Comet Backup

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

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

The day at CloudFest 2026 started with... surprise, surprise! The doors of the WebPros Cloud Pavilion opening for the first time! 🥳 1,000sqm of indoor-outdoor space - a stage with three days of programming, a bar, a swag shop, and an exhibition area featuring 7 brands. It's the kind of presence that says something without needing to say it: Our investment this year proves the value we see in this community. 🥰 The main stage spent the morning wrestling with a tension that's increasingly hard to ignore: the same AI infrastructure wave everyone wants to ride is also the biggest new pressure on energy consumption, data sovereignty, and cost margins. Keynotes from HPE, Dell Technologies, Ampere, and NVIDIA all circled this - building smarter while building greener is no longer a nice-to-have framing. At the Pavilion, the programming had its own through-line. Oliver Sild (Patchstack) opened the stage with a frank assessment of the state of WordPress security - useful context given that the HackerSpace track was running parallel sessions on AI-assisted attacks and browser-level exploits all afternoon. Andrew Simpson (VERISIGN) followed with domain registration data mapped against hosting trends. Remkus de Vries made a convincing case that most WordPress performance issues are a process and decision problem before they're a technical one. The WebPros team's contributions across the day: Jesse A. joined Verisign's Sameer Thakar on the .com Stage to reframe the customer acquisition-to-retention conversation through the lens of domain strategy - a timely argument for any hosting provider thinking seriously about churn. Carlos Rego introduced WHMCS Support Copilot: AI that drafts context-aware ticket responses using customer history, open invoices, and KB articles - with a human reviewing and sending every reply. At $14.20 average cost per manual ticket, the ROI case writes itself. Closed beta opens Q2 2026. Sruthi Yalaka and CloudLinux's Ákos Vajda presented findings from 446 hosting providers worldwide. Around 65% grew last year, but margins are being squeezed from both directions. 86% now compete on value rather than price. AI sits at the centre of both the problem and the opportunity. Shridhar Luthria laid out the WebPros Cloud proposition: a fully managed wholesale infrastructure platform across 62 global locations that lets hosters, registrars, and resellers expand their product offering without the CapEx overhead. Michael Fowler closed the WebPros stage with Nova, WebPros' agentic web and application builder - white-label, partner-first, and built for a market projected at $20.1B by 2033. The Pavilion wraps up with happy hour and live music. CloudFest continues through the evening. Day 3 tomorrow! #WebPros #CloudFest #WebHosting #AI #Nova #WHMCS #WordPress #cPanel #Plesk