Industry reports — Web Hosting News
Latest Industry reports news, updates and analysis from the web hosting industry — 260 articles.
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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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Which Top-Level Domains Are Worth Carrying? The Abuse Data Most Registrars Never Book.
A wide TLD lineup looks like pure margin, but Spamhaus data shows that in extensions like .bond and .lol nearly the whole zone is registered and discarded within months. The reputation, deliverability, and abuse-desk costs are real and unbooked, and ICANN is moving to make them explicit.
Industry reports
DigitalOcean Lands Nine-Figure AI Deals as Its Backlog Jumps Tenfold
DigitalOcean, long the cloud for developers, says its preliminary Q2 backlog will top $800 million, up more than tenfold, on multiple nine-figure AI-inference commitments. Revenue growth is re-accelerating to 29 percent, and it now sells itself as an "AI-native cloud" rather than raw GPU rental.
Industry reports
team.blue Reports the Climate Trade-Off of Consolidation
Europe's hosting groups have consolidated for a decade and now want science-based climate targets to match. But growth by acquisition works against it: each deal adds emissions to the total they have pledged to cut. team.blue's report documents the bind, making it the sector's test case.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
Industry reports
Is Cloudflare silently killing the web hosting industry?
Cloudflare is not trying to become another host. It is building the layer where new projects are deployed, secured and managed: domains, DNS, deployment, security, storage, compute and AI workflows. In that world, traditional hosting may no longer be needed.
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WooCommerce 10.9 Ships Agent Abilities. The Hard Part Now Belongs to the Hosts.
WooCommerce 10.9 (stable June 23) ships canonical, MCP-exposable abilities for products and orders across 4.3M live stores. Shopify flipped agentic storefronts on for 5.6M merchants; WooCommerce has no central switch, making agent access the hosting industry's next managed-service battleground.