Last year we asked 446 hosting providers a set of fairly uncomfortable questions. How did revenue actually go? What is eating your support team? What are you worried about? The answers became the 2026 Web Hosting Trends Report, and the headline was a contradiction: 65% of providers reported revenue growth in 2025, and yet the thing they named most often as a threat to profitability was price competition from low-cost providers, at 29%, with rising costs right behind at 28%.

Growing and squeezed at the same time. That is a hard year to plan for, and it is why we are running the Industry Year in Review survey again for 2027, together with WebPros. The survey is open now, and it takes a few minutes.

Take the 2027 Survey

What last year’s answers actually showed

A report is only interesting if it tells you something you could not have guessed. Four findings from the 2026 edition did that.

Growth did not make profitability easier.

37% of providers saw moderate revenue growth between 6% and 19%, and 28% saw significant growth above 20%. Roughly two-thirds growing. But when we asked about the biggest threat to profitability in 2026, the answers split between pressure from below and pressure from above: 29% named price competition from low-cost providers, 28% named rising costs such as energy, software licenses, and hardware. Smaller providers felt the price pressure more acutely. Larger ones were more likely to name competition from hyperscale cloud providers.

Churn had two separate causes.

Price came first, cited by 56% of providers. But 41% said customers were leaving for SaaS platforms such as Wix, Shopify, or Squarespace. That second number describes a different customer, one who wants a website rather than a server and will accept less flexibility to get it. Providers told us they were responding by explaining the trade-offs of open platforms and adding tools that narrow the gap. Further down the list sat the reasons providers can act on directly: performance issues at 29%, missing features at 25%, security incidents at 19%, and poor support at 18%.

Services became the preferred way to grow revenue per customer.

50% of providers planned to expand professional services, more than any other tactic. Bundling more features into premium tiers came second at 39%, followed by reselling third-party products at 36% and shifting focus to higher-value customer segments, also at 36%. Read alongside the growth question, where 26% named VPS and dedicated hosting as their biggest opportunity for the next two to three years, the picture is of providers moving away from volume and toward depth.

The unglamorous work was the expensive work.

We asked what consumes the most support time. Email problems, meaning spam, blacklisting, and deliverability, topped the list at 42%. Customer CMS and application issues followed at 39%, then performance issues at 35% and security incidents at 35%. None of those are strategy problems. All of them are staffing problems.

The questions the 2026 data left open

That is the value of running this survey annually. Last year’s findings were mostly a set of intentions, and intentions are testable.

Did the move upmarket protect margins?

VPS and dedicated hosting was the top growth bet across all fleet-size bands. But 56% of providers also named competing on price with unmanaged cloud providers as their biggest challenge in running those services, and 30% pointed to low profit margins on them. It is possible to move upmarket and still lose on price. We want to know which happened.

Did professional services pay for themselves?

Half of providers planned to expand them. Professional services were already the second most commonly sold paid service, at 40%, behind domain registration and management at 46%. A year on, we want to know whether the expansion produced revenue or just headcount.

Did the SaaS pull keep growing?

41% is a large number, and if it grew it changes what a hosting product needs to include.

Did AI arrive where providers wanted it?

53% expected AI-driven automation and new AI products to have the biggest impact on the industry in 2026, ahead of increased security threats and compliance demands at 33%. But when we asked which AI capabilities providers would find most valuable, the answer was not chatbots. 65% named automated site security and malware detection, and 48% named predictive server performance monitoring. Meanwhile providers had deployed it mostly in customer support, at 36%, and 27% had not implemented AI anywhere. That gap between wanted and deployed is the single thing we most want to measure again.

Did anything get simpler?

55% of providers rated automation and set-it-and-forget-it capability as extremely important when choosing new server software, the top score on a five-point scale. 71% said they were interested or very interested in a unified dashboard consolidating management, billing, and analytics. Tool sprawl was clearly bothering people. Whether anyone actually consolidated is another matter.

Why your answers matter more than the sample size

Last year, 58% of respondents identified as business owners, presidents, or C-level. Another 21% were technical leaders, engineering managers, or product and operations managers, and 18% were system administrators and engineers. Responses came from Europe, North America, Asia-Pacific, Africa and the Middle East, and Latin America, across fleet sizes ranging from a handful of servers to hundreds or more.

That mix is what makes the fleet-size comparisons possible, and those comparisons were some of the most quoted parts of the report. Nearly 60% of providers with up to 10 servers named acquiring new customers as their single top priority. In the largest band, above 200 servers, providers chose efficiency almost as often, and average revenue per user (ARPU) and churn reduction both gained real weight. Same industry, different problems.

You cannot get that from a small sample of large providers. It only works if providers of every size take part, which is the actual reason we ask.

Take the 2027 Survey

The survey closes on Friday, October 16, 2026.