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 17, 2026
Protein Muffins and Pivot Tables: The Longevity Market Goes Mass
Mark Wahlberg is trading the NYSE drama for a new fitness venture that aims to bring high-end biohacking to the budget-conscious consumer.
Read article: Protein Muffins and Pivot Tables: The Longevity Market Goes Mass→ - Oct 17, 2026
The Glass House Crack: Memory Leaks and Sandbox Realities
A new Linux kernel flaw proves once again that virtual isolation is often thinner than we like to admit. It is time to patch your hosts before the neighbors start peeking.
Read article: The Glass House Crack: Memory Leaks and Sandbox Realities→ - Oct 16, 2026
Amazon’s Bee and the $75 Surveillance Discount
Amazon-owned Bee just dropped a wearable and a slim recorder that live in your pocket, turning your casual chats into Amazon shopping lists for under a hundred bucks.
Read article: Amazon’s Bee and the $75 Surveillance Discount→
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: cPanel Root Bypass, LatePoint Criticals & Rank Math Supply Chain Attack
🚨 Hosting Infrastructure & Server Alerts
cPanel & WHM Root Authentication Bypass — A critical exploit tool has been released for a session handling vulnerability in the cpsrvd daemon, allowing unauthenticated remote attackers to gain full root-level administrative access to hosting servers [13].
- CVE / severity: CVE-2026-41940 / Critical (CVSS 9.8+)
- Affected versions: cPanel & WHM versions prior to recent security patches (exact version range not disclosed in source)
- Fixed in: Consult cPanel security advisories for latest builds; use
/scripts/upcpimmediately [13]. - Action now:
- Update cPanel/WHM to the latest stable tier immediately.
- Monitor
cpsrvdlogs for unusual session creation from unknown IPs. - Restrict access to WHM ports (2087/2083) via firewall/IP allowlisting.
U.S.NEXT Hosting Outage & Service Termination — Following an October 8 cyberattack, Jackson-based hosting provider U.S.NEXT has reportedly begun terminating long-term clients rather than restoring their data, following an 8-day service outage [7][8].
- Incident Type: Infrastructure Cyberattack / Availability Loss
- Impact: 8-day total outage of web and email services; permanent loss of service for affected clients [7].
- Action now: Infrastructure teams should review disaster recovery and data portability plans; ensure off-site backups are independent of the primary hosting provider's network.
🛡️ WordPress CMS & Plugin Threats
Rank Math SEO PRO Supply Chain Compromise — A subset of packages for the Pro version of this popular SEO plugin, downloaded or updated on October 15-16, 2026, contains malicious code [14].
- CVE / severity: No CVE assigned / Critical
- Affected versions: Rank Math SEO PRO v3.0.123 (specifically those downloaded in the last 48 hours) [14].
- Fixed in: Version 3.0.124 (or clean re-install of 3.0.123 from official dashboard) [14].
- Action now:
wp plugin update rank-math-seo-proto the latest clean version.- Inspect
wp-content/plugins/seo-by-rank-math-pro/for unauthorized files. - Scan site for new administrative users or injected scripts.
LatePoint Appointment Booking Suite: Multiple Criticals — A cluster of high-severity vulnerabilities has been identified in the LatePoint plugin, including a race condition allowing authentication bypass and ORM injection leading to sensitive data exposure [3][4][6].
- CVE / severity:
- CVE-2026-110653: Auth Bypass via Race Condition (CVSS 9.8+)
- CVE-2026-111602: Information Disclosure via ORM Injection (CVSS 3.7)
- CVE-2026-104766: Privilege Escalation (CVSS 8.8)
- Affected versions: All versions up to and including 5.7.4 [4][6].
- Fixed in: 5.7.5 (or latest available vendor patch) [6].
- Action now: Update to LatePoint 5.7.5+. If unable to update, disable the booking portal immediately to prevent unauthenticated database access.
⚡ Active Exploits & Vulnerability Roundup
- WP Photo Album Plus (Authenticated RCE): CVE-2026-92115 allows authenticated users to perform Command Injection in all versions up to 8.8.08.007 [5]. Action: Update the plugin immediately.
- Tutor LMS (Insecure Direct Object Reference): CVE-2026-92715 affects eLearning sites, potentially exposing student/course data [1]. Action: Update to latest version via WordPress dashboard.
- Themify Builder (Stored XSS): CVE-2026-111726 allows attackers to inject scripts via the 'visible' shortcode attribute in all versions up to 7.6.3 [2]. Action: Sanitize all shortcode-based inputs via WAF or update to the patched version.
On the
road.
Conferences, summits, and WordCamps I’ll be at in the months ahead.
- 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.