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 8, 2026
Space Is Getting Crowded, and That’s Good for Business
Stoke Space just landed a billion-dollar Series E to take on SpaceX, proving that the era of launch monopolies is finally coming to an end.
Read article: Space Is Getting Crowded, and That’s Good for Business→ - Sep 8, 2026
When the Lights Go Out, the Websites Get Built Anyway
While the enterprise debates CMS market share, students in Bangladesh and Uganda are busy building 108 websites and proving that infrastructure is secondary to intent.
Read article: When the Lights Go Out, the Websites Get Built Anyway→ - Sep 7, 2026
Middlemen Never Miss a Settlement Meeting
When AI companies pay up for scraping data, authors are finding that their publishers and agents are first in line with their hands out for the settlement cash.
Read article: Middlemen Never Miss a Settlement Meeting→
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: N-central Zero-Day, F5 Linux Rootkit & Amelia Premium Auth Bypass
Infrastructure & Server-Layer Threats
N-able N-central Critical Zero-Day — Attackers are actively exploiting a remote code execution vulnerability to compromise monitoring infrastructure [1].
- CVE / severity: CVE-2026-86218 / Critical (10.0)
- Affected versions: N-central versions prior to the September 2026 hotfix (exact ranges not disclosed in sources)
- Fixed in: N-central September 2026 Hotfix [1]
- Action now:
- Apply N-able hotfixes immediately to all N-central nodes.
- Restrict access to the N-central dashboard to trusted IP ranges only.
F5 BIG-IP APM Linux Rootkit & Fileless Web Shell — A sophisticated campaign targets F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager devices, deploying a rootkit that intercepts PHP file loading to inject a fileless web shell into memory [6].
- CVE / severity: No CVE assigned (Active campaign utilizing post-exploitation persistence) [6]
- Affected versions: F5 BIG-IP APM environments [6]
- Fixed in: Not applicable (Incident response required)
- Action now:
- Audit all F5 BIG-IP APM instances for unauthorized PHP process modifications.
- Monitor for unusual memory usage or unauthorized fileless execution in Linux kernels.
- Rotate all SSL VPN and administrative credentials associated with these devices.
NVIDIA Triton Inference Server Path Traversal — A critical flaw allows remote attackers to manipulate file paths on Linux-based AI inference servers [14].
- CVE / severity: CVE-2026-47627 / Critical [14]
- Affected versions: Triton Inference Server for Linux (versions not specified in sources)
- Fixed in: Latest vendor update (Consult NVIDIA security portal) [14]
- Action now:
- Update NVIDIA Triton containers and server binaries immediately.
- Apply restrictive file system permissions to ensure the server process cannot access sensitive system directories.
MikroTrick Auth Bypass & Config Overwrite — Multiple vulnerabilities in MikroTik RouterOS can be chained to bypass authentication and take full control of routing hardware [8].
- CVE / severity: Not disclosed in sources / Critical [8]
- Affected versions: MikroTik RouterOS (versions not specified in sources)
- Fixed in: Latest MikroTik RouterOS stable releases [8]
- Action now:
system package update check-for-updatesand install latest firmware.- Disable Winbox/Webfig on public-facing interfaces.
WordPress & CMS Vulnerabilities
Amelia (Premium) Plugin Privilege Escalation — A critical flaw allows unauthenticated attackers to escalate their role to Administrator by manipulating the type and externalId parameters in the customer update endpoint [2].
- CVE / severity: CVE-2026-9055 / Critical (9.8)
- Affected versions: Amelia (Premium) 8.0 - 9.6.2 [2]
- Fixed in: Amelia (Premium) 9.6.3 (or higher) [2]
- Action now:
wp plugin update amelia(Verify version is > 9.6.2).- Audit WordPress users for unauthorized accounts with the
wpamelia-managerrole. - Check for recent password resets on Administrator accounts.
Application Frameworks & Data Privacy
Hono (Npm) Denial of Service — A vulnerability in the Hono framework's parseBody function allows for memory exhaustion via unbounded dot notation nesting [4].
- CVE / severity: Not disclosed / Medium [4]
- Affected versions: Npm hono < 4.13.5 [4]
- Fixed in: Hono 4.13.5 [4]
- Action now:
- Update hono dependencies:
npm update hono.
- Update hono dependencies:
Metabase Self-Hosted Data Breach — A breach of a self-hosted Metabase instance has exposed data for over 1 million users [7].
- CVE / severity: Not disclosed (Breach report) [7]
- Affected versions: Self-hosted Metabase instances [7]
- Action now:
- Infrastructure teams hosting Metabase must ensure instances are not exposed to the public internet without a VPN or zero-trust proxy.
- Verify Metabase version is patched against recent remote code execution or SQLi flaws.
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.