Next month is going to be extremely exciting. Members of the Rochen team (including myself) are going to be attending CMS Expo in Chicago, IL on May 3rd, 4th and 5th. This will be my first time attending CMS Expo but my fourth visit to the beautiful Windy City. Chicago is my second favourite city in the United States after San Francisco.

CMS Expo is the leading business and learning conference in North America for content management systems including (but not limited to) Joomla, Drupal and WordPress. As you may already know Rochen is huge within the Joomla community. We host tens of thousands of Joomla powered websites including the official Joomla sites at www.joomla.org. Rochen is also a Platinum Development Sponsor of the project too, helping to support the ongoing development of Joomla version 1.6. We provide support to popular third-party extensions like Akeeba Backup and VirtueMart as well.

While we remain absolutely and totally committed to the Joomla project, we are hoping at CMS Expo this year we can spread our wings and push our hosting services to users of Drupal and WordPress more than we have previously.  Rochen already hosts thousands of Drupal and WordPress sites, but we are not nearly as big or well known within these communities as we are within Joomla.

Chris speaking at previous event.

WordPress and Joomla sessions presented by Rochen experts
Adam Boswell, from our support team, and I will be presenting two sessions at CMS Expo. “WordPress Hosting and Security” at 8.30AM on Tuesday, May 4th and “Joomla Hosting and Security” at 2.30PM also on Tuesday, May 4th. We still need to request an update to the CMS Expo website to correctly reflect our sessions and also reflect that I am going to be offloading some of the heavy lifting to Adam and not doing these sessions solo!

We have base presentations made up for both sessions, but we would very much like to tailor these to fit attendees needs. If there is any pressing hosting or security issue you would like us to address during these sessions then please post a comment at the end of this blog or Twitter us @rochenhost and we can try to work your request into the sessions.

Adam and I look forward to any feedback you can provide!

FREE CMS Expo tickets. $550 giveaway.
Rochen is one of the two main Diamond Sponsors for CMS Expo this year (along with Arc Technology Group). We are going to have a fantastic 20 x 10 ft booth at the conference, so please stop by to talk about any kind of hosting related issue or just to say “hello!” Whether you’re looking for a small shared hosting plan, a multi-server redundant cluster to handle 100 million page views or something in between then we will be happy to talk things over with you. We will have Rochen swag to giveaway at the booth too!

Furthermore, we have two free tickets to giveaway to any current Rochen customer. Each ticket is for one day conference access and would normally cost $279. If you are a current customer and would like a free ticket then please open a support ticket through the My Rochen Portal with the subject: “Free CMS Expo Ticket” and we will get that taken care of for you. This is on a first come, first serve basis and we must receive your request before the end of the day tomorrow, Tuesday April 13th 2010.

For anyone who misses out on a free ticket you can also use the promotional code: ROCHEN via the CMS Expo website to receive a 10% discount on any CMS Expo ticket. The free ticket offer is for current Rochen customers only, but this promo code can be used by anyone.

Teaser of Rochen's green campaign.

Green Hosting Campaign @ CMS Expo
Rochen are looking to highlight many issues at CMS Expo (shameless plug: including our redundant clusters to attendees needing to host larger or enterprise sites, our rock solid shared hosting, Rochen Vault twice-daily managed backups, our ‘out of the box’ compatibility for the most popular CMS scripts) but one in particular we have decided to draw attention to is our green hosting initiatives.

We will be running a green hosting campaign at CMS Expo, which we think will draw attention to our green hosting in a subtle but clever way. I think when it comes to being green it is something most hosts handle badly or in a scammy and dishonest way, so we hope to be able to promote this as one of our strengths at CMS Expo. While our green hosting is clearly a marketing tool Rochen uses, I think it is more than that due to the way we have implemented it through partnerships with Green Mountain Energry and our continual technology improvement process. E.g. data center cooling. Learn more here.

I look forward to seeing as many of you as possible at CMS Expo next month and hopefully being able to help with your CMS hosting questions!

- Chris

P.S. Rochen will also be launching a new website prior to CMS Expo. So keep an eye out for that too.

Chris Adams is the Founder and CEO of Rochen Ltd.