WHD’s U.S. event will be held at the same location as NamesCon.
Now that WorldHostingDays owns NamesCon (both are now owned by GoDaddy), the former is moving its U.S. show to the same venue as NamesCon.
WHD.usa will take place September 11-12 at the Tropicana hotel in Las Vegas. It hopes to attract 1,000 attendees, which would be a bump up from last year’s event in Phoenix.
One attraction is that the event is free if you register before June 30. Passes includes lunch and snacks, too. Given the cheap flights and hotel rooms in Vegas, WHD.usa can be a very affordable event to attend.
Although the event is about the webhosting industry, webhosting and domain names are intertwined. There will surely be sessions about domain names and you’ll see lots of domain industry people there.
GoDaddy has completed its $1.8 billion acquisition of Host Europe Group, giving it a massive presence in the European market.
This week I have a wide-ranging discussion with Roland LaPlante, Chief Marketing Officer of Afilias. We discuss new top level domain names and why Afilias’ past experience with launching TLDs made its expectations for the current round more realistic. We also chat about increased competition for backend registry services, the challenges of restricted TLDs and Afilias’ fight for .Web. I also recap last week’s NamesCon conference and have five short interviews from the event.