team will be at HostingCon 2013 in Austin next week. This is our third year at the show and we have a lot of things in store for partners.

Here's a sneak peek:

• Complimentary limousine transfers from Austin-Bergstrom International Airport to the Hilton Austin hotel on Sunday, June 16th. Reserve your spot today!

• New CloudFlare tshirts

• Live music to supercharge your day during breakfast each morning

• Charging stations at our booth (#523) to keep your devices supercharged

• Bigger and better Nerf Railguns. There is limited quantity, so be sure to visit us at booth #523 to get your Railgun

CloudFlare Railguns ready for HostingCon 2013

We are looking forward to connecting with our current partners and meeting new partners at the show. If you are already a CloudFlare Certified Partner, be sure to stop by and introduce yourself. If you are not a partner yet, stop by to learn more about how CloudFlare can reduce your server load, improve the performance of your network, block spammers, botnets and other web threats, and provide DDOS protection. More details about the CloudFlare Certified Partner program here.

Here's where the CloudFlare team will be all week:

Limo transfers from Austin-Bergstrom International Airport to the Hilton Austin Hotel.

Registration is still open, reserve your spot now!

• 7:45am-8:45am: CloudFlare sponsored breakfast located in the Level 4, Ballroom D Foyer - Live music by Alternator Jones

• 5:00pm onwards: Come find the CloudFlare team at the welcome reception!

• 7:45am-8:45am: CloudFlare sponsored breakfast located in the Level 4, Ballroom D Foyer - Live music by Jackie Venson

• 12:00pm-4:00pm: CloudFlare is in Exhibit Hall 4 at booth #523

• 4:00pm-6:30pm: Visit our booth during the exhibit hall happy hour for a beverage and to supercharge your mobile phone!

• 8:00am-10:00am: CloudFlare sponsored breakfast located in the Level 4, Ballroom D Foyer - Live music by Sean Evan

• 9:00am-9:45am: Our co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince will be speaking on the IPv6 panel discussion "Now is the Time for IPv6" in room #18D

• 9:00-9:45am: Maria Karaivanova and John Roberts from CloudFlare will be co-hosting a talk on partnerships, "Strategies for Successful Partnerships" in room #16

• 12:00-4:00pm: CloudFlare is in Exhibit Hall 4 at Booth #523

Connect with us on Twitter during the event to find out where we are and what's coming up next:#hostingcon, @hostingcon, @CloudFlare

See you in Austin!

CloudFlare recently integrated into the Parallels APS catalog and we couldn't be more excited. We are currently in the beta phase of our partnership, and we are looking forward to our official launch later this fall.

"Application Packaging Standard is a really quick way to connect CloudFlare to thousands of service providers around the world," said Alex. "We're really excited that CloudFlare is now integrated. What your company is offering for service providers is awesome."

Parallels was founded over 10 years ago and has more than 9,000 partners around the world. Today, they are present in 130 countries around the world.

"We help service providers use our software to deliver cloud services," said Alex. "We are making it easy for them to deliver a lot of solutions to the market."

At HostingCon 2012,CloudFlare co-founderMichelle Zatlyn sat down with 28 leading experts in the hosting industry. Their conversations were captured live and offer insight into the latest trends and news in hosting.

PEER 1 Hosting is one of the world's leading server and cloud hosting providers. We caught up with Dax at HostingCon 2012 to get the latest on recent acquisitions and announcements from PEER 1.

"We just announced the acquisition of a new company into the PEER 1 family, it's called NetBenefit," said Dax.

NetBenefit is based in Nice, France and doubled PEER 1's UK presence. The international acquisition is instrumental in reaching a new market for PEER 1 and is their first foray into continental Europe.

The acquisition is just one of many new announcements PEER 1 will bemaking this year.

"We're going to have some big announcements coming up in November at CloudExpo," said Dax. " We're going to be talking a little bit about ServerBeach and ZuniCore, our cloud offering, and some other PEER 1changes."

Listen in to hear more about the NetBenefit acquisition and otherannouncements from PEER 1.

At HostingCon 2012, CloudFlare co-founder Michelle Zatlyn sat down with 28 leading experts in the hosting industry. Their conversations were captured live and offer insight into the latest trends and news in hosting.

We caught up with Jared to learn about name.com and find out exactly what a community manager does.

"We are GoDaddy, but cooler," said Jared. "Domains, websites and hosting, we pride ourselves on ridiculous customer support."

When it comes to community management Jared says name.com is always trying new things, listening to people, giving things a chance and just seeing what works. He says it's about creating that conversation.

"It's ever evolving, but my basic thing is create that conversation," said Jared on his Twitter use. "10 years ago you didn't have the opportunity like you do now, take advantage of that."

As far as creating a culture, Jared believes you can't micromanage and you need to give everyone an opportunity to go beyond their scope of work. He also believes it's important to like your job and what you're working on.

