WebPros

We’re excited to share the next story in our Team Member Spotlight series.  This month, we’re featuring a teammate who joined WebPros after hearing one simple thing again and again: People couldn’t stop talking about how much they loved working here.  From collaborating with a team of 6 people across 6 time zones, to growing in a fast-moving, innovative environment, to using remote flexibility to fuel a passion for comedy improvisation — this story is about energy, growth, and balance.  Just honest reflections on teamwork, wellbeing, leadership accessibility, and the freedom to be yourself.  The spotlight is live now – see what Kristoffer has to say about the journey at WebPros!  At WebPros, we bring together global teams to build software that powers the Web Enablement Ecosystem — from hosting and billing automation to the tools businesses rely on every day.

The Web Hosting industry doesn't do gentle rides, and the thrill only works if the foundations hold. 😅 🎢 65% of providers say automated security and malware detection is the most valuable capability they could have right now. 🎢 43% are actively investing in it this year. 🎢 33% are still running a firewall that reached end-of-life in August 2025 - which is pretty much like "riding with the safety bar not fully locked". Price wars squeezing from below. Hyperscalers pushing from above. AI rewiring everything at once. The industry is picking up the fast track whether you wanted it to or not. Thanks for the photo, Christian Jaeger - and for a CloudFest that matched the data: fast, loud, and impossible to ignore. The WebPros Cloud Pavilion, the stage sessions, the conversations - exactly where we want to be when the ride gets interesting. See you back on the ground. 📸 PS: All data comes from 446 hosting providers interviewed for the 2026 Web Hosting Trends Report 💡

CloudFest 2026 is wrapping up. Or is it? Four days, thousands of conversations, sore feet, and a lot of ground covered across AI, data sovereignty, security, WordPress, and the future of cloud infrastructure. For us, this edition felt different. The questions being asked - how to build trust into the stack, how to make AI actually work at scale, how to stay sovereign without slowing down - are exactly the questions we've been working on answers to. So being here, among the people who run and build the internet, felt less like attending a conference and more like being where it matters. That's why it's called a festival! Our teams were on stage throughout the week: unpacking what LLMOps really means for hosting providers, making the case for AI-augmented support through the WHMCS Copilot, walking through what the web hosting landscape actually looks like in 2026 (with data to back it up), and showing how sovereignty can be a growth strategy rather than a compliance burden - through Comet Backup's EU-first design approach. At the WebPros Cloud Pavilion, our 1,000sqm space with the WebPros Stage, bar, swag shop, and seven brands under one roof - cPanel, Plesk, WHMCS, Nova, Comet Backup, SolusVM, and WebPros Cloud - the conversations ran deep. Partners, hosters, developers, and industry leaders talking about what comes next for web enablement. There was a lot of fun while doing it, but that's what this week was really about. The industry is shifting fast, and AI isn't just a feature on the roadmap anymore. See you next year. 👋 But wait! While CloudFest may be over in Rust, it will be pretty much alive on WebPros socials for the next couple of weeks, as we'll be sharing moments, interviews, and key takeaways from several stage sessions. Stay tuned! #CloudFest2026 #WebPros #cPanel #Plesk #WHMCS #Nova #CometBackup #SolusVM #Wordpress #WebHosting #Hosting

True colors really did shine through at Rainbow in the Cloud at CloudFest! 🌈 🤩 🌈 These are definitely the times for celebrating and embracing diversity!

It's getting packed already! Time to get early to the next session and get you a nice comfy seat ☺️

The last day of CloudFest 2026. There's a particular energy to the final day of an event like this. The schedule is lighter, but the conversations tend to go deeper. Four days of keynotes, masterclasses, and debates have given everyone enough shared context to stop explaining and start actually talking! The WebPros Cloud Pavilion closes out with a full morning and afternoon of programming. The day opens in just a bit with a focused sequence on the MSP opportunity. Juergen Domnik (JUDOCON - Transforming IT) asks the uncomfortable question most fast-growing MSPs avoid: are you actually built to sustain this pace? Patrick Burgess (Nutbourne Ltd) follows with a practical sketch of what the MSP business looks like by 2028. Brooke Edge, PhD (Open Eye) and CloudFest CEO Christian Jaeger (CloudFest) then pull the lens wider with a fireside on the state of the MSP industry as a whole. Three sessions, one through-line - building businesses that scale without breaking. Olivier D. (TYPO3) takes the stage to address something the week's AI enthusiasm has somewhat overshadowed: open source stewardship under mounting regulatory pressure. With the EU AI Act, NIS2, and DORA all reshaping how software is governed, the open source foundations this industry runs on deserve more attention than they've been getting. David Snead (Secure Hosting Alliance (SHA)) gives a one-year progress report on the Secure Hosting Alliance - a trust and security initiative the hosting community has a direct stake in. A year in, the question shifts from "why does this matter?" to "what has it actually built?" The afternoon takes a sharper edge. Jesse Tuttle and Reese Tuttle (AP2T Labs) bring a rare generational perspective on threat intelligence - a veteran hacker and a coding prodigy sharing lessons from the front lines. Lino Brenner closes the Pavilion's programming by recounting how he hacked CloudFest itself - and why you should never trust the frontend. A fitting way to end four days at an event that has never shied away from asking hard questions in public. Happy hour and live music at the Pavilion from 4pm 🎶 . Then BierFest will close the week. 🥳 See you later for a recap of the week! #WebPros #CloudFest #MSP #WebHosting #OpenSource #Security #cPanel #Plesk #WHMCS

