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.
- Oct 10, 2026
Satellite Dreams and Terrestrial Gates: The Battle for India’s Connectivity
When two billionaires clash over spectrum and satellite rights, the only certainty is that the status quo is about to get disrupted.
Read article: Satellite Dreams and Terrestrial Gates: The Battle for India’s Connectivity→ - Oct 10, 2026
Don't Let the Root Key Roll You Over
A long-overdue change to the DNS root zone is happening this Sunday, and while most systems are ready, an unpatched resolver could quietly break your weekend.
Read article: Don't Let the Root Key Roll You Over→ - Oct 9, 2026
Measuring the Machines: Why Arena's $3.1B Valuation Matters
Arena's massive new valuation highlights a shift from raw AI performance to the critical, and lucrative, need for model alignment and trust.
Read article: Measuring the Machines: Why Arena's $3.1B Valuation Matters→
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: Core WP RCE via Comments, TLD Hijacks & Host Provider Outages
CRITICAL: Infrastructure & Hosting Incidents
- Google TLD Registry Hijacks & Counterfeit Certificates: Google has reported an incident where attackers successfully hijacked top-level domain (ccTLD) registries. This allowed the issuance of counterfeit certificates, potentially facilitating massive-scale man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks against hosting infrastructure relying on these domains [2].
- Hosting Provider Cyber-Attack Outage: A significant cyber-attack targeting a regional hosting provider has resulted in widespread downtime for government and municipal websites. Recovery efforts are ongoing, highlighting the risk of concentrated outages for agencies managing multiple client sites on single upstream providers [11].
- CVE-2026-94503: Zombify Web Shell Upload: A critical vulnerability in the Zombify plugin allows unauthenticated attackers to upload web shells directly to the server, providing full remote control [7].
- CVE / Severity: CVE-2026-94503 / 9.8 (Critical)
- Affected versions: PX-lab Zombify (all versions through latest)
- Fixed in: Not disclosed in sources
- Action now: Disable plugin immediately; inspect
/wp-content/uploads/for PHP files or suspicious scripts.
WordPress Core & Plugin Exploits
- CVE-2026-93485: Comment-Based Server Takeover: A new vulnerability has been identified involving the interaction between KSES sanitization and the
comment_textfilter chain. Maliciously crafted comments can bypass sanitization to execute code on the server [4].- CVE / Severity: CVE-2026-93485 / Not disclosed (High/Critical)
- Affected versions: WordPress Core (versions not specified in source)
- Fixed in: Not disclosed in sources
- Action now: Implement WAF rules to block complex HTML patterns in comment POST requests; consider disabling comments if not essential.
- CVE-2025-14123: Redux Framework Privilege Escalation: The widely used Redux Framework is vulnerable to privilege escalation, allowing low-level users to gain administrative control [3].
- CVE / Severity: CVE-2025-14123 / 8.8 (High)
- Affected versions: Redux Framework <= 4.5.11
- Fixed in: Update to latest version immediately
- Action now:
wp plugin update redux-framework; audit user accounts for unauthorized Admin roles.
Data Disclosure & SQL Injection (SQLi)
- CVE-2026-96331 & CVE-2026-96328: Premium Plugin SQLi: Critical Blind SQL injection flaws have been discovered in Ajax Search Pro and JNews - Pay Writer, allowing database exfiltration [8, 9].
- CVE / Severity: CVE-2026-96331 / 9.8 (Critical) | CVE-2026-96328 / 8.8 (High)
- Affected versions: Ajax Search Pro (wpdreams); JNews - Pay Writer (jegtheme)
- Fixed in: Update to latest available versions
- Action now:
wp plugin update ajax-search-pro; monitor database logs for unusualSELECTpatterns.
- rtMedia Limited File Deletion: A path validation flaw allows unauthenticated users to delete files or read limited data via the
sideloadparameter [5].- CVE / Severity: No CVE assigned / 7.5 (High)
- Affected versions: rtMedia <= 4.7.13
- Fixed in: 4.7.14 (or latest)
- Action now: Update rtMedia plugin; restrict
tmp_nameparameters at the WAF level.
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.