Web Wednesday - Two Year Anniversary

Whilst wandering around the hills of Hong Kong last weekend (on Buddha's birthday), it suddenly dawned upon me that Web Wednesday is about to turn two years old! Our next social mixer on 6th May will be Version 24.0, which translates to 24 months of Web Wednesdays!

I'm not sure if it was the sudden intake of fresh air (not a common occurrence in Hong Kong)...or just being distracted by other pressing concerns, like swineflu. Nevertheless, I felt the urge to step back and assess where we've come.

From a small gathering of five digital marketers back in June 2007, our community of Asian Digerati has now reached over 1,800 members: 1,169 in the Hong Kong Facebook Group, 426 in the Guangzhou FB Group, 57 members in the Beijing FB Group and 28 in the Halmstad, Sweden FB Group. And the networking continues, our recently launched group on LinkedIn has 166 members (perhaps a sign of the times?).

In celebration of reaching this milestone, I have the pleasure of announcing that we will be offering an extra round of drinks to the first 100 guests who attend tomorrow's social mixer, courtesy of our new sponsor, DediPower - the UK's leading provider of managed hosting services.

Unless you've been working in a big bank, where the local telcos dote on your expensive use of their air-conditioned data centres, I guarantee that you've had to suffer shoddy and often unstable local web hosting services. Nearly every web developer that I know has had to turn to North American suppliers for his/her hosting needs.

I'm hoping that DediPower's self-proclaimed "support with passion", humanly-managed hosting and on-call technical advice will shake up the industry here and finally provide us with good quality, reliable and affordable hosting services.

In the UK, DediPower supports established corporations like iTV, First Great Western and Sony, as well as rapidly growing social media start-ups, such as TweetMeme and SlicethePie.