CloudFest Americas is two weeks away. On November 11 and 12, Ice Palace Studios in Miami hosts the Americas edition of the CloudFest series, which its organizers present as the meeting point for web hosts, cloud providers, managed service providers (MSPs) and agencies across the region. They expect 2,000-plus attendees and 175-plus speakers, with NamesCon, the domain industry conference, running alongside.

When we previewed the event in July, the full program had not yet been announced. The agenda is now out, and several of its hosting sessions ask a version of the same question: what is left of web hosting as a product when AI tools let customers launch a site without choosing a host or opening a control panel. Among the speakers are the chief executives of GoDaddy, Newfold Digital and Rocket.net.

Our top 10, listed in schedule order, covers the sessions most relevant to hosting providers, including a panel on Blacknight’s move to Your.Online moderated by our co-founder Konrad Keck. All times are Miami local time (EST).

CloudFest Americas Takes Shape: Miami’s Speakers and Themes So Far

1. Building for the AI-Native Entrepreneur: Inside GoDaddy’s Transformation

November 11, 9:20-9:50 a.m., Biscayne Stage

GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani, in this featured session, presents a prediction for 2027. According to the program, it rests on the idea that AI will increasingly do the discovering, comparing and buying that websites were designed for. The question he puts to every business is “Can an AI find me, understand me, trust me and do business with me?”

Why it matters: Bhutani’s question also applies to every customer site a host serves. Elementor’s “Is the Website Dying?” session on the second day sits in the same Discovery Beyond Search track.

2. We Put AI Into Every Layer of the Hosting Stack. Here’s What We’ve Learned.

November 11, 9:55-10:15 a.m., Biscayne Stage

Presented by WebPros director of product TJ Danklefs, the talk covers a year of adding AI across the company’s stack: cPanel AI in the hosting panel, the Nova site and app builder, the Riva growth tooling and user support. It promises to show where AI reduced support load and build time, where it created “new failure modes nobody predicted,” and how WebPros decided what to build in-house.

Why it matters: Hosts that run cPanel get the vendor’s own account of how AI is changing the panel and the tools around it.

3. The State of the Cloud 2026: What You’re Telling Us

November 11, 11:15-11:45 a.m., Wynwood Stage

Brooke Edge of Open Eye and CloudFest CEO Christian Jaeger present findings from CloudFest’s State of the Cloud research, which draws on responses from cloud providers, hosting companies, MSPs and infrastructure operators. The organizers describe this year’s findings as showing an industry moving beyond reactive AI adoption toward strategic implementation, with geopolitical considerations and infrastructure decisions increasingly shaping long-term planning.

Why it matters: It is the only session in our top 10 built on survey data, which lets hosts compare their own AI and infrastructure decisions with those of other operators.

4. Web Hosting Is Dead. Long Live Web Hosting.

November 11, 2:40-2:55 p.m., Wynwood Stage

The talk by Ben Gabler, founder and CEO of Rocket.net, argues that customers increasingly buy an outcome, with hosting “a necessary line item buried inside the service that delivers it.” For Gabler, hosting may be dying as a product while becoming more essential as an invisible layer.

Why it matters: It goes to the commercial problem behind the AI debate: what hosts can sell when customers buy a finished result rather than a hosting plan. The session description points to services, platforms and integrations that sit on top of the infrastructure.

5. What Happens to Hosting in an AI-First World?

November 11, 2:55-3:30 p.m., Wynwood Stage

Gabler then moderates this featured panel with Sean Dundon, vice president of product management for hosting at Bluehost, Jesse Asklund, chief product officer at WebPros, and Jelle Slenters, commercial director at Sims Lifecycle Services and RackRenew. Its questions include whether hosting companies need to become platforms themselves, and whether consolidation creates stronger companies or “simply larger shares of a shrinking traditional market.”

Why it matters: Customers leaving traditional hosting for platforms is not new. In a survey of 446 hosting providers by CloudLinux and WebPros, conducted from October to December 2025, a move to SaaS platforms such as Wix or Shopify was among the top three reasons customers give for leaving, according to 41% of the providers.

6. Agency Survival Guide: The Infrastructure Decisions That Protect Your Reputation

November 12, 9:10-9:45 a.m., Wynwood Stage

The panel starts from the premise that agency clients rarely know who hosts their site or who handles their backups. As the program puts it, “They only know who they hired: you.” Moderated by David Snead of the Secure Hosting Alliance, it brings together Carrie Smaha of InMotion Hosting, Svilena Peneva of CloudLinux, Atarim CEO Vito Peleg and Nick LaRose of rtCamp to discuss how agencies should evaluate hosting partners.

Why it matters: The questions agencies ask before recommending a platform are the ones hosts selling through them need to answer.

