CloudFest 2026 will take place between March 23 and 26 at Europa-Park in Rust, Germany.
This year’s theme – “The Sustainability of Everything” isn’t just about green energy. It’s about whether the hosting industry’s business models, security measures and margins can survive what’s coming in the next few years.
If you haven’t registered yet, you can do this with the promo code from webhosting.today here to get free pass:
If you do not know which of over 170 sessions to attend, we went through the full agenda and picked the talks that matter most if you work in shared and web hosting.
Here are our picks.
1. Matt Russell
Former Chief Cloud Officer at Namecheap, now a private investor in hosting and cloud.
📅 Tue, March 24 | .COM Stage: “Sustainability is Everything Everywhere All at Once” (Opening Highlight Panel)
Matt joins Oliver Sild, Christian Dawson, Rachel Sterling, and Soeren von Varchmin for CloudFest’s opening session, framing what “sustainability” really means when you’re expected to be carbon neutral, AI-optimized, financially resilient, and ethically sound all at once.
Matt knows the economics of shared hosting at scale from the inside. Having spent years running cloud operations at one of the world’s most recognizable hosting brands, his perspective on whether the current business model is sustainable carries real weight.
2. Oliver Sild
CEO of Patchstack, the WordPress vulnerability intelligence platform behind the industry’s largest WP security database.
📅 Wed, March 25 | NameStudio API Stage – “Web hosts battle tested. The learnings from hacking websites.”
Also: Opening Panel (Tue) + WP Security Panel (Mon, WP Summit)
Over the past year, Oliver’s team conducted controlled security testing, mimicking real-world attacks, across multiple shared and managed hosting companies. This session reveals who protects customers and who doesn’t. For shared hosting, where thousands of WordPress sites sit on the same server and a single unpatched vulnerability can cascade across the entire customer base, this is the single most directly relevant session at CloudFest 2026.
3. Luke Langford
CEO of Monarx, the AI-powered malware detection platform built for hosting providers.
📅 Wed, March 25 | NameStudio API Stage – “Revenue or security, can you have both?”
Many hosts are stuck in a loop: customers need better security, but adding it raises costs in a market where someone always sells cheaper. Luke presents a market study of what hosting companies across the industry are actually doing – pricing models, bundling strategies, and what competitors are charging for security add-ons. If you’ve been wondering whether security can become a revenue line instead of a cost center, this session has the benchmarks.
4. Igor Seletskiy
CEO and Founder of CloudLinux, the company behind CloudLinux OS and Imunify – the infrastructure that makes shared hosting work on millions of servers worldwide.
📅 Tue, March 24 | .COM Stage – “More revenue, same servers: what’s next from CloudLinux & Imunify (Keynote)”
Customer acquisition costs are up, margins are tight, and the fastest growth comes from revenue you unlock from sites you already host. Igor shares CloudLinux’s roadmap: new upsellable add-ons, security improvements that justify premium tiers, and the monetization hooks – bundles, trials, billing integrations – that make it easy to sell. In a market where acquiring a new customer costs 5-7x more than retaining one, even $2-5 more ARPU from existing accounts can change your P&L.
5. Miriam Schwab
Head of WordPress at Elementor, the WP page builder with 19 million active installs powering ~13% of the web.
📅 Wed, March 25 | NameStudio API Stage – “WordPress 2026: Scaling the AI revolution for hosts and agencies”
Miriam introduces “Angie” – an AI-native layer for WordPress that turns site building into a conversation. The pitch to hosts: offer an “AI-first” onboarding experience that rivals closed-platform builders like Wix and Squarespace, keeping customers on self-hosted WordPress (i.e., your servers) instead of losing them to all-in-one platforms. When the session title literally says “for Hosts,” shared hosting providers should take note.
6. Arto Minasyan
President & Co-Founder of 10Web, an AI-native website building and hosting platform.
