Web Hosting News & Industry Updates
Breaking news, M&A deals, pricing moves, security alerts and in-depth analysis for the web hosting industry — 643 articles across 14 categories.
✦ Featured
M&A
Thirty Deals in Six Months: The H1 2026 Hosting Consolidation Map, and the Two Clocks Driving What Sells Next
H1 2026 produced a US$1B Polish hosting-commerce merger, a $450M registrar champion, serial buyers closing two deals apiece within a fortnight, and a $40B data-centre record, while Google's AdSense shutdown forced Sedo and Team Internet to market. The map, the multiples, and the debt walls pushed to 2028-2029.
GoDaddy Q2 2026: More Revenue From the Same Customers
Industry reports #airo#arpu
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.
The Hosting Price Squeeze, Part 3: The Playbook
Expert's Voice #control-panel#pricing
In the final part of the series, BrandForge CEO Michiel Grotenhuis turns to the practical question: what do you actually do about rising hosting costs? He borrows from streaming, SaaS, and retail, shares what the community is doing, and argues for reducing dependence on any single vendor.
The Renewal Multiplier Index: What Hosting Costs After the Intro Price
Pricing updates #bluehost#hostinger
First edition of our quarterly index, measured July 29: SiteGround renews at up to 5.3x, the price-lock club at 1.0x, and GoDaddy, HostGator, and Namecheap mid-band at 1.7–3.7x. At every provider with a full plan range, the entry plan renews at a higher multiple than the top plan.
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Industry reports
GoDaddy Warns It May Exit India Over a Domain-Privacy Ruling
A December 2025 Delhi High Court ruling orders registrars to reveal domain owners' details within 72 hours to anyone with a "legitimate interest" and to end default WHOIS privacy. GoDaddy, Namecheap and Hosting Concepts are appealing, and GoDaddy warns it could force registrars to exit India.
Industry reports
Half a Billion Dollars to Shrink: What Public Filings Say a Hosting Customer Costs in 2026
The FY2025 filings reveal hosting's quiet pivot: marketing spend up, customer counts down, headline metrics retired, ARPU doing the growing. With AI summaries halving search click-through, the volume era of web presence is ending, and the filings say who is adapting how.
Industry reports
One of the Largest Planned Data Centers Died on a Notice Technicality
QTS has withdrawn its final appeal and terminated the Prince William Digital Gateway, a 2,100-acre Northern Virginia campus. Courts voided its rezoning after the county's newspaper notices failed state and local notice rules, ending one of the largest data center projects ever planned.
Security
India’s .bank.in Trust Domain Leaked the Data of the People Who Run It
India's .bank.in namespace was RBI's trust badge against banking phishing. Its registrar, IDRBT, left 33+ unauthenticated APIs exposing bcrypt hashes, emails, phone numbers and device fingerprints of 5,576 domain admins for 13 months. It was fixed in June 2026, with no confirmed exploitation.
Other
UpCloud’s Founder Becomes CEO After a 15-Month Outside Hire
UpCloud has named founder Joel Pihlajamaa as chief executive, ending Arno Schäfer's roughly 15-month tenure and putting the Helsinki cloud provider under founder-led leadership. The company frames it as a natural evolution and a signal that its sovereign, engineering-led strategy stays the course.
M&A
Automattic Has Taken Over WebHosting.com. The Plan Is Still a Coming-Soon Page.
WebHosting.com, a premium one-word .com long dormant under AT&T, now resolves to an Automattic-branded "coming soon" page, confirming the WordPress parent controls it. There is no announcement, price, or stated plan. The move fits Automattic's broader hosting push, but its plans are unconfirmed.
Events
CloudFest Americas Takes Shape: Miami’s Speakers and Themes So Far
CloudFest Americas lands at Miami's Ice Palace Studios on November 11-12, 2026, the Americas edition of Europe's flagship cloud festival. Organizers expect 2,000+ attendees across keynotes, roundtables and a NamesCon co-location, with a five-theme program spanning AI, security and growth.
Industry reports
You Don’t Own Your .io or .ai. You Rent a Country’s Politics.
RFC 1591 says a country-code domain is held in trust, not owned. Build a brand or infrastructure on .io, .ai, or .ly and you rent a foreign government's politics, with a retirement mechanism, seizures, and price ratchets to prove it. The .io Chagos scare was a reprieve, not a resolution.
Other
Meet the New webhosting.today: The Hosting Market Now Has a Scoreboard
The new webhosting.today is live. Market Insights resolves 400M domains and fingerprints 24M hosting IPs monthly, profiling 3,400+ operators across 110+ countries, down to which competitors each host wins and loses domains to. Free to browse; registration opens the full engine.
Industry reports
AI Agents Now Run Hosting Operations, Not Just Content. Pressable’s June Update Is the Tell.
Pressable, an Automattic hosting lab, expanded its MCP integration in June so AI agents can run caching, backups, SSL, WP-CLI and bulk operations across a WordPress portfolio. With Rocket.net shipping a native MCP server too, the hosting control panel is becoming an interface built for agents.
Industry reports
The Hosting Industry Runs on Subscription Billing. Visa Made That More Expensive.
Hosting runs on recurring billing but rarely counts the cost of collecting it. A quarter after Visa's April 2026 VAMP change cut the "excessive disputes" threshold from 220 to 150bps, the exposure is live, and GoDaddy's 10-K spells it out: reserves, higher fees, and settlement losses.
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.