"Do what you love," said Jared.

At HostingCon 2012, CloudFlare co-founder Michelle Zatlyn sat down with 28 leading experts in the hosting industry. Their conversations were captured live and offer insight into the latest trends and news in hosting.

David Gardner, Sr. Project Manager at EIG, sat down with us to talk about EIG's recent acquisitions and newest announcements.

"Endurance acquired HostGator and that's something we're really excited about," said David. "They're a huge brand, they've got a lot of customers that love the service and we are really excited to have that under our business."

David touched on a few other exciting announcements including Bluehost's recent partnership with CloudFlare, their University Program that provides hosting services targeted for educators and students, and the acquisition of HostGator allowing them to offer dedicated servers and VPS to their Bluehost customers.

Tune in to hear other exciting developments with EIG.

At HostingCon 2012, CloudFlare co-founder Michelle Zatlyn sat down with 28 leading experts in the hosting industry. Their conversations were captured live and offer insight into the latest trends and news in hosting.

DotNetNuke is the leading Web Content Management Platform (or CMS) for Microsoft, powering over 700,000 production web sites worldwide. The flexible DNN open source CMS platform also functions as a web application development framework.

DNN just recently launched a new social platform. We caught up with Joe to hear the latest on DNN and their social offering.

"We just launched DotNetNuke 6.2, which is what we're calling the social CMS for business," said Joe. "We include a lot of the same types of functionality that you might find in a Jive or a Yammer or a Chatter, integrated directly into the core CMS platform."

"It's more than just social," said Joe. "It's social CMS."

DNN has seen a very strong uptake in the new social offering from their customers.

They have also seen a strong growth around cloud, mobile and social, the "new CMS." DNN has invested a lot of time and energy into these three verticals and are looking forward to growing the company in those areas.

"Those three together position us pretty uniquely in the CMS space," said Joe.

Listen in to hear more on DNN and the new CMS.

At HostingCon 2012, CloudFlare co-founder Michelle Zatlyn sat down with 28 leading experts in the hosting industry. Their conversations were captured live and offer insight into the latest trends and news in hosting.

"StopBadware is a non-profit anti-malware organization," said Maxim. "We focus on protecting people from malicious websites and we work with both industry partners and with consumers and small businesses whose sites have been hacked."

Maxim says there are three things people can do to be more prepared against computer and website attacks.

"There's a lot of things people can do to be more prepared. One is basic web maintenance, keeping your software up to date. Whether it's WordPress or plugins or various software you may be using to host your site or manage different parts of your site," said Maxim.

Keeping passwords secure is also a must. It's important to use different passwords for websites and all other login sites.

The third thing is to keep your computer clean. Maxim explains how a bad computer contributes to getting hacked.

"Most of the sites that get hacked are everyday consumer and small business sites," said Maxim.

Tune in to hear more on how you can protect your computer and websitesfrom getting hacked.

At HostingCon 2012, CloudFlare co-founder Michelle Zatlyn sat down with 28 leading experts in the hosting industry. Their conversations were captured live and offer insight into the latest trends and news in hosting.

Shridhar most likely wins the longest distance traveled award at HostingCon 2012, traveling 20 hours from India to Boston. We sat down with him at the conference to hear the latest on ResellerClub.

"ResellerClub is one of the largest web service providers in the worldtoday," said Shridhar. "From a domain registration standpoint, we're one of the largest wholesale focused registrars. We are always in the top five fastest growing registrars."

Growing quickly, ResellerClub is beginning to focus on hosting products, including shared hosting, reseller hosting and launching VPS and dedicated servers.

Part of their growth is also international, expanding to different parts of the world.

"We've seen tremendous amounts of growth in India, it's a buzzword," said Shridhar.

From a percentage standpoint, the U.S. is still one of the strongest markets out there in terms of absolutes, but ResellerClub is seeing traction in China, Turkey, Brazil and Russia as well.

At HostingCon 2012, CloudFlare co-founder Michelle Zatlyn sat down with 28 leading experts in the hosting industry. Their conversations were captured live and offer insight into the latest trends and news in hosting.

We talked with Gabriel, Sr. Product Manager at Verio, to find out what Verio is all about and what new initiatives they are announcing.

"Verio is a wholly owned subsidiary of NTT Communications. We've been in the business for over sixteen years, offering shared web hosting, VPS, and SaaS products," said Gabriel.

Verio serves mostly small businesses, but they do have a resellerchannel. Their biggest channel is telcos and OEMs worldwide. They have alarge presence in Latin America, Europe and Japan.

Within their customer base, they've seen a few changes that they are striving to address.

"Primarily customers want easy to use, turn key solutions, especially small businesses who don't want to have to spend too much time figuring out how to use or configure product," said Gabriel. "We try to make sure we find and deliver solutions that are turn key and easy."

