Web Hosting News & Industry Updates
Breaking news, M&A deals, pricing moves, security alerts and in-depth analysis for the web hosting industry — 742 articles across 14 categories.
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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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Security
Acronis cPanel Backup Plugin: Exploited Privilege-Escalation Flaw on CISA’s List
Acronis has patched CVE-2026-87886 in its backup plugin for cPanel and WHM and says it has been used in limited, targeted attacks, based on one customer report. CISA added it to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on September 16 with a three-day deadline for US federal civilian agencies.
M&A
Before the Press Release: What We See in Hosting M&A
Many owners who ask what their hosting business is worth have not decided to sell. Beyond the thirty deals announced in the first half of 2026 sit owners testing valuations, buyers with precise criteria, and conversations that run for months before anything becomes public.
Other
Elementor Opens an MCP Beta to Claude, Codex and Cursor
Elementor, on more than ten million sites, has opened a beta letting Claude, Codex, Cursor and other MCP tools build pages as native Elementor structures. It runs on atomic pages, output stays a draft, and three of the nine capabilities need a second Elementor plugin.
Security
Ten IP Addresses Sent at Least 94,000 Attempts to Exploit a WooCommerce Plugin.
A critical file-upload flaw in a paid WooCommerce extension was disclosed in February, and Wordfence has since blocked more than 100,000 attempts to exploit it. The largest published spike came on August 30, and ten source addresses account for at least 94,490 of the blocked requests.
Industry reports
We Ranked Hosting Two Ways. We Resolved 108 GoDaddy Domains: 96 Point at Amazon.
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.
Partners
Why Unfinished Websites Are Costing Hosting Companies More Than They Think
An agency founder spent eighteen years being paid to finish websites for people who had already bought hosting elsewhere. He argues that customer was the host's first, that the loss rarely looks like a loss, and that support tickets are full of requests hosts currently turn away.
Other
auDA Backs Removing a .com.au Allocation Route. Domain Monetization Stays Allowed.
auDA approved in principle a recommendation deleting the clause that lets a .com.au domain match a service, goods or premises. In the same package it kept domain monetization allowed, a pairing the panel's minority calls inconsistent. No rule has changed yet.
Security
EU Software Makers Now Have 24 Hours to Report an Exploited Flaw.
Article 14 of the Cyber Resilience Act took effect on September 11, giving manufacturers 24 hours to file an early warning on an actively exploited flaw. License is not the test, monetization is, and the equivalent duty for open-source stewards does not begin until December 2027.
Stock reports
IONOS Is Cutting 12% of Its Workforce Five Weeks After Raising Its Revenue Outlook.
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.
Other
group.one’s Ask Aida Completed 95% of Tasks in Customer Testing. Three Areas Still Required Human Support.
In initial customer testing, Ask Aida completed 95% of tasks. Authentication, some external invoicing and abuse cases still required human support.
Other
Cloudflare Changes Its Crawler Defaults on September 15. Sites Blocking AI Training Will Start Blocking Googlebot.
Cloudflare changes its AI crawler defaults on September 15. Crawlers that do more than one job will be judged by all of their behaviors, so sites that already block AI training will start blocking Googlebot. The new ad-page defaults reach every free-plan site left untouched.
Partners
Monarx Launches Dark Web Monitoring. One Domain Covers Every Address on It.
Monarx Dark Web Monitoring begins with a domain rather than a list of mailboxes, sells white-label at a suggested $1.99 to $9.99 a month on a 50/50 revenue share, and today shows customers which categories of their data were breached rather than the data itself.
Other
Aruba Applied for 39 TLD Strings. The Private Auction That Won It .cloud Is Now Banned.
Aruba, the Italian host that runs .cloud, told Domain Name Wire it applied for 39 strings in ICANN's 2026 round, among them vps, demo and pec. It won .cloud in a private auction, the route the new rules ban, which leaves an ICANN auction or a free switch to a fallback.
Other
Automattic’s Board Put Matt Mullenweg on Paid Leave. He Still Leads the WordPress Project.
Automattic's board has put Matt Mullenweg on paid leave, with chief financial officer Mark Davies as interim chief executive. The change stops at the commercial company: no change has been announced to his leadership of the WordPress project or to his control of WordPress.org.
Security
A cPanel Account With Mail Privileges Could Reach Root. Every Supported Version Was Affected.
cPanel has patched CVE-2026-67401. An authenticated account with mail-related privileges could create files through EmailTrack and reach code execution as root. All supported versions were affected, and the CVE record scores the flaw 9.9 out of 10, critical.
Other
Most of Hostinger’s Hardest Support Cases No Longer Transfer to a Human. The Human Coaches the AI Instead.
Hostinger has merged its support assistant Kodee with its marketing and SEO agents into Hostinger Agent. The bigger change is behind it: on the one conversation in ten the AI cannot settle alone, a specialist advises it instead of taking over, and hard-case resolution rose from 41 to 72 percent.
M&A
What Is Your Hosting Business Worth? The Smallest Deals Are Back at 2.0x.
A hosting owner reading the private-market data finds a ladder from a median of 2.0 times earnings at the bottom to 5.8 at the top. The lower rungs are quoted on the owner's total benefit and the upper ones on EBITDA, and the bottom is exactly where it stood in 2023.
M&A
Team Internet Still Wants Over $160 Million for Its Domains Business. The Timeline It Set in June Has Passed.
Team Internet's sale of its Domains, Identity and Software division is at an advanced stage with multiple parties interested in all or parts of it, the company said on September 7, holding its floor of over $160 million while the outcome it guided for in early Q3 has yet to arrive.
Industry reports
Non-Developers Are Building Whole Websites With AI. 20i’s Survey Says Only 31.5% Get a Developer’s Review.
A survey of 600 US non-developers who use AI to write code found 16.3 percent building entire websites, 61 percent testing the results themselves and 31.5 percent having a developer review the code. Separate laboratory testing puts the flaw rate near half.
Expert's Voice
Is auDA About to Nuke the .com.au Namespace? The $500 Million Red Tape Nightmare
auDA has voted to tie .com.au and .net.au eligibility to an exact match with a company name, ASIC business name or trademark. Domains registered against a product, event or trust structure would no longer qualify, and the cleanup lands on registrars and hosts.
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