A theater whose first screening was Ben-Hur in 1927 will spend two days this September on AI agents, supply-chain attacks and hosting M&A. Atlas Digital Summit, a new invite-only meeting for hosting and cloud infrastructure executives, opens on September 28 and 29 at Gamla Bio in Reykjavik, one month from now. The pitch fits in one line of the event’s own copy: “AI Can Build the App. Infrastructure Has to Keep It Alive.” The draw is the room: the backer list spans the software supply chain of shared hosting, and for most of the working program the format seats executives at tables to talk, not in rows to listen.
Key information
- Date: September 28 and 29, 2026
- Location: Gamla Bio, Ingolfsstraeti 2a, Reykjavik, Iceland
- Format: invite-only, aimed at C-level hosting and data center executives; requests require a company email address
- Program: one keynote, one fireside chat and six executive roundtable blocks, each run in two parallel tracks, Hosting and Security
- Curator: Jason Nickerson, of Domain Days Dubai and JoomlaDay Florida
- Sponsors: Monarx (platinum), CloudLinux and WebPros (gold), SuperDeploy and Blackwall (silver)
Three Years in the Making
The summit is curated by Jason Nickerson, a fixture of the hosting-events circuit: part of the founding team of Domain Days Dubai for the past four years, formerly in field marketing for Cloudways and WebPros, and founder of CMS Summit at Merge and JoomlaDay Florida. The name may be familiar to readers here: Nickerson also contributes to this site as one of our experts. By his own account he has spent the past three years working toward an event in Iceland, and Atlas is the result: a first edition built around the executives who will be asked to secure, scale and pay for the AI-driven web.
The backer list reads like a shared-hosting supply chain. Monarx, the server-side malware detection and prevention vendor, is the platinum sponsor; CloudLinux and WebPros, the companies behind CloudLinux OS and the cPanel and Plesk control panels, hold gold; bot-mitigation firm Blackwall and migration tool SuperDeploy take silver. The i2Coalition and the Secure Hosting Alliance are community sponsors.
The Format: Main Stage First, Roundtables in Two Tracks
The program is built for conversation rather than lectures: after each day’s main-stage opener, attendees split into executive roundtables that run in two parallel tracks, Hosting and Security, and pick a table per block. There are six blocks over two days and sixteen named participants in total, including emcee Robert Jacobi.
Source: Atlas Digital Summit
Day One: AI, Strategy and the Future Hosting Stack
The opening keynote is Luke Langford’s “The Next Web: When Machines Browse, Build, and Buy.” It starts from the premise that machines now generate more internet traffic than humans, that AI agents shop and transact on people’s behalf, and it considers whether trust could become the web’s most valuable and profitable commodity. Three roundtable blocks follow:
- Meeting the AI-First Customer: what buyers now expect from hosting providers (TJ Danklefs), opposite “The Secure Upsell” on packaging protection customers understand without fear tactics (Aaron D Campbell).
- Defending the Stack: building agentic AI workflows with governance and guardrails (Robbie Adair), opposite securing AI agents across the hosting fleet, from credentials to tenant isolation (Sergei Gruntovskii).
- Operating at the Edge of Risk: customer support in an AI-first hosting business (Panos Kesisis), opposite “WordPress Under Siege,” on defending WordPress against AI-accelerated exploit development, mass scanning and what the agenda describes as six-hour-to-exploit windows (Campbell again).
Day One closes with a networking party on the rooftop terrace.
Day Two: Operations, Compliance and What Comes Next
The second morning opens with a fireside on AI, regulation and resilience, covering data sovereignty, security standards and sustainability mandates, with panelists Ana Rojo-Echeburua, Bergthora Halldorsdottir and David Snead. Then the roundtables resume:
- From Infrastructure to Strategic Partnerships: how hosts move beyond selling plans and compete with the likes of Shopify and Squarespace (Jesse Friedman), opposite AI-powered supply chain attacks on providers and their dependencies (Campbell).
- Building and Securing AI-Native Hosting: AI search visibility, or getting cited when buyers ask ChatGPT or Perplexity which provider to choose (Carolyn Shelby and Daniel Stanica), opposite AI-driven threat detection in production, past the vendor hype (Thomas Raef).
- The Future Hosting Business: “M&A in the New Hosting Era,” on how AI-driven company creation, shifting valuations, tighter capital markets and changing buyer expectations are reshaping hosting acquisitions (Nadya Frost), opposite “Who Controls the Stack?”, benny Vasquez’s roundtable on the open-source governance underneath the AI boom.
A closing session distills both days into the AI, security and sustainability trends to watch over the next 24 months.
Why Iceland, and Why This Room
The organizers build their case for Iceland around a grid running on 100 percent renewable energy, a climate that cuts data-center cooling costs, and political stability with EU-aligned data protection. The location reinforces the summit’s sustainable-infrastructure theme.
The room itself is a piece of Icelandic history. Gamla Bio was commissioned by cinema operator Peter Petersen; construction began in 1926, the first screening, Ben-Hur, came in August 1927, and the Icelandic Opera made the house its home from 1982 to 2011. Today it seats 280-plus under its crystal chandelier. The roundtables meet in the Petersen Suite, the venue’s third-floor VIP lounge, and the first day ends on the rooftop terrace.
Who It Is For, and How to Get In
Atlas is not a trade show: attendance is by invitation, aimed at C-level hosting and data center executives, with CTOs, security officers, sustainability leads and infrastructure architects also welcome. Invite requests go through the event’s site and require a company email address. The calendar adds its own argument: the summit is a month away, and the organizers say they follow up on invite requests personally. webhosting.today supports initiatives like this one, and as the summit’s media sponsor we gladly recommend it: for hosting executives, the agenda reads like the industry’s current worry list in roundtable form. September in Iceland adds one non-conference argument the organizers point out themselves: it is aurora season.