Christian Jaeger himself did the honors today of showing off the WebPros Cloud Pavilion 🥰

Today at CloudFest, across the main stages and the WebPros Cloud Pavilion, the question shifted from "what can AI do?" to "what breaks when it does?" Mirco Pyrtek opened the .com Stage main programme by naming the problem honestly: Agentic AI is growing fast. From under 5% of enterprise apps to a projected 40% by 2026. With that growth comes real failure modes: chatbots making unintended binding commitments, AI agents weaponised for phishing, PII leaking into LLM contexts. His framework for production-ready AI: 👉 Observability (understand the system), 👉 Guardrails (police inputs and outputs - from lightweight algorithmic checks to LLM-as-Judge), 👉 and Infrastructure (control the compute). Every example drawn from WebPros' own products - Nova, XOVI AI, cPanel, Plesk, and WHMCS. The close: "We found our missing 5%. What's yours?" Anton Akhtyamov ran a Rock Café Masterclass on MCP - Model Context Protocol - the structured API layer that lets AI agents interact with hosting infrastructure. The prototype, available from cPanel & WHM v134+, connects AI clients to a /mcp endpoint, operating within existing token and ACL permissions. The key point: MCP doesn't create a bypass. It gives AI a standard interface to APIs that already exist. The shift from CLI to control panel took twenty years. The next shift may be faster. 😅 Marc McCutcheon took part of a panel, moderated by CloudFest's own CEO Christian Jaeger, on predicting the future of cloud services in the AI era, alongside Rachel Sterling (Identity Digital Inc.), Ben Gabler (hosting.com), Sara Rego (Team Internet). Not speculation - real data and case studies from senior leaders across hosting and domains, built to help the industry craft AI service strategies with a genuine chance of success. Adam Wien (Comet Backup) tackled the backup blind spot: Production environments get architecture committees. Backups get a cron job from 2017. The result: Silent sovereignty drift - cross-border replication, non-EU key management, metadata outside jurisdiction. Post-Schrems II, that's a compliance failure even when servers are physically in Frankfurt, because jurisdiction follows the company, not the data centre. The sovereign-by-design framework: EU-only storage, customer-controlled encryption keys, transparent data-location reporting, sovereign DR paths, and local deletion guarantees. For regulated industries, this is now a vendor selection criterion - not a nice-to-have. Shridhar Luthria closed out the evening by hosting the Rollercoaster Pitch Contest Startup Grand Finale. Founders pitching to industry leaders from the biggest names in cloud and hosting - on a moving rollercoaster. 😀 Only at CloudFest. Such a great community! One more day to go. Already? 😭 #WebPros #CloudFest #cPanel #Plesk #WHMCS #CometBackup #AI #LLMOps #DataSovereignty #WebHosting

WP Squared is proud to be a launch partner for CloudLinux MAx Cache - bringing server-level caching to Managed WordPress. With native Apache and Nginx integration, WordPress pages are served directly from the web server - reducing PHP overhead, improving response times, and increasing efficiency. What it means for you: - Faster performance: pages load instantly  - Lower CPU usage: PHP runs only when needed  - Integrated with AccelerateWP: works with your existing optimizations  - Plugin-friendly: Open for integration with popular caching plugins The result: faster #WordPress performance and better resource utilization, even under high traffic.

Can't believe CloudFest Day 3 is about to begin. It's been an amazing journey so far! Ready to see what it takes to scale? Not just infrastructure. Not just AI. But the systems, controls, and strategies behind both. We start on the Main Stage with Mirco Pyrtek (Director of Applied AI and Data Innovation at WebPros), tackling what most teams overlook - the missing 5% - the rare AI failures that only show up at scale, and why LLMOps, guardrails, and observability are becoming critical to protecting both product and reputation. From there, the conversation turns practical. At the Rock Cafe, Anton Akhtyamov (Director of Product Management at WebPros) introduces a new direction for hosting platforms with the MCP server for cPanel & Plesk, exploring how AI agents could safely interact with hosting environments and what it means to make infrastructure programmable. Across the stage at the WebPros Pavilion, the focus shifts to the bigger picture: ☁️ How AI is shaping the future of cloud services (Marc McCutcheon, Growth PM at WebPros). ☁️ How regulatory pressure like EU data sovereignty is becoming a competitive advantage (Adam Wien, Product Manager at WebPros). ☁️ And how the next generation of startups is thinking about innovation in the hosting space. And to close the day, something CloudFest does better than anyone else... The Rollercoaster Pitch Contest, starring WebPros CMO Shridhar Luthria where founders will pitch their ideas to industry leaders while riding an ACTUAL rollercoaster. It’s fast, unpredictable, and a reminder that innovation in this space doesn’t stand still. Behind the format, the goal is serious: connecting the next wave of startups with the partners and platforms that can help them scale. If you're building, scaling, or rethinking your platform, this is where the conversation gets real. #WebPros #CloudFest2026 #AIInfrastructure #CloudComputing #LLMOps #WebEnablementEcosystem