Tune in to hear more on Verio's customer solutions and recently launchedCloud offering, Cloud End.

At HostingCon 2012, CloudFlare co-founder Michelle Zatlyn sat down with 28 leading experts in the hosting industry. Their conversations were captured live and offer insight into the latest trends and news in hosting.

Founded in 1997, SoftCom Inc. is an industry leading provider of Cloud Hosting and Business Communication services to more than 2.5 Million users with support of 26 languages in 140 countries worldwide.

Elya is incredibly focused on initiatives to improve their customer's experiences.

"One of our initiatives I would definitely like to point out is our customer onboarding process," said Elya. "It's a three-stage process, we onboard the customers as soon as the order is submitted. Within 10 minutes a call is being placed to welcome them aboard."

Two more calls are placed within the next week, just to be sure customers are having a painless, easy onboarding experience.

At HostingCon, Elya was excited to meet with companies to partner with.

"We are looking for partnerships to enhance the customer experience," said Elya.

When it comes to dealing with the customers directly, Elya welcomes to opportunity and even gets to practice her Russian.

"I think the executive team has to be involved and connect with the customer base," said Elya.

At HostingCon 2012, CloudFlare co-founder Michelle Zatlyn sat down with 28 leading experts in the hosting industry. Their conversations were captured live and offer insight into the latest trends and news in hosting.

During HostingCon, we were able to catch up with Ben to see what his thoughts are of the hosting and cloud space. First question, what is the cloud?

"This is how you explain it (the cloud) to your mom: Infrastructure-as-a-service is akin to going to Home Depot to build your furniture. Platform-as-a-service is like going to to Ikea. Software as a service is much more of a polished service, like going to Crate and Barrel or a furniture store, get it done and over with," said Ben, describing the services that make up the cloud.

"Every hosting provider has a cloud solution," said Ben. "Unfortunately, all the marketing has gotten in the way and the word ‘cloud' doesn't mean anything anymore."

There are a lot of exciting trends that Ben is seeing in cloud hosting, consumer products turning enterprise, and opportunities for major growth.

"I think there's going to be a lot more cloudy hosting providers coming out over time, over the next few years. That's pretty interesting I think," said Ben.

Ben also thinks there will be huge growth for enterprise offerings and startups who will fill a need not currently being met in the cloud space. "There's a lot of space available for people to blow-up," said Ben.

Hear the rest of Ben's predictions in the full interview clip above.

At HostingCon 2012, CloudFlare co-founder Michelle Zatlyn sat down with 28 leading experts in the hosting industry. Their conversations were captured live and offer insight into the latest trends and news in hosting.

"We actually provide market metrics into the cloud industry," said Kenny. "We realize there are a lot of reports out there and there are a lot of analysts out there, but no one gets down to the nitty gritty."

Cloud Spectator investigates and reports on what cloud users are really looking for. They use a variety of open source benchmark tests to provide data and peg it to pricing.

Looking forward, Kenny is excited to attend expos like HostingCon and learn more about providers and customers.

"The main goal of these expos is not only to network with cloud providers but ultimately understand the end user," said Kenny. "We want to be able to understand what cloud users are looking for so we can optimize our products to help them."

Tune in to hear more on Cloud Spectator and how they are like the "Consumer Reports" of Cloud Providers.

At HostingCon 2012, CloudFlare co-founder Michelle Zatlyn sat down with 28 leading experts in the hosting industry. Their conversations were captured live and offer insight into the latest trends and news in hosting.

We sat down with David at HostingCon (and started a friendly Nerf war with his staff) to find out what CodeGuard is up to these days.

"CodeGuard is a daily, automatic website backup tool," said David. "For anyone who has a website on a shared host or VPS dedicated, who has access, we do FTP, SFTP, MySQL and WordPress backup."

CodeGuard gives website owners the tools to easily fix hacks and revert changes, allowing website owners to turn back time on any damage done to their site.

"We provide a time machine for websites," said David.

CodeGuard has many different types of customers, including lawyers, doctors, florists and fitness experts.

"It's really a mix of anyone who has a website, but they don't have full-time web IT staff," said David.

In a sense, CodeGuard is like the superhero for these website owners who don't have the capabilities or staff to run their sites or fix problems that occur.

"We came out of the gates thinking people would really want us because they are so scared of being hacked and wanting to fix it and roll back, but what we've found is that people really enjoy us for just having a tool to manage this asset they have, which is their content," said David.

At HostingCon 2012, CloudFlare co-founder Michelle Zatlyn sat down with 28 leading experts in the hosting industry. Their conversations were captured live and offer insight into the latest trends and news in hosting.

We caught up with Ryan at HostingCon where we talked about Basekit, where he's seeing growth in the industry, and what their customers are saying.

