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
A Magento Zero-Day Is Being Exploited Now. The First Known Victim Was Fully Patched.
Attackers are running code on Magento and Adobe Commerce stores through an unpatched flaw Sansec calls StyleSmuggler. There is no patch and no CVE, the first known victim had a clean patch status, and the backdoor installs in the site user's home directory rather than the web root.
M&A
cyber_Folks Has Over PLN 1 Billion of M&A Capacity. Hosting Is Not the Priority
cyber_Folks puts its capacity for further acquisitions above PLN 1 billion and says the activity will be concentrated in e-commerce. Its hosting arm earns a 51 percent adjusted margin and a quarter of group earnings, while the segment being bought into reported an operating loss.
Security
WHMCS Has an Unauthenticated RCE. The Fix Exists Only for 9.0.8 and 8.13.7.
Two WHMCS advisories on September 3: an unauthenticated remote code execution flaw affecting every build since 8.0, and a 2CheckOut gateway flaw exposing client data in versions from 4.5. Both are fixed in 9.0.8 and 8.13.7, and nothing older gets a patch.
Partners
1,000+ Junk Emails a Day, Brought Under Control by One DNS Change
HeroicGuard filters mail before Google, Microsoft or any other provider receives it. Setup is one MX change, pricing is per domain with unlimited mailboxes, and NameHero's founder tells how it rescued a company address taking a thousand junk messages a day.
Security
Nearly Two-Thirds of All-in-One WP Migration Installs Remain Unpatched Two Weeks Later
Two weeks after the CVE-2026-19949 patch, WordPress.org statistics show 35 percent of installs on the fixed version, leaving about 3.2 million on a vulnerable version. Wordfence has published the chain from trackback to remote code execution, and Patchstack has raised its rating to medium priority.
Industry reports
Parked Domains Distort Hosting Rankings. So Do Corporate Registrars.
National hosting rankings mix five different businesses in one column. By our count, 35 of 115 markets have a domain parking service or a corporate brand-protection registrar among the eight largest names, which leaves fewer domains attributable to hosting providers than the table suggests.
Security
Attacks on the Elementor Pro Flaw Began the Day It Was Disclosed
A critical Elementor Pro flaw was disclosed on August 19 and attacked the same day, with one firewall vendor blocking more than 190,000 attempts. The fix had already shipped, only sites with a published upload form were reachable, and the check for compromise takes one look at a single directory.
Interviews
BalticNOG Interview: The Hosting Industry Is the Missing Voice in the Room
BalticNOG chairman Paulius Judickas talks to webhosting.today about the 220-attendee debut, why building a community across three countries proved harder than filling a room, what the event must never become, and the limited role hosting and data center companies play in it.
Security
A High-Severity Patch for Five Million WordPress Sites Was Labeled as a Text Fix
Two unauthenticated flaws in plugins on millions of WordPress sites were patched the same day, days before the CVE records went public. The changelogs gave no severity signal, and for anyone running a fleet, that gap is the real story.
M&A
DigitalOcean’s Market Cap Is Now Higher Than GoDaddy’s. What Five Public Multiples Say About Hosting Valuations.
GoDaddy is worth less than DigitalOcean on five times the revenue, and OVHcloud's record margin earns the lowest multiple of all. Our arithmetic on five public companies shows what actually moves a hosting valuation, and the logic transfers to private deals.
Security
An Attacker Hijacked Hetzner IP Space and Poisoned a Virtualizor Update
A BGP hijack of Hetzner address space sent Softaculous traffic to an attacker for two nights. A valid Let's Encrypt certificate hid the diversion, update packages were not cryptographically verified, one malicious Virtualizor update got through, and the countermeasure took about 12 hours to arrive.
Other
Proton’s Frankfurt Outage Report: 20 Minutes to Critical, and Hardware Too Scarce to Sacrifice
Proton's outage report is direct about what went wrong: a night-time filter change on both compressors killed the cooling, AI-era density cut the time-to-critical from hours to 20 minutes, and engineers chose to power servers down rather than lose hardware the AI boom has made hard to replace.
Pricing updates
Verisign Lifts .net Wholesale From $10.91 to $12.00, Effective March 1, 2027
A one-line 8-K raises .net wholesale from $10.91 to $12.00 from March 1, 2027, the first increase since February 2024. With 12.5 million registrations renewing at 78.7%, the step is worth up to $13.6 million a year, and resellers have six months to reprice.
Security
cPanel Patches a Root-Level Flaw in Domain Parking: One Customer Account With Domain Permissions Was Enough
cPanel patched CVE-2026-65643: an account holder able to add parked or addon domains could create arbitrary files and reach root, taking every site on the server. All supported versions were affected. No CVE record, no CVSS and no exploitation status published so far.
Events
Atlas Digital Summit Debuts in Reykjavik: Two Days on What AI Does to the Hosting Business
A 1927 Reykjavik theater hosts the first Atlas Digital Summit on September 28-29: two keynotes, six executive roundtable blocks in parallel Hosting and Security tracks, curated by Jason Nickerson of Domain Days Dubai. Invite-only, C-level, with AI as the thread through every session.
Pricing updates
Melbicom Prices Its Premium CDN by Zone: EUR 0.03 per GB in 55 Territories, Up to 0.15 Elsewhere
Melbicom's new CDN pairs a 39-PoP Premium network with a 12-PoP Volume lane reaching EUR 0.002 per GB. The zone map sets Premium's destination rate: 55 territories at the entry 0.03, delivery to the other 196 costs more. Cache-fill is free, the company told us; the published terms state no SLA.
Industry reports
In Wix’s Report, .store Doubled and .ai Cracked the Top 10. Zone Files Rank Them 24th and 39th
Wix says .store doubled and .ai cracked its top ten. Our zone data ranks them 24th and 39th while .com holds 45.6%, and registry estimates have .shop renewing at 14.2% against .com's 74.9%. Fast growth, faster churn, and the same incumbent.
Events
A Month Before Riga: What the First BalticNOG Delivered in Vilnius
The first BalticNOG put Geoff Huston's encryption doubts and Ukraine's wartime network lessons on one Vilnius stage. A month before Riga, that program is the best argument for going. Our co-founder was there; this year we watch from afar.
Industry reports
Seventeen Providers, Five Ways to Bill AI, and a Credit That Means Three Things
AI billing at 17 providers runs on five recurring mechanisms, often combined in one product. At one pole a provider publishes examples of what its credits buy; at the other, a subscription defines no unit at all and reserves additional charges or suspension for excessive use.
Other
Namecheap’s Second Hosting Outage This Month Hits 78 Shared Servers
Namecheap's second hosting outage in 13 days hit 78 shared servers on August 26 and was resolved after two hours and twenty minutes of status updates. Unlike the Phoenix cooling failure, this one ended with no cause given.