For the first time, the European Commission aimed its Digital Markets Act at cloud, preliminarily designating AWS and Azure as gatekeepers on qualitative grounds and naming AI dependence as the lock-in. Remedies on portability and egress would hand European hosts a switching-cost edge.
An extortion email demanding Blesta pay up passed SPF, DKIM and DMARC from Blesta's own servers, pointing to a real compromise. Blesta has not confirmed one.
After three Hetzner price increases and OVHcloud raising VPS prices up to 67%, European shared vCPU hosting remains 60-75% cheaper than US providers. But dedicated vCPU instances have reached price parity with DigitalOcean, Vultr, and Linode. The choice is no longer about cost alone.
Hostinger's AI agent Kodee now executes commands directly on customer VPS servers. Retention rose from 66% to 70%, only 7% of conversations require a human, and new orders grew roughly fourfold. While AI apps churn 30% faster than non-AI, hosting may be the exception.
Bluehost surveyed 350 small business owners and found that 34% say their website has become more important since they started using AI. Only 13% optimize for AI search, but those who do report 3.4x higher revenue growth.
Vito Peleg of Atarim argues the agency panic about AI is ahead of the data: DIY activation rates have not moved, and people who left WordPress for Lovable came back in three months. The agencies that shorten delivery and lean into AI will run mega operations; the ones that resist will be replaced.
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