Web hosting industry news, trends, and market developments.
The hosting industry moves faster than it looks from the outside. Acquisitions reshape provider landscapes, pricing models shift, new technologies like edge computing and serverless change what "hosting" even means. Keeping track of it matters if your business depends on these companies.
We report on developments that affect UK website owners: provider changes, platform announcements, pricing shifts, and the market trends that influence where the industry is heading. Analysis from a company that's been in the hosting business since 2002.
ICANN opens its first major new domain extension round in 14 years on 30 April 2026. The USD 227,000 application fee is aimed at global brands, cities, and industry bodies. For UK small businesses, the real action is already in the existing 458-TLD catalogue.
A wave of new domain endings arrives in 2026 as ICANN opens its first application round since 2012. Big brands are queuing up for their own .brand extension. Here's what it means for UK businesses, brand identity, and how AI systems read the web.
SSL/TLS certificates have been capped at 200 days since 15 March 2026. DigiCert moved first with a 199-day limit. The browser ecosystem transitioned without a major incident. Here's what actually happened, and what UK businesses still managing their own certificates should do before the 100-day cap lands in 2027.
Hetzner just announced price hikes of up to 37% on cloud servers, effective April 2026. OVHcloud warns hardware costs will climb 15% to 35% this year. The cause: AI companies are hoovering up the world's DRAM supply, and every hosting provider is paying the price.
Profound just closed $96 million at a billion-dollar valuation to track what AI says about brands. Fortune 500 firms are already using it. Here's what this means for UK businesses that can't spend thousands on enterprise AI tools, and the free steps you can take today.
Defense Secretary Hegseth gave Anthropic until Friday to drop Claude's safety guardrails or face the Defense Production Act. Eight of the ten largest US companies use Claude. Here's why this is a business continuity problem, not just a Washington power struggle.
A cleanup script with an empty API filter deleted 1,100 BYOIP prefixes from Cloudflare's global routing table on 20 February. It's the third time in four weeks that a major cloud provider has had automation destroy production infrastructure.
Amazon's AI coding assistant Kiro deleted a critical production server during a routine permissions change, triggering a 13-hour outage across AWS. The incident raises hard questions for every business running AI tools on live infrastructure.
Claude Sonnet 4.6 launched 17 February 2026 matching the then-flagship Opus 4.6 on office tasks and financial analysis at a fifth of the price. Opus 4.7 has since taken over as Anthropic's flagship with 87.6% on SWE-bench Verified. Sonnet 4.6 remains the value pick for office work and computer use.
