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
InMotion Rolls Out Monarx ThreatShield Inside the PHP Engine Across Its Fleet
InMotion is switching on Monarx ThreatShield fleet-wide, blocking attacks inside the PHP runtime rather than filtering requests in front of it. Its own July incident report, with two sites taken over in under half a minute each, documents the problem this product class targets.
Security
Plesk Patches Three Flaws That Start From an Ordinary Customer Account
Plesk's August 25 advisories cover three flaws reachable from an ordinary customer account: arbitrary file reads, cross-tenant database access, and root through two extensions. The extension fixes ship separately, and administrators report the Migrator update is not arriving.
Industry reports
Five Registrars, Half the Blocklisted Domains, and a Dispute Over the Count
Interisle counts 8.5 million of 2025's 85 million new gTLD domains on blocklists, with five registrars accounting for half of them and rates ranging from 3% to 88%. ICANN's scientists dispute the scale and the method, while two policy processes target the bulk registration the report documents.
Software reviews
Hostinger’s AI Builder Exports the Code, While the Database Stays
Hostinger has merged its two builders into AI Builder, where the AI provisions the backend rather than recommending one. Asked what customers can take elsewhere, the company told us the codebase exports while the database stays. Its own documentation adds that the export is one way.
Stock reports
GoDaddy Is Sued Over the .com Promotion That Worked Too Well
A securities complaint alleges GoDaddy told investors it had turned off front-of-funnel discounting while running a $4.99 one-year .com offer. Its own filings show domains under management rising in that quarter and bookings growth falling from 9.1% to 5%.
Events
What WebHosting.Today Learned at WordCamp US 2026
WordCamp US 2026 drew close to 1,200 people to Phoenix, more than a third of them first-timers, and shipped 21 contributions in a reimagined Contributor Day. Porkbun, Hosting.com, BigScoots and CloudLinux told us how they are handling AI and faster threats, and what brings them to events.
Pricing updates
Clientexec Will Enforce Its Update Window, and the First Upgrade Is the One That Fails
Owned Licenses came with one year of updates that Clientexec says it never strictly enforced, in one case for twenty years. Enforcement starts at 7.2.1, and because the eligibility check ships inside that release, it is the one upgrade that fails rather than refusing.
Industry reports
GoDaddy Launches Node.js Hosting, and Publishes the Rules Apps Must Follow
GoDaddy's Node.js Hosting runs applications as persistent processes on plans that already exist, at a flat price. Its published deploy contract sets the limits that decide fit: outbound traffic on ports 80 and 443 only, no external databases, and no outbound SMTP.
Security
Researchers Found Six Major CDNs Vulnerable to New HTTP/3 Attacks. Two Deployed Mitigations.
New research turns a CDN against the site behind it by exploiting the gap between HTTP/3 at the front and HTTP/1.1 at the back. All six CDNs tested were vulnerable, only Baidu and Tencent have deployed mitigations, and every proposed fix sits at the CDN rather than at the site.
Security
Forminator’s 9.8 Flaw, and Eleven More Fixes in Nineteen Days
Forminator's file upload flaw scores 9.8 and needs no authentication, but it takes a form with both an upload and a select field, and the default .htaccess meant to stop execution does nothing on NGINX. The changelog records twelve security releases in nineteen days.
Industry reports
Namecheap Wants 40 Top-Level Domains, and 15 Overlap With Rival Portfolios
The second-largest registrar is moving up the chain with 40 top-level domain applications. Fifteen of them overlap with portfolios published by rival applicants, though two of those rivals filed more than three hundred strings each, which is most of the explanation.
Industry reports
Telegram Applies for .gram After a Sanctions Listing Took Down t.me
A single Telegram channel address in a US sanctions filing took the whole of t.me offline for nineteen hours. Telegram's answer is to apply for its own top-level domain, but a registry contract does not move a company out of the jurisdiction that caused the outage.
Industry reports
my.host Expands Into Europe From a Market With No Dominant Provider
The Dutch host has launched an English site and will add European data centers. The Netherlands is the eleventh most fragmented market we track and its leader holds 12.6 percent, so a challenger there has no dominant incumbent to displace.
Events
BalticNOG 2026: What the Baltic Network Operators Meeting in Riga Means for Hosting Providers
BalticNOG moves from Vilnius to Riga for its second edition. On paper it is a network operators meeting. Read the sponsor list and the topics and it is a hosting infrastructure event, from IPv4 leasing to BGP hijacks to peering.
Industry reports
Cloudflare Is in Every Market We Track. It Leads Fewer Than Half of Them.
Our data across 115 countries: Cloudflare appears in every top eight, GoDaddy in 49. But 375 providers appear in total, 284 of them in a single country, and in five markets the national leader leads by under one point.
Industry reports
ICANN Banned the Private Deals That Ended Most 2012 gTLD Contests
More than 1,600 applications arrived before ICANN's window closed, but the bigger change is the rulebook. Private resolution of contention sets is now prohibited, and unlike its 2012 predecessor the Guidebook says nothing about where the auction money goes.
Industry reports
A Chiller Failure in Phoenix Took Down Namecheap, Liquid Web and phoenixNAP.
Storms knocked out the chillers at RadiusDC's Phoenix site on August 13, and at least four providers went offline behind that failure. The operator's only detailed account appeared on a tenant's status page, and no reason-for-outage report has followed.
Security
The Hypervisor Escape Comes to VMware: CVE-2026-47876 May Let a Guest VM Run Code on the ESX Host
CVE-2026-47876, rated 9.3, may let a guest VM with a VMXNET3 adapter escape to the VMware ESX host. Two vCenter flaws rated 9.8 shipped in the same advisory, and one is already being exploited in the wild.
Industry reports
The Field of cPanel Alternatives Keeps Widening. A Brand-New One Comes From Inside cPanel’s Ecosystem.
Since cPanel moved to per-account pricing in 2019 and raised it most years since, the control panel has become a cost decision. Some hosts run their own panel, others license one of a widening set of independents, though the shift is directional rather than a measured stampede.
Industry reports
Web3 Naming Bids for the DNS Root, and ICANN Names Its Price
ICANN's study group concluded that blockchain naming can integrate with the DNS root, but only if the same string stays under the same owner in both systems. Days before the deadline, ENS reorganized into a foundation to pursue .ens as a closed brand domain, with the earliest launch in 2028.
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