Industry reports — Web Hosting News
Latest Industry reports news, updates and analysis from the web hosting industry — 260 articles.
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Automattic Is Not an Owner of the WordPress Marks It Asserted in Court, a Judge Rules
The September 24 order brings back four antitrust claims the same judge had dismissed in an earlier ruling. It also holds that Automattic and Mullenweg are neither owners nor registrants of the WordPress marks, so they cannot assert them in their own right.
Automattic Is Not an Owner of the WordPress Marks It Asserted in Court, a Judge Rules
Other #automattic#web-hosting
The September 24 order brings back four antitrust claims the same judge had dismissed in an earlier ruling. It also holds that Automattic and Mullenweg are neither owners nor registrants of the WordPress marks, so they cannot assert them in their own right.
We Ranked Hosting Two Ways. We Resolved 108 GoDaddy Domains: 96 Point at Amazon.
Industry reports #domains#godaddy
Ranked by domains on their nameservers, GoDaddy leads with 73.1 million. Ranked by hosting attribution it falls to 3.5 million, but that column records whose address space a site is served from. We resolved a sample of GoDaddy's domains: 89% land in blocks registered to Amazon.
IONOS Is Cutting 12% of Its Workforce Five Weeks After Raising Its Revenue Outlook.
Stock reports #ai#cloud
IONOS will reduce headcount from about 3,800 to about 3,350, spending around EUR 35 million once to save up to EUR 30 million a year from 2027. IONOS says the savings will be reinvested, including in AI product development and cloud, and its 2026 adjusted EBITDA forecast is unchanged.
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Industry reports
The Field of cPanel Alternatives Keeps Widening. A Brand-New One Comes From Inside cPanel’s Ecosystem.
Since cPanel moved to per-account pricing in 2019 and raised it most years since, the control panel has become a cost decision. Some hosts run their own panel, others license one of a widening set of independents, though the shift is directional rather than a measured stampede.
Industry reports
Web3 Naming Bids for the DNS Root, and ICANN Names Its Price
ICANN's study group concluded that blockchain naming can integrate with the DNS root, but only if the same string stays under the same owner in both systems. Days before the deadline, ENS reorganized into a foundation to pursue .ens as a closed brand domain, with the earliest launch in 2028.
Industry reports
Google’s Field Data Ranks the Platforms Behind Live Sites by Speed, and the Gap Is More Than Twofold
We pulled real-user Core Web Vitals for two dozen platforms from Google's field data. Closed builders beat premium hosts, sister brands differ by 21 points, HostGator anchors the bottom, and the developer clouds fail on responsiveness. Speed turns out to be a rankable output.
Industry reports
Porkbun Passed 4 Million Domains. The More Interesting Number Is 750,000.
Porkbun announced its fourth million domains under management, reached in nine months by the company's own count. The number underneath it matters more: 750,000 customers, up from 450,000 at the last milestone, meaning the registrar is adding people faster than it is adding domains.
Industry reports
Running a Domain Costs About a Dollar a Year. Here Is What Eight Registries Charge for It.
We compiled the published accounts of eight domain registries. Three independent data points put the cost of operating a domain-year at about a dollar; wholesale prices run from €1 for .de to $11 for .org after its first increase since 2016. Governance, not technology, sets the price.
Industry reports
Hosting’s Next Six Months Are Already Scheduled: Five Dates to Prepare For
September 11 puts vendor silence on a 24-hour clock. Autumn opens the licensing season under a new ownership alignment. Q3 closes the Sedo window. November 1 raises .com to $10.97. January 12 kills egress fees. What prepared operators do before each date.
Industry reports
Montenegro Is Taking .me Back: A State Company Will Run the Million-Domain ccTLD
.me earned 114 million euros since 2008 and the state kept about a third. Montenegro has now started building a state company to take over its ccTLD from GoDaddy and Identity Digital, in the name of digital sovereignty and a bigger share of the money.
Industry reports
A DNS Record Now Flags Domains for Sale. Adoption Is Up to Registrars.
RFC 10023 defines a "_for-sale" DNS record so a domain owner can advertise a name directly, price and contact included. SIDN built it to loosen the secondary market's grip, but it only works if registrars put the button in front of customers.
