Other — Web Hosting News

Namecheap pulled Handshake TLD support on June 10, five months after selling its Namebase marketplace. HNS trades at $0.005, down from $0.85 in 2021. Unstoppable Domains says blockchain names were "part of the crypto craze" that never crossed into mainstream usage.

Matt Mullenweg announced Protect The Shire on June 5, 2026: a 24-hour default delay before every WordPress plugin release reaches auto-updates. The infrastructure has existed as opt-in since August 2025. The shift cites AI-accelerated supply chain risk after Mythos and Essential Plugins.

SoftBank's €45B firm commitment and €75B ceiling for AI data centers in France drove Choose France 2026 to a record €93B total. France's nuclear grid is the structural advantage. SoftBank's balance sheet is the open question.

SiteGround auto-installed its AI Agent plugin on 1M+ WordPress sites timed to WordPress 7.0. The plugin's rating dropped to 1.1 stars within days.

Wix cut 1,000 jobs and Webflow 140, both naming AI. Hostinger Horizons hit 1M users, 93% first-time website owners.

WP Engine pursues WordPress Foundation dissolution. The June 4 hearing coincides with WordCamp Europe's opening day in Kraków.

AI tools are now standard across WordPress environments, and hosting providers can no longer treat data privacy as a static concern. This article breaks down what changes, what risks emerge, and what you can do about it.

Cloudflare cut 1,100 employees (20% of headcount) on a $639.8M record revenue day and used a "builders, sellers, measurers" framework that maps directly onto hosting operations. Billing, support triage, and compliance are where AI closed the gap. The advantage goes to who acts first.

Dutch FIOD seized 800 servers on May 22, dismantling Stark Industries and its post-sanctions successor THE.Hosting. The bulletproof host built by brothers from Transnistria hosted NoName057, Sandworm, and the Doppelganger campaign; JA4T fingerprints proved the rebrand was the same hardware.

AWS Interconnect multicloud eliminates per-gigabyte transfer fees between AWS and Google Cloud VPCs in favor of flat bandwidth pricing. Azure and Oracle are next. The launch removes the cloud-to-cloud brokerage role that drove Megaport and Equinix Fabric growth.

Founded in 2006 as TwooIT GmbH, hosting.de marks its 20th anniversary with a refreshed brand identity. The Aachen-based provider unveils a new logo and visual design system across its product interfaces, reinforcing its commitment to German-hosted services.

Google Cloud incorrectly suspended Railway's account on May 19, 2026, taking it offline for eight hours. AWS and Railway Metal workloads ran throughout but were unreachable: Railway's edge proxies relied on a GCP-hosted control plane API for routing, and when it failed, everything returned 404.

On May 5, a defect in DENIC's newly deployed signing infrastructure made Amazon.de, DHL, Bahn.de, and hundreds of thousands of other .de domains unreachable for three hours. Servers were running. Monitoring showed green. The fix came from Cloudflare, not DENIC.

Kenneth Gaughan has filed suit against InMotion Hosting and DreamHost after both canceled his ESApet.org hosting following trademark complaints from Elevate Rank LLC. The case exposes a critical legal gap: the DMCA's safe harbor covers copyright only, and hosts that cancel service over trademark complaints bypass the legal processes trademark law actually designates for resolving such disputes.

DigitalOcean's Inference Engine gives developers and businesses four ways to run AI inference workloads, from serverless to dedicated GPU capacity. The April 28 launch is backed by $120M in AI ARR growing 150%, a Richmond data center built for AI alone, and production deployments at Character.ai, Hippocratic AI, and LawVo.

OpenAI's Azure exclusivity ended on April 27 as Microsoft and OpenAI restructured their partnership: Microsoft stops paying revenue share, retains its 27 percent equity stake, and Azure keeps first-launch rights, while OpenAI gains full multi-cloud distribution including AWS and Google Cloud. The restructuring directly resolves a legal conflict created by OpenAI's $38 billion AWS cloud contract and up to $50 billion Amazon investment, and removes the barrier that prevented enterprise customers from running OpenAI models outside Azure.

The EU awarded EUR 180 million in sovereign cloud contracts to four European provider consortia and introduced the SEAL framework, which for the first time defines cloud sovereignty through measurable levels rather than political principles.

Cloudflare's Agents Week, April 12-17, 2026, produced more than 20 announcements spanning compute, storage, networking, browser, email, voice, and developer tooling. The week followed Anthropic's April 8 managed agent launch and an 11 percent Cloudflare stock decline two days later.

The blockchain domain company that hit a $1 billion valuation in 2022 has quietly become a traditional ICANN registrar, and its 10 new shell accreditations are a competitive move in the domain expiry market rather than preparation for the new gTLD round opening April 30. In parallel, Unstoppable Domains is sponsoring more than 19 organizations through the gTLD process, including .agent with Sentient Foundation and .blockchain with Blockchain.com, establishing a role as the bridge between the Web3 domain ecosystem and the traditional DNS system.

Let's Encrypt issues approximately ten million certificates per day and is closing in on protecting one billion websites, making its May 13 root certificate switch a change that affects the majority of SSL certificates in any hosting provider's customer base. The two deadlines that require immediate action are May 13, when renewal automation must be verified to handle future shorter lifetimes correctly, and July 8, when client authentication certificates issued by Let's Encrypt stop working entirely. Providers whose automation relies on acme.sh face an additional gap: acme.sh does not yet support ACME Renewal Information (RFC 9773), the mechanism that lets Let's Encrypt communicate renewal windows directly to clients.