📅 Tue, March 24 | .COM Stage – “The 4th Revolution of Website Building (Keynote)”
Also: “The new map of the web” (Panel, Thu)
Arto’s thesis: we’ve moved from hand-coded HTML → CMS templates → drag-and-drop → to vibe coding, where AI-native editors turn website creation into a conversation. The critical detail for hosting providers: Arto frames hosts as the distributors of this technology through embeddable APIs, plugins, and white-label solutions. The providers who integrate AI building into their plans become the channel; those who don’t risk becoming a commodity that AI platforms route around.
7. Brewster Kahle
Founder and Digital Librarian of the Internet Archive, home of the Wayback Machine.
📅 Thu, March 26 | .COM Stage – “The world’s digital memory” (Highlight, interviewed by Christian Dawson)
Brewster’s organization has preserved over a trillion web pages since 1996 and nearly didn’t survive 2024, when a devastating DDoS attack and data breach compromised 31 million accounts while ongoing legal battles threatened the Archive’s existence. Every website on your servers is part of the web’s living memory. This is a rare appearance by someone who’s spent three decades making sure the web endures and a sobering reminder of how fragile it all is.
8. Robert Jacobi
CXO of Blackwall, specializing in bot mitigation for hosting providers. Also MC for both the WP Summit and Masterclass stages.
📅 Tue, March 24 | .COM Stage – “Infrastructure-native security” (Keynote)
Also: “AI in the attacker-defender arms race” (Panel, Tue) + WP Security Panel (Mon)
A third of the traffic hitting your servers isn’t human – bots consuming bandwidth and CPU cycles you pay for but can’t bill anyone for. Robert argues that outsourcing to CDN “black boxes” creates dependency and erodes margins, and that providers should own their security stack instead. For shared hosting companies running on thin margins, reclaiming wasted bandwidth and turning bot mitigation into a sellable feature could change the math entirely.
9. Ditlev Bredahl
CEO & Co-Founder of hosted·ai, a GPU-as-a-Service platform built for service providers.
📅 Wed, March 25 | .COM Stage – “AI cloud 12 months later: what went right, what went wrong, and what we learned” (Keynote)
At CloudFest 2025, Ditlev said he didn’t want to come back and talk about a missed opportunity. One year later: who actually grew their GPUaaS business? Who’s still waiting? Did everyone freak out about the AI bubble? This is the honest assessment of what happened when the hosting industry tried to become AI infrastructure providers – and whether GPU-as-a-Service is a realistic adjacent business for shared hosting companies or an expensive distraction.
10. Christian Dawson
Executive Director of the i2Coalition (Internet Infrastructure Coalition), the leading trade association for hosting, cloud, and domain companies.
📅 Tue, March 24 (Opening Panel) | Thu, March 26 (Brewster Kahle interview + The New Map of the Web panel) – 3 sessions total
Christian appears across the full conference – opening CloudFest, interviewing Brewster Kahle, and closing with a panel on how AI-driven discovery is reshaping the role of domains and hosting. The i2Coalition fights for hosting interests when regulators come calling, from NIS2 compliance in Europe to sustainability reporting. For shared hosting providers without a legal or compliance team, which is most of them, Christian’s sessions are the most efficient way to understand what’s coming.
See you at CloudFest!
CloudFest 2026 is packed with exciting talks (this year’s agenda consists of 143 speakers in 175 sessions), but these ten speakers stand out as some of the most important ones to watch.
If there’s one thread connecting all ten sessions, it’s this: the hosting business you’re running today won’t work the same way in two years. CloudFest is where you figure out what comes next.
If you’re attending CloudFest and want to meet with Konrad Keck, co-founder of webhosting.today, make sure to check his schedule here:
If you are wondering what after the CloudFest is worth your attention – here is our detailed overview of the most important web hosting-related events in 2026:
Disclosure: Patchstack, Monarx, and Blackwall are sponsors of the webhosting.today Podcast. Their inclusion in this article is based on session relevance, not sponsorship relation.
Damian Andruszkiewicz
Author of this post.