Industry reports
$227,000 to Apply for a New Domain Ending: The First ICANN Round Since 2012 Closes August 12
ICANN's first new gTLD window since 2012 closes August 12: $227,000 per application, country names banned outright, cities needing government letters. Bali wants .bali, and ICANN 87 lands on the island in October, where the bid is due to be announced.
Industry reports
GoDaddy Q2 2026: More Revenue From the Same Customers
GoDaddy's Q2 2026: revenue up 6.6%, EPS up 30%, customers up by just 22,000. ARPU, upsell and an $851.8 million buyback are doing the work, and the segment split shows domains and hosting growing slowest of all.
Industry reports
Parked Domains Lost Their Ad Engine. What Replaced It Is Drawing Scrutiny.
For a decade, parked domains earned money showing Google ads. On February 10, 2026, Google ended AdSense for Domains and the parking economy collapsed: Bodis closed, Sedo's revenue fell 66%, Team Internet's search revenue fell 63%. The traffic moved to zero-click redirects ICANN is now examining.
Industry reports
Verisign Finally Won .web. Unlike .com, No One Caps Its Price.
On July 22, after a decade of litigation, Verisign won .web. It arrives as the company posts a record .com quarter, and unlike .com, whose price is capped by a US government agreement, .web has no such ceiling. What a freely priced premium domain under the .com monopolist means for the market.
Industry reports
August 2 Is Still Real: What the AI Act’s Big Date Means for Hosting After the Omnibus
The Digital Omnibus moved the AI Act's high-risk obligations to December 2027, and much of the industry heard "delay." But August 2, 2026 still activates Commission fines up to 3% of turnover for GPAI providers and transparency duties for new AI systems. Where hosts sit, step by step.
Industry reports
An AWS Region Has Been Offline for Months, and the Cloud’s Address Is No Longer a Technicality
The war between the US and Iran has kept an entire AWS cloud region offline for months, something ordinary outages never do. Why losing one region can take an unprepared business down, and what real disaster recovery requires.
Industry reports
A Government ID for Every .ru Domain, and a Warning for Every Country Code
From September 1, everyone holding a .ru domain must verify their identity through a Russian government system or lose the name, and foreign owners are the ones most exposed. It is a blunt reminder that a country-code domain carries the politics of the country behind it.
Industry reports
H1 2026: The Six Months That Repriced Hosting
H1 2026 synthesized from forty pieces of verified reporting: renewal spreads past 5x, RAM and storage up 50–300%, domain escalators restarted into record demand, the acquisition funnel measurably broken, $850B of leases off balance sheet, and the machine customer arriving. Growth by invoice.
Industry reports
Cloudways Just Handed AI Agents the Admin Panel, and the Locks Are Racing to Catch Up
Cloudways' MCP server now exposes 244 tools, letting an AI agent run security scans, deployments, and billing on your hosting by chat. It is part of a wave, from DigitalOcean to cPanel, and its role-based scoped tokens stand out in a category where research finds many MCP servers insecure.
Industry reports
GoDaddy Opens Its Domain API to AI Agents, With Guardrails Built In
GoDaddy's new Developer Platform lets AI agents search, register, and manage domains without a browser. Unlike the first wave's "no human required" pitch, it ties every registration to a recorded consent object and scoped tokens, the domain version of the authorization pattern agentic commerce is converging on.
Industry reports
UK Financial Regulators Now Oversee AWS, Google, Microsoft and Oracle
The UK's three financial regulators are now overseeing the cloud giants. From July 13, AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft and Oracle are designated critical third parties, a recognition that regulated finance runs on a handful of clouds and one outage could ripple across it. It mirrors the EU's DORA.
Industry reports
The Free Tier Isn’t Dying Loudly. It’s Being Repriced Quietly. And the Developer Pipeline Goes With It.
Fly.io removed free for new accounts and Netlify doubled credit costs to halve free capacity, while Render, Cloudflare, and a reversing Railway keep free as strategy. The quiet unwinding of developer free tiers decides where the next CTO generation's defaults form.
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