Published: June 05, 2026 by Lucas Rolff

Pulse: June 05, 2026

Last time we wrote a Pulse update is almost a year ago, on June 16, 2025. It's not because nothing happened the past year, it simply boils down to coming up with actual useful content, and more importantly, writing it into something that makes somewhat sense.

Grid Hosting Improvements and Features

Quite a few new features or improvements have been made for our Grid Hosting product.

Patchstack Implementation

We've added the possibility to purchase Patchstack vulnerability protection through the panel. We blogged a bit about it in the "Launching Patchstack for WordPress on Grid Hosting" post.

NS Records on Subdomains

This seems like a minor thing, but services like Klaviyo recommend doing the sub-delegation of the sending domain to their name servers to improve deliverability.

While it's a simple feature, it's useful for many e-commerce sites that often use Klaviyo or similar systems. It's also one of these features that cPanel doesn't yet support for end-users.

Our WordPress Installer

Our WordPress installer became a bit smarter with multiple new features added recently.

Scan for WordPress

It's possible to import existing installations into the WordPress installer now, so you can more easily manage them from the control panel.

WordPress Site Overview

The initial feature was simply to give insight into whether your WordPress site is up to date, whether that's for WP Core, plugins or themes. But instead it got expanded into being able to actually update, disable, enable and delete plugins as well. This is just the beginning and we'll expand the WordPress Management capabilities from within the panel.

Access Log Viewer

Sometimes people want to do a quick look in the access logs, whether they want to investigate a certain problem, or look for specific traffic from a given IP on their domain. Not everyone is comfortable dealing with the raw logs on their account.

So we made a small UI to allow people to get a decent overview of what's going on in the logs, filter by IP, request method, or even country.

Since we're already ingesting all these logs into ClickHouse, it only made sense to expose this information to the end-user.

Likewise for our Photon Optimizer feature that delivers AVIF/WebP images to end-users depending on browser support, we've also made it possible to see logs for requests on this service.

SSH Keys

To simplify people getting started with using SSH, we made SSH Key Management easier, so you can manage it directly from a UI. No more guessing whether you created the authorized_keys file with the correct file permissions.

Overall Stability and Fixes

We've added a bunch of smaller design changes, or bug fixes throughout the panel, improving various aspects, whether that's for the benefit of our customers, or whether it's for the benefit of developing the panel.

Anyone who have ever worked on building panel of some kind, knows that it's a never ending cycle of improvements and fixes, because there's always something that can be made better or easier for users.

Other Minor Things

• PSI Monitoring: Weekly runs of PageSpeed Insights on hosted websites to track performance improvement/degradation over time.
• PHP 8.5 support: With the release of PHP 8.5, we added this back in January this year when we had all the security modules available. It's also the default PHP version for all domains since then.

Hardware and the "AI Boom"

This could be a post in itself, and it probably will be eventually.

Hardware in short is getting harder and harder to get hold of, not only because lead times are getting longer, but it's also getting much more expensive.

We've seen prices of hardware 4-5x in less than a year. Servers we could buy for e.g. €5,000 now cost over €20,000 for the exact same system, and then it's not even guaranteed to be the final price.

That means expansions become much more expensive, and being in the generic shared hosting market, that makes ROI much longer, or making hosting for sites significantly more expensive. Neither being ideal to be honest.

While we've managed to secure some hardware at decent (not great) pricing, it does raise the question about who's actually going to foot the bill in the long run.

The landscape is changing rapidly, and we don't really know what's going to happen in 6 months or a year. But if we're following the trend as it has been, we're only going to see worse and worse pricing for the end-users, since the high pricing at the suppliers over time will make its way down to the end-customer.

There's certain products or features we'd like to work on and release, but the higher cost in hardware does increase the risk, and overall cost of actually then offering these things, but on the other hand, that applies largely to the whole hosting industry. So we're all in the same boat for now.

With that said, we're still very confident in our ability to offer a great service to our customers, with high performance and reliability. There's only one way, and that's up and onward 👌