We were recently at a conference in Florida explaining some of our services to potential clients. As luck would have it we also got to meet a lot of people who use and love Bluehost as much as we do. It was a blast. One great customer we had the opportunity to chat with was Sarah Metzger, a small business owner. It was exciting to learn more about Sarah, her endeavors, and what her experience has been like working with Bluehost. 

[from left] Steve Handy (Bluehost), Sarah Metzger, and Grant Hansen (Bluehost). 

Sarah is an online media professional and has been leveraging her experience to start a consulting practice. She is dedicated to helping businesses leverage today’s technologies and information outlets to successfully promote their vision. She provides small business owners with tools and guidance so they can successfully grow their online presence.

“I was overwhelmed with the prospect of building my own website for a Coronado Real Estate business I was re-launching with my partner. Building an engaging real estate website was a lot to manage on top of the day-to-day tasks. Bluehost made the entire process so much easier than I had expected and I am so glad I found them. I can’t recall how many countless nights I have been up at 2am on the phone with one of my friendly Bluehost contacts. I don’t personally know any of the Bluehost support team employees but I always get off a call feeling like I talked to an old friend.” – Sarah

She creates WordPress websites that are optimized with high-quality content designed to engage customers and helps her customers through a step-by-step process of defining their brand. How great is that? Go Sarah!

“I am hugely passionate about helping business owners. Bluehost has helped me help other grow their personal projects and businesses. I am eternally grateful.”  -Sarah

It’s such a treat to meet our customers and hear first hand how we were able to play a role in their success. So if you’re a Bluehost customer and you see us at a conference somewhere, we hope you’ll stop by and say hi. We’d love to meet you!

From left: Corbin Hendrickson (Bluehost), Andrea Righi (Better Linux), and David Collins (Hostgator).

We recently attended the HostingCon Conference in Boston, Massachusetts. HostingCon is the premier conference and trade show for the hosted services industry. Vendors, top technology minds, and web hosting fanatics gathered for a 3-day event of sessions, booth displays, and keynote talks. HostingCon serves as a place to learn, share, and collaborate on technologies affecting businesses.

During the conference, we also announced our partnership with CloudFlare! In addition, CloudFlare also introduced their latest technology, RailGun, which will be incorporated into Bluehost technology for the most dynamic content caching possible. Stay tuned to learn more about our partnership with CloudFlare and how it’s going to help make hosting with Bluehost even better!

Bluehost is committed to open source. From our data center to the programs our customers rely on every day, our business is built on it. So we’re always looking for ways to give back. This year we were privileged to be a diamond sponsor of the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON), one of the world’s largest and most significant open source conferences.

We had a great week in Portland. We met a lot of great developers, learned a ton, and made a few BIG announcements. Here are some highlights!

Best Booth Ever

We wanted everyone at OSCON to know just how seriously we take our commitment to open source, so we built a massive Bluehost lounge front & center in the exhibit hall, complete with a comfy couch, super padded carpet, an awesome display showcasing live traffic to our website, and of course… a world-class Ping Pong table.

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Lots of people had a blast playing against our robot. Tim O’Reilly stopped by a few times to take on Alfred. Check out who won!

Awesome Prizes

Nexus 7 Raffle
The latest tablet, up for grabs. With hundreds of entries submitted, we held our raffle on Thursday at 4pm. The lucky winner? Fred T. Congrats Fred!

Ping Pong Tournament
We held a 16-person single-elimination tournament at 1pm on Thursday. The competition was fierce. Who knew so many OSCON attendees would be so good at Ping Pong? At the end of the day Martin pulled out the win. He walked away with the flat screen TV, significant bragging rights, and a title to defend.

Play Bluehost to Win
Conference participants were invited to stop by our lounge for a chance to win a free year of web hosting. All they had to do was beat a Bluehost player. Not many were able to equal our CEO Dan Handy or Affiliate Manager Alfred Najem, so we gave contestants a few point head start.

Ping Pong Table Giveaway
Instead of bringing our Ping Pong table back with us to Provo, we offered it as a prize in the OSCON raffle. Participants had to collect all the required trading cards to enter the drawing.

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Announcements

O’Reilly Radar Report
At Bluehost we work closely with both small businesses and open source developers, and we’ve noticed that all too often these two communities seem unaware of the impact they have on one another. To help bridge this gap we sponsored an O’Reilly report that examines the impact of open source on small business. We provided anonymous customers usage data and performed a survey to explore how open source helps small businesses. The paper made some startling discoveries. For example, it turns out the economic benefit of open source software to Bluehost customers alone amounts to over $12 billion dollars!

Watch the roundtable discussion with Tim O’Reilly, Bluehost CEO Dan Handy, EIG VP Technology John Mone, O’Reilly Media Director of Market Research Roger Magoulas, and O’Reilly AuthorMike Hendrickson.

BOSS
Bluehost has long supported open source. After all, we and our customers rely on great open source tools every day. To do even more we’ve launched the Bluehost Open Source Solutions program, or BOSS. It’s designed to make leveraging Bluehost resources in support of open source development easier than ever. Headed by our Director of Open Source Outreach, BOSS offers open source developers unprecedented resources to help them succeed. Learn more at bluehost.com/BOSS.

Bluehost.com/OpenSource
Bluehost is committed to open source, and now we have a centralized hub from which to base our efforts. From here we’ll make announcements, promote new initiatives and open source developments, share resources, communicate ways we can help, etc…

Keynote Address

John Mone, EVP Technology for our parent company (Endurance International Group), gave a keynote address highlighting the impact of open source on small business and the economy. Check it out!

Sponsored Sessions

Jared Smith, our Director of Open Source Outreach, spoke on Asterisk, a leading open source telecommunications platform. We weren’t able to get video, but people loved it. Bluehost Senior Developer Jason Hall expounded on the role of open source in supporting enterprise-level billing systems. We did manage to record his presentation and we uploaded it to our YouTube channel.

O’Reilly also posted several great videos on their channel, so check them out. OSCON 2012 was a blast. And make sure to save the date for next summer!