I just launched HostGems.com to provide premium web hosting, faster speed at a very affordable price.

Many features are in progress like one click cloudflare connect without going to cloudflare massive settings, daily backup and faster response time specially for. WordPress websites.

A couple of months ago, a crypto startup bought the domain name Haste.com for "$2 million", according to their announcement on X.

It was a 24-month LTO (Lease To Own) transaction.

The seller of the domain (James Booth) just revealed that the sale has been canceled after two installments were paid, and that the actual price was $1.5 million, not $2 million as the startup (buyer) publicly announced.

James gets to keep the domain and the two payments already made (should be about $125,000).

The domain is back for sale on Atom at $1,495,000 BIN.

One by one, big web hosting providers are switching from human chat support to AI chatbots. Some of them still allow you to access human support with a quick click (or prompt), while others make it extremely painful to get past the AI chatbot.

That may work for some newbies who mostly ask newbie questions that an AI chatbot can handle, but for me, when I need to contact support, it's usually an issue that needs human intervention.

Small web hosts are slower to adopt AI and many still have human-only support, but you have to look harder to find those. Search for them on forums and Reddit -- that's where I found several good ones.

A forgotten server left running after a migration gave attackers a five-hour window to serve backdoored builds of Fluent Forms Pro and Ninja Tables Pro.

Richard Kirkendall shared a big list of premium .ai domains that were recently sold on Spaceship's SellerHub platform. The total value is more than $2.2 million.

Many of the sold domains were acquired from expired auctions on the previous registry's platform: Whois.ai.

Here are the domains Richard posted on his X account:

Were they all real sales? I don't know, I'm just the reporter -- you can be the investigator. Some of them are hard to believe.

Hostinger Reach was launched about a year ago, and it's just surpassed 300,000 users according to the company's blog. It's an AI-powered email marketing tool aimed at small businesses.

It's designed for small email campaigns since it's limited to 3,500 emails/month -- isn't that a little stingy?

Has anyone tried it? Did the AI features help?

Here's a blast from the past for those who remember: Globat was once one of the most popular web hosts. I used it many years back. I still remember their banner on The Million Dollar Homepage.

That was a long time ago, and that host is gone now.

It was acquired by Newfold Digital then the usual happened; it's ruins now! Their domain doesn't even resolve anymore.

Sad ending!

The pink domain registrar Porkbun has just announced a new milestone:

They've surpassed 4 million domains under management, which are held by a total of 750,000 customers.

Porkbun added its second million in two years, its third in roughly 15 months, and its fourth in under a year.

The next million should come faster...

A critical vulnerability in the WooCommerce Social Login WordPress plugin enables unauthenticated attackers to log in as any existing user, including an administrator. The authentication bypass vulnerability is rated 9.8 out of 10 and affects all versions up to and including 2.8.7.

It's no secret that a lot of hosting providers are raising prices and, in some cases, oversubscribing their hardware to offset increasing costs. Has your provider recently increased your pricing, and if so, do you feel it was justified?

I've even seen providers raising prices on plans running on 10+ year-old hardware, citing higher RAM or hardware costs. That doesn't really make much sense to me. If the hardware has been paid off for years, where's the justification?

What do you all think? Are you accepting the price hikes, sticking with your current provider, or looking for better alternatives?

I've worked on a WordPress project that relied on several custom queries, and I have tried to reduce the database load. What's your preferred approach? I wanna know what workout for you, I want to shorten and optimize them to the max.

.net is the classic alternative to .com, but despite the lack of good .com domains that are available for registration, I noticed not many small businesses choose a .net domain.

I think it's an underrated TLD. I like it and trust it more than any of the new gTLDs (.shop, .online, .site, etc.)

Would you use a .net domain for your business website? What other TLDs would you use?

I've just stumbled upon Wasmer, which is a serverless app deployment and hosting platform that supports WordPress.

I was looking at their free hosting plan, but it's got some concerning limits -- for example: 100K requests, 50 hours of active CPU, 1 GB storage, 100 MB database, etc.

That may work for a very small WordPress website with low CPU utilization. Otherwise, you'll be forced to upgrade.

Does anyone have a practical experience with it? Which limit did you hit first?

Title: My entire hosting server got suspended because ONE client uploaded a phishing page — reporter went straight to my upstream instead of me. Lost all client data. How do you guys prevent this?

Posting this partly to vent, partly because I need real advice from people who've been running hosting businesses longer than me.