7. The New Open Web: Why Partnership Matters More in the Age of AI

November 12, 9:45-10:05 a.m., Wynwood Stage

Newfold Digital CEO Sachin Puri, in the role since October 1, argues in this featured talk that customers increasingly expect technology to work together. In his view, APIs, agents, MCP (a protocol for connecting AI agents to outside tools) and emerging standards make those connections easier to build, which creates an opportunity for the open web. In the program’s words, “Closed platforms can compete by owning more of the stack. The open web can compete by connecting more of it.”

Why it matters: Puri’s distinction between closed platforms and the open web bears directly on a question from the first day’s AI-First World panel: whether hosting companies need to become platforms themselves. Bluehost, part of Newfold, has its own executive on that panel.

8. What Makes a Hosting Business Valuable?

November 12, 10:05-10:35 a.m., Biscayne Stage

The panel looks at the metrics behind a hosting company’s value: margins, churn, customer acquisition costs, recurring revenue, infrastructure efficiency and operational execution. It also asks how those economics change as competition, consolidation and new technologies reshape the market. Two of the four panelists run companies that, like Blacknight, belong to Your.Online: Gandi CEO Arnaud Franquinet and Ex2.com CEO Benoit Hochedez. They join Nadya Frost of ShareShift.io and VEXXHOST CEO Mohammed Naser, with Robert Jacobi of Blackwall moderating.

Why it matters: For owners weighing a sale or an acquisition, the list of metrics reads like a due diligence checklist. The Blacknight panel starts on the other stage five minutes after this one ends, so together the two sessions cover the numbers and the decision behind a hosting deal.

9. The Great Growth Debate: Buy, Build, or Both?

November 12, 10:40-11:15 a.m., Wynwood Stage

Our co-founder Konrad Keck moderates this panel, in which Blacknight CEO Michele Neylon and Henk Mosterd of Your.Online discuss the transaction that brought the Irish registrar and host into the group. Blacknight announced in June that it was joining Your.Online and that Neylon and co-founder Paul Kelly would continue to lead the company. The session covers why Your.Online wanted Blacknight, what convinced its co-founders that the timing was right, what nearly stopped the deal and how both sides approached culture and continuity.

Why it matters: Blacknight’s announcement describes Your.Online as “a group of founder-led digital businesses.” The panel offers a first-hand account, from both sides of the deal, of how that model works for a company Neylon and Kelly founded in 2003.

10. When the Patch Window Disappears: Security in the Age of AI

November 12, 3:25-4:00 p.m., Wynwood Stage

The panel examines the shrinking time between the disclosure of a vulnerability and its exploitation. It brings together Igor Seletskiy, founder and chairman of CloudLinux, Aaron Campbell, vice president of product at Monarx, and Drew Bagley, chief privacy and policy officer at CrowdStrike, with Ron da Silva moderating. Its subjects include vulnerability response, customer communication and patch deployment.

Why it matters: For shared hosts, the window matters at two levels: the server software they patch themselves and customer applications they usually do not control. In the CloudLinux and WebPros survey, customers’ outdated or vulnerable software, such as WordPress plugins, topped the list of security challenges that create the most overhead or risk, cited by 53% of providers.

Also Worth a Look

  • The Great Pivot: How Domain Businesses Reinvented Themselves, November 11 at 11:55 a.m., Biscayne Stage: a panel including Team Internet CEO Michael Riedl and Arthur Mai, CEO of InterNetX and CMO of IONOS, on how domain businesses adapted as parking revenue declined and AI reshaped online discovery.
  • Hosting in the AI Era: Protecting Margins & Owning the Security Layer, November 11 at 12:15 p.m., Wynwood Stage: Blackwall chief experience officer Robert Jacobi on security models built on outsourced tools and their cost to hosts’ margins.
  • DNS Abuse: What Registries, Registrars, and Hosts Can Actually Do, November 12 at 10:05 a.m., Wynwood Stage: a panel moderated by Andrea Silas of DreamHost, running at the same time as the valuation panel.
  • Is the Website Dying?, November 12 at 3:10 p.m., Wynwood Stage: Elementor’s head of WordPress, Miriam Schwab, on the role of the website as AI assistants and conversational interfaces mediate how people interact with businesses.

These are only our picks, and the full agenda has many more sessions across both days, including the program of the co-located NamesCon.

The Common Thread in Miami

Gabler’s talk and the AI-First World panel start from the same premise: hosting is not disappearing but is less often bought as a standalone product. Several of the other sessions explore related questions, from how customers’ sites are found and the partners hosts sell through to the security of customer sites hosts do not control and what hosting companies are worth.

The question running through these sessions is where hosting companies can create value if fewer customers choose the infrastructure behind their sites.