Jason Nickerson — Hosting Industry InsiderTwo decades
inside the web
as it kept rewriting
itself.
I’m Jason, a hosting industry insider with experience across open-source CMS platforms, control panels, cloud infrastructure, and the events that bring the industry together. Today, I focus on building partnerships, programming industry summits, and documenting what is happening across the hosting ecosystem.
- Sep 19, 2026
Patch First, Debrief Later: The Reality of 7.1.1
WordPress 7.1.1 is out with 11 security fixes and nearly 40 bug patches. If you haven't checked your dashboard yet, now is the time to verify those auto-updates actually ran.
Read article: Patch First, Debrief Later: The Reality of 7.1.1→ - Sep 18, 2026
Data Centers Are Just AI Factories Now
Crusoe's massive new funding round proves that the old guard of web hosting and the new giants of AI infrastructure are now playing entirely different games.
Read article: Data Centers Are Just AI Factories Now→ - Sep 18, 2026
Root Access is Never a Gift: The Acronis Plugin Patch
A privilege-escalation vulnerability in the Acronis cPanel plugin reminds us that even our security tools can become the primary vector for a server compromise if permissions aren't tight.
Read article: Root Access is Never a Gift: The Acronis Plugin Patch→
The early 2000s were the good years for tinkerers. Open-source CMS platforms were the closest thing we had to a universal starter kit, and PHP-Nuke and osCommerce were how you learned to ship real projects on the open web. I went deep on Joomla for the better part of a decade, contributing code to the project, organizing its community around releases and events, and eventually crossing over into the WordPress orbit that quietly swallowed everything in its path.
From there the story is a tour of the hosting stack: cPanel and the control-panel era that defined shared hosting, the managed cloud wave at Cloudways and DigitalOcean, and the publishing side at webhosting.today. Day to day now I'm at JetBackup, working on backup and disaster recovery and helping hosts protect the infrastructure that keeps everything running. I also program the seasonal industry summits, Atlas Digital Summit and Domain Days Dubai, where the hosting community gathers to set the agenda for what comes next.
The through-line is community, the conferences, the hallway conversations, and the group chats where the industry actually decides what happens next. The technology changes; the people pointing it in the right direction stay the same.
Twenty-something years,
in reverse.
- 2026 – present
FounderAtlas Digital SummitPrivate gatherings for hosting leaders, AI infrastructure innovators, and the builders of the agentic web.
- 2026 – presentFounderConf64
The Conference Operating System for Business Development and Field Marketing Teams.
- 2026 – present
Co-FounderSuperDeployThe advanced migration engine for AI applications. Seamlessly transition your codebase to independent, production-grade infrastructure in minutes.
- 2025 – 2026Director of Business Developmentwebhosting.today
Contract · Business development and partnerships for the hosting publisher.
- 2024 – presentBusiness Development & Partnerships ManagerJetBackup
Backup and disaster recovery for the hosting ecosystem.
- 2023 – present
Chief Marketing Officer, Founding TeamDomain Days DubaiMENA’s domain and digital asset conference.
- 2021 – 2023Senior Manager, WordPress Business Unit → Lead Community Marketing Manager IICloudways / DigitalOcean
Full-time · WordPress community, field marketing, and sales enablement through the acquisition.
- 2019 – 2021Marketing ManagercPanel
Full-time · Event planner and marketing strategist for 500–3,000 attendee events and virtual series.
- 2017 – 2019FounderCMS Summit
The global CMS conference.
- 2007 – 2019CEO | FounderJoomlaxtc.com / Monev Software LLC
Premium Joomla templates and extensions. 101,000+ members.
- 2015 – 2019Board Member, Capital Team ChairJoomla! Project
Leadership, sponsorships, and partnerships for the open-source CMS.
- 2001 – 2005DeveloperPHP-Nuke · osCommerce era
First shipping code in the early open-source web.
Threat Briefing: libheif Server RCE, Kirki XSS & WP Core Click2Shell Exploitation
⚠️ Critical Server & Infrastructure Alerts
libheif Image Library RCE — A critical flaw in a widely used image processing library allows remote code execution via malformed photo uploads [7].
- CVE / severity: No CVE assigned / CVSS 9.8 [7]
- Affected versions: libheif versions prior to current stable (exact range not disclosed in sources) [7]
- Fixed in: Latest security patches for libheif [7]
- Action now:
- Update libheif via OS package manager (e.g.,
dnf update libheiforapt upgrade libheif). - Infrastructure teams must patch at the host level; site-level CMS updates do not mitigate this [7].
- Audit server-side image processing pipelines (ImageMagick/GD) that rely on libheif.
- Update libheif via OS package manager (e.g.,
cPanel, WHM & WP Squared Auth Bypass — A critical authentication bypass allowing unauthorized access to hosting management interfaces [12].
- CVE / severity: CVE-2026-41940 / Critical [12]
- Affected versions: cPanel, WHM, and WP Squared (version ranges not disclosed in sources) [12]
- Fixed in: Latest vendor security releases [12]
- Action now:
- Execute
/scripts/upcpto ensure cPanel/WHM is on the latest tier. - Review access logs for unauthorized logins to the WHM interface.
- Execute
🛡️ WordPress Core & Plugin Threats
WordPress Core "Click2Shell" RCE — A chain involving theme-preview features allows attackers to execute PHP on the server via a crafted link [2][3].
- CVE / severity: No CVE assigned / Critical [3]
- Affected versions: WordPress Core < 7.1.1 [3]
- Fixed in: WordPress 7.1.1 [3]
- Action now:
- Update core immediately:
wp core updateto version 7.1.1 [3]. - Educate administrators not to click suspicious theme preview links in the dashboard [2].
- Update core immediately:
Kirki Customizer Framework Stored XSS — A vulnerability in a framework used by thousands of themes allows script injection [4].
- CVE / severity: CVE-2026-17037 / High [4]
- Affected versions: Kirki plugin (affected versions not specified) [4]
- Fixed in: Latest version of Kirki [4]
- Action now:
- Update via
wp plugin update kirki[4]. - Scan
wp_optionstable for suspicious injected scripts.
- Update via
The Events Calendar Unauthenticated RCE — Two critical chains allow full site takeover without credentials, impacting ~600,000 sites [6].
- CVE / severity: Multiple (not disclosed in sources) / Critical [6]
- Affected versions: The Events Calendar plugin [6]
- Fixed in: Latest plugin release [6]
- Action now:
- Update the plugin immediately to the latest version [6].
- Monitor for unauthorized administrative user creation.
📉 Incident Updates
Gyazo Infrastructure Breach — Hackers exploited a server-side flaw to exfiltrate 23.6 million user records [10].
- Status: Access routes were blocked as of Sept 12; investigation into the server-layer entry point is ongoing [10].
- Infrastructure Impact: High-scale data exfiltration via internal API/server flaws [10].
On the
road.
Conferences, summits, and WordCamps I’ll be at in the months ahead.
- Aug 16 – 19, 2026
- Sep 28 – 29, 2026
- Domain Days DubaiRescheduled
New dates to be announced.
Oct 15 – 16, 2026 - Nov 11 – 12, 2026
- State of the WordDec 2026
- Mar 15 – 18, 2027
When the servers
go quiet.
A small digital label putting out industrial house, progressive house, and dubstep. A different kind of open protocol.
Twenty years of showing up for the projects, communities, and voices that keep the open web open.
A news portal covering the hosting and domain industry — and a running excuse to keep talking to the people who build it.