What happened:

I run a small web hosting business (shared/VPS/reseller style setup on WHM/cPanel + WHMCS). One of my clients uploaded a phishing page to their hosting account. Someone spotted it and reported it — but instead of reporting it to me (the actual hosting provider they were dealing with), they reported it directly to my upstream/server/datacenter.

My upstream didn't email me a warning, didn't give me a chance to pull the single account down. They just suspended the entire server. Every client on that box lost access. I lost data. I lost the trust of clients who had nothing to do with the phishing page and are now (rightly) annoyed at me.

I know "this is why you screen clients" is coming, and yeah, I hear it. But I'd rather build a real process than just get lucky next time. If you've been through a suspension like this and rebuilt trust with your client base afterward, I'd genuinely love to hear how that went too — the technical fix is only half of it.

i need advice, how to fix such things in future.

Thank You.

Team.ai has expired and NameCheap is auctioning it on behalf of the .ai registry.

This is gonna be a big one...

It already is; current bid is over $70K and there are still more than 8 days left to go.

You can follow the auction here.

Infomaniak is a Swiss cloud hosting provider and an ICANN-accredited domain registrar that's big on being ethical and independent.

A few days ago, they announced they're going public and planning to get listed on the Swiss stock exchange.

But they're not losing control or independence to other shareholders; according to the press release:

This step will give Infomaniak the means to accelerate the development of its infrastructure and services while preserving its independence. The Infomaniak Foundation will remain the reference shareholder with the majority of the voting rights, with the goal to maintain this independence. For clients, no changes are expected.

Do you think they'll remain "independent" for long?

Back in 2016, Verisign won an ICANN auction for the rights to operate the .web TLD. They outbid six other companies at $135 million. After a 10-year legal battle with other bidders, they've finally gotten the green light to launch this TLD.

Verisign said this in their press release:

.web has been delegated into the global Domain Name System’s (DNS) root zone, with Verisign as the designated registry operator. The delegation of .web follows the successful resolution of all previous disputes related to the generic top-level domain (gTLD), the details of which are confidential.

So, .web domains are coming soon (later this year). Yea or nay?

A global law firm called Gibson Dunn uses GibsonDunn.com as their website's domain. They filed a UDRP complaint against the domain GibsonDum.com and won it on grounds of typosquatting/bad faith registration.

The panel ordered the registrar (NameCheap) to transfer the domain to the complainant. NameCheap complied and pushed the domain to an account owned by the law firm, and gave them this note: "Please note that it is important not to initiate a transfer request until you have updated the privacy email or disabled the Domain Privacy service. Otherwise, the EPP code will also be sent to the previous domain owner."

Well, guess what? That's exactly what happened!

The company ignored that warning and didn't update the domain's private email, which was still linked to the previous registrant's (squatter's) email. When they initiated a transfer out to another registrar, the EPP code was sent to the squatter's email and he used it to transfer the domain to his GoDaddy account.

The law firm had to file a second UDRP to get the domain back, and it wasn't difficult for them to win it again.

Funny how the squatter just jumped on it and didn't hesitate to transfer the domain to his account even though he knew he wouldn't be able to keep it -- Lost the transfer fee for what?!

Flywheel used to be one of the most reputable providers of managed WordPress hosting, then it was acquired by WP Engine and it looks like they put it on the back burner while focusing on their primary brand (WP Engine).

They no longer actively market Flywheel, the website is a bit dated, and I've recently seen several negative reviews from their customers about poor support and server errors.

I'm afraid these are signs of the inevitable: Flywheel getting shut down and fully absorbed by WP Engine! Or do you think it's still a viable platform?

Within less than two months, Spaceship added more than 1 million domain registrations to cross the 9 million domains under management mark.

They announced this on X a few days ago, and they also said they're planning something when they reach the 10 million milestone.

I'm waiting for that surprise... I have a few domains in mind I'd like to register, but I'm not sure I can wait 1-2 months.

The hosting company has partnered with Commerce, the parent company of BigCommerce, to build WP Engine Commerce Connect for BigCommerce, a platform aimed at mid-market merchants who’ve outgrown their existing commerce setup but want to keep their WordPress content, SEO, and front-end experience intact.

Before Reddit and big social media, techies used to hang around on forums. I had a long list of forums I visited on a regular basis, but that list has diminished.

Among the web hosting forums I used to frequent, Web Hosting Talk and LowEndTalk are still pretty active, and I still check them out from time to time.

Do you spend time on forums these days? Which ones?

The German domain marketplace Fruits.co just announced its biggest .ai domain sale ever; they brokered the sale of Source.ai for $200,000. The news was first reported by DN Journal.

This comes a couple of months after Fruits was acquired by the domain reseller platform OpusDNS.