"We have a platform for small businesses to get online. At the very basic part of that it is getting a website and getting a template that is relevant to what customers are doing," said Ryan. "We try to make that as slick and easy as possible."

Basekit provides customers with everything they need to create a professional website in an easy to use, completely customisable way. No coding required.

"The biggest thing, the reason they are picking Basekit, is that there's a ton of flexibility there," said Ryan.

Basekit's customers span from photography sites to ecommerce sites to small businesses of all kinds.

"It's a wild and wooly mix of small businesses out there," said Ryan.

At HostingCon 2012, CloudFlare co-founder Michelle Zatlyn sat down with 28 leading experts in the hosting industry. Their conversations were captured live and offer insight into the latest trends and news in hosting.

ZippyKid focuses purely on WordPress, specifically hosting, securing, and scaling popular WordPress websites. Vid is a self proclaimed technology addict and is passionate about its implementation in everyday life.

We connected with Vid at HostingCon, where he shared with us their latest big news.

"We just raised money from 500 Startups and some of the founders of Rackspace and even Jason Seats, the founder of Slicehost," said Vid. "The company has just been growing like crazy."

ZippyKid's latest customers include Revlon and Estee Lauder, not to mention countless other small businesses and single-practice lawyers and doctors.

Looking ahead, ZippyKid plans to build more partnerships and hire, hire, hire.

"We are going to focus on more partnerships with people who provide really excellent tools for our customers," said Vid.

The San Antonio-based company is excited to build out their fast-growthcompany.

"We can't stop growing and we don't want to," said Vid.

At HostingCon 2012, CloudFlare co-founder Michelle Zatlyn sat down with 28 leading experts in the hosting industry. Their conversations were captured live and offer insight into the latest trends and news in hosting.

There are a lot of exciting things happening at LuxCloud and we were lucky enough to get an opportunity to hear about them from Marco himself.

LuxCloud is a market leading provider of cloud computing services, allowing companies to quickly launch and profitably deliver the cloud services demanded by small- and medium-sized businesses.

"We are positioning ourselves between the software and the channel," said Marco. "We are taking out the difficult part which is automation of the whole sales process."

LuxCloud is also ramping up to expand internationally and bring on twice as many employees as they have today.

"Right now we are setting up operations in the U.S. and Singapore, hopefully we will be going into South America by 2013," said Marco.

When asked about his time at HostingCon this year, Marco had big thoughts on what he was seeing in the cloud computing industry.

"We have to become aware that we are driving the world. The whole economy of the world with the cloud and SaaS services. That's a huge responsiblity that I see a lot of people taking on. It's thrilling."

At HostingCon 2012, CloudFlare co-founder Michelle Zatlyn sat down with 28 leading experts in the hosting industry. Their conversations were captured live and offer insight into the latest trends and news in hosting.

We caught up with Mladen at HostingCon to hear what Atomia is all about, what challenges they've overcome and what they are looking to do next.

"We do control panel automation, billing, domain and DNS," said Mladen. "We are like a full platform for hosting companies."

Once a host installs Atomia, they can start selling shared hosting and VPS right away. Atomia makes it easier for hosting companies to get started and serve their customers.

As for hosting trends going forward, Mladen thinks there's going to be a focus on usage-based types of hosting.

"We're thinking of supporting, as much as possible, a new type of packaging where the end user will pay as few or nothing at the beginning and just pay what they used in the end," said Mladen.

Having just launched in 2011, Atomia is focused on getting their name out there and getting more exposure. They offer something new in hosting and provide high reliability. We are excited to see a new company like this who focuses on making life better for hosting providers.

At HostingCon 2012, CloudFlare co-founder Michelle Zatlyn sat down with 28 leading experts in the hosting industry. Their conversations were captured live and offer insight into the latest trends and news in hosting.

The fun guy has definitely transcended into the DreamHost culture. One of the largest hosting providers in the world, DreamHost is known for its fun atmosphere and laid-back employees.

"I think it's good to expose a little bit of your culture back out [to the public]. I don't think it hurts your product," said Dallas.

DreamHost, who issues a hilariously popular newsletter and doesn't shy away from the creative, shows a lot of personality in most of their work. They consider their customers "fans" and even hosted a "reach out and touch you" tour earlier this year.

"Having personality helps build the brand and have a differential," said Dallas.

It's not all fun and games for DreamHost though. As one of the most popular hosting providers out there, they are focusing on building a better product and expanding their network.

In the fall, DreamHost will be bringing on a new, east coast data center in Virginia to grow their network and better serve their customers. They are also developing a cloud computing service that is currently in alpha and scheduled to hit beta later this year.

At HostingCon 2012, CloudFlare co-founder Michelle Zatlyn sat down with 28 leading experts in the hosting industry. Their conversations were captured live and offer insight into the latest trends and news in hosting.