Web Hosting News & Industry Updates
Breaking news, M&A deals, pricing moves, security alerts and in-depth analysis for the web hosting industry — 812 articles across 14 categories.
✦ Featured
Software reviews
A Vercel for Africa? HOSTAFRICA’s HCode Runs in South Africa
HOSTAFRICA launched HCode on November 5 as its answer to platforms like Vercel, with prices in local currencies across six African countries. The apps run in South Africa. HCode, a rebranded version of the Zanode platform HOSTAFRICA bought in May, starts at R50, or about $3, a month.
Monarx Reviewed 65 Hosts: 10 of 12 Large Hosting Brands Sell Website Security Add-Ons
Partners #cybersecurity#monarx
Monarx's review of 65 hosting providers finds 37 including advanced website protection at no extra cost, 31 selling a separate security product and 18 doing both. Mass-market brands lean toward add-ons, while managed WordPress hosts mostly build protection into the plan.
Who Owns Europe’s Largest Hosting Markets: IONOS Controls the Leader in Germany, Poland and Spain
Industry reports #domains#europe
The four largest Swiss-owned hosts hold 39.8% of .ch domains, while the UK has one British-owned operator among its eight largest. We matched the leading operators in Europe's eight largest domain markets with their owners, and IONOS owns the leader in three of them.
DreamHost Confirms File Manager Breach. FTP/SFTP and Some Webmail Credentials Were Exposed
Security #cybersecurity#dreamhost
A security breach prompted DreamHost's October 23 File Manager shutdown and password resets. An attacker exploited third-party software behind the tool and could access FTP/SFTP credentials of users who signed in, plus some webmail logins. Well under 10% of email and FTP/SFTP accounts were affected.
All articles
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M&A
Google’s TPUs Get a Blackstone-Funded Cloud of Their Own
Google and Blackstone are standing up a separate US company, majority-owned by Blackstone, to build data centers and sell Google's TPU chips as merchant compute beyond Google Cloud. Blackstone is committing $5 billion in equity toward 500 MW by 2027, and late-June hires for a COO and CTO show the venture being built from the ground up at pace.
Security
Europe’s Hosts Bundle Email to Keep Customers. One in Four Mailboxes Has No SPF.
ShareShift's State of Email 2026 scanned 56.3M European domains and found three in four run an active mailbox, a powerful retention lever. But 1 in 4 mailboxes has no SPF record. Strato attaches mail to 94% of new domains and configures SPF on 6%, while IONOS, All-Inkl and OVH bundle and protect.
Industry reports
AI Website Builders Are Now Part of Provisioning. A GoDaddy Outage Just Showed Why.
A minor late-June GoDaddy Airo incident disrupted its free, AI-driven site-creation step. With AI builders now bundled into the plans at GoDaddy, Hostinger, Wix, and IONOS, their uptime has become an activation and revenue metric rather than a feature flag.
Security
2,930 of 2,931 Exposed MySQL Databases Were Already Marked by Ransomware. The Playbook Is Six Years Old.
A 2026 study found 2,930 of 2,931 exposed MySQL databases were marked by ransomware. One in four organizations still exposes MySQL, and honeypots get hit within 30 seconds. The PLEASE_READ_ME playbook from 2020 still works because the databases are not being broken into. They are being left open.
Other
The EU Just Aimed Its Gatekeeper Rules at AWS and Azure for the First Time, and It Used AI to Do It
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.
Security
An Attacker Sent a Ransom Email From Blesta’s Own Servers
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.
Pricing updates
European Hosting Is Still Cheap. But Only If You Buy the Right Tier.
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.
Industry reports
Hostinger’s Kodee: 91% VPS Resolution, 69% Reality. Here Is What the Data Actually Shows.
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.
Industry reports
AI Was Supposed to Kill the Website. Bluehost Data Says the Opposite.
Bluehost's AI Confidence report: 34% of SMBs say their website matters more since AI, not less. Only 13% optimize for AI search.
Interviews
The One-Click Website Was Never Real. AI Does Not Change That – Vito Peleg, CEO of Atarim
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.
Software reviews
WooCommerce 10.9 Ships Seven Agent Abilities in Core
WooCommerce 10.9 reaches stable June 23 with seven canonical abilities, five of them write operations, exposed through the Abilities API and MCP. The permission callback is the new security boundary; a Store API change that cuts draft-order writes is a quiet win for hosting economics.
Industry reports
FERC Orders Six Grid Operators to Fix the Data-Center Queue
FERC's June 18 orders give six US grid operators 60 days to fix large-load interconnection, including the cost-shift fight over whether data centers or ratepayers fund grid upgrades. For hosting, the queue is the binding constraint on compute supply.
Industry reports
The Affiliate Funnel Built Modern Hosting. AI Search Is Dismantling It.
Future plc's affiliate revenue fell 24%. Penske says affiliate income is down a third. Tom's Guide lost 36% of its audience. Hosting's highest-paying acquisition channel is losing its distribution - and providers must rebuild CAC math around creators and AI citations.
Other
Team Internet Pursues £20M Damages Claim While Its Domain Division Goes to Market
Team Internet generated $566.9M from Google in 2023. After successive AFD policy changes cut parking revenue, it is now pursuing a £20M+ antitrust claim and selling its Domains, Identity & Software division - which the board values above the group's market cap.
Industry reports
The File Nobody Watches: llms.txt Is the Hosting Industry’s Newest Attack Surface
110 hosting-industry domains publish an llms.txt that AI agents read verbatim, and a single edit can feed customers a rogue download or an attacker's phone number. Zero of the 110 are signed or monitored. Every piece of the attack is already proven; nobody is guarding the file.
Industry reports
Europe’s Domain Market Is Splitting: Local Giants Hold the Base, Cloudflare and Namecheap Win the Flow
ShareShift's June 2026 analysis maps a structural split in the European ccTLD market: Cloudflare and Namecheap win new registration flow well above their installed base, while United Internet's 17% position masks a portfolio where 9 of 12 brands are not growing net.
Interviews
Copilot Q&A, Part Two: The AI Finds the Problem. You Decide Whether to Fix It.
Ayaz Ahmed Khan on what Copilot adoption looks like in practice: nearly 400 preview customers, diagnosis time down from 30-60 minutes to minutes, a deliberate human-in-the-loop design, and why AI diagnostics became a paid add-on rather than a bundled feature.
Industry reports
We Audited the AI-Crawl Posture of Hosting Companies. Cobbler’s Children Have No Shoes.
We audited 736 hosting and infrastructure companies: 90% of the measurable declare no AI-crawler policy. The 58 that do reveal five strategies.
Industry reports
500,000 VPS: Contabo Hits a Scale Milestone in the Quarter Its Rivals Raised Prices
Contabo hit 500,000 VPS on June 16, 2026. In the same quarter, Scaleway raised serverless prices up to 100%, Hetzner raised dedicated cloud servers by up to 204%, and OVH adjusted pricing from April. Contabo added features. The timing is worth examining.
Pricing updates
Hetzner’s Price Increases Reached 204%. The 30% Headline Applied to a Different Tier.
The widely reported 30-37% Hetzner price increase applied to CX and CAX entry-level servers. CCX dedicated vCPU instances rose 113-173% in the EU and up to 157% in the US. CPX Intel servers in the US rose up to 204%. Full price tables inside.
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