Lillian Castro

Senior Editor
Lillian Castro
About the Author

Lillian Castro brings more than 30 years of editing and journalism experience to our team. She has written and edited for major news organizations, including The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the New York Times, and she previously served as an adjunct instructor at the University of Florida. Today, she edits HostingAdvice content for clarity, accuracy, and reader engagement.

Latest Posts

Worked On 2,401 Articles To Date
Can You Block AI Training and Still Rank on Google?

Can You Block AI Training and Still Rank on Google?
By: Ryan Frankel • 9/24/2026
A week ago, a post made it to the top of r/Cloudflare with a title guaranteed to make a lot of site owners spit out their coffee: “PSA: CloudFlare Now Defaults To... read more »
Data Center Roundup: Power Problems, Tight Capacity, and New Places to Build

Data Center Expansion Is Running Into a Power Problem
By: Jordan Sprogis • 9/22/2026
Data centers are popping up everywhere, but finding enough power to run them is becoming a bit of a headache. Texas is putting new permits on hold, Northern Virginia... read more »
Some Customer Data Might Be Permanently Lost in AWS’ Middle East Disruption

Some Customer Data Might Be Permanently Lost in AWS’ Middle East Disruption
By: Jordan Sprogis • 9/21/2026
Back in March, I covered AWS’ outage in the Bahrain thanks to drone missile strikes. When that happened, AWS told customers to move their workloads out of the... read more »
Newfold Digital Partners With DigiCert to Manage SSL for 6M Customers

Newfold Digital Partners With DigiCert to Manage SSL for 6M Customers
By: Jordan Sprogis • 9/17/2026
Newfold Digital is officially putting its SSL/TLS certificate operation in DigiCert’s hands. The web-hosting giant announced on September 10 that DigiCert will now... read more »
AI Traffic Is Booming. Turns Out Nearly Half of It Goes to One Platform

Take a Guess: One Platform Takes Nearly Half of AI Traffic
By: Jordan Sprogis • 9/16/2026
A new analysis from OneLittleWeb looked at more than 9,500 AI tools and found something that will shock absolutely no one: Nearly half of those visits went to a... read more »
The Best U.S. Cities for Affordable, Connected Living

The Best U.S. Cities for Affordable, Connected Living
By: Jordan Sprogis • 9/15/2026
Finding a good place to live usually means weighing a lot of priorities. How much will housing cost? Are there enough jobs? What’s the quality of life like? And can... read more »
Plugin Updates Now Get Screened, and a Backdoor Exposed the Missing Piece

Plugin Updates Now Get Screened, and a Backdoor Exposed the Missing Piece
By: Ryan Frankel • 9/15/2026
On July 28, someone added a backdoor to a plugin for WordPress, which is used on roughly 20,000 sites. None of it was ever distributed through the update API. In an... read more »
WooCommerce May Be Heading to Private Equity. Hosts Have a Lot to Watch

WooCommerce May Be Heading to Private Equity. Hosts Have a Lot to Watch
By: Ryan Frankel • 9/10/2026
Ask any managed WordPress host what the common thread is among their most profitable customers and the answer will probably be: “Well, they sell something.” Which is... read more »
A Critical WHMCS RCE Just Got Patched. Did You Update?

A Critical WHMCS RCE Just Got Patched. Did You Update?
By: Jordan Sprogis • 9/9/2026
Hosting providers have yet another thing to check on their servers: WHMCS just patched a critical remote-code-execution vulnerability affecting versions 8.0 and... read more »
Organic Search Is Changing. Hosts Need to Help Clients Understand What It Means

Organic Search Is Changing. Hosts Need to Help Clients Understand What It Means
By: Jordan Sprogis • 9/7/2026
Everyone knows that AI is changing the way people search the web. Many of us have done our fair share of asking a chatbot for recommendations, explanations... read more »
The Best Small U.S. Cities for Starting an Online Side Hustle

The Best Small U.S. Cities for Starting an Online Side Hustle
By: Jordan Sprogis • 9/3/2026
These days, starting an online side hustle can be as simple as opening a laptop. Whether you’re freelancing, selling products online, creating content, consulting... read more »
More Than Half of Americans Have Abandoned an Online Purchase Over Password Problems

More Than Half of Americans Have Abandoned an Online Purchase Over Password Problems
By: Jordan Sprogis • 9/1/2026
Online shopping is supposed to be easy: Find what you want, add it to your cart, enter your payment information, and you’re done. But there’s one surprisingly simple... read more »
AI Agents Escaped Their Sandboxes. Now Hosting Providers Have a Bigger Problem

OpenAI’s Rogue AI Agents Are a Bigger Problem for Hosting Providers
By: Jordan Sprogis • 9/1/2026
As a refresher for Part One, here’s the TL;DR: In July, OpenAI put its AI models through a cybersecurity test inside what was supposed to be a restricted testing... read more »
Can GoDaddy's Flat Rate Beat Your Next Serverless Invoice?

Can GoDaddy's Flat Rate Beat Your Next Serverless Invoice?
By: Ryan Frankel • 8/31/2026
Picture the solo entrepreneur who built a working application in Cursor on a Tuesday afternoon. The code runs. The client demo was a success. But then comes the... read more »
OVHcloud Raises Server Prices by Up to 87% as Memory Costs Climb

OVHcloud Prices Are Going Up 87% as Memory Costs Climb
By: Jordan Sprogis • 8/27/2026
OVHcloud recently announced that it’s raising prices on some of its servers, with certain hardware generations jumping by as much as 87%. It’s another casualty in... read more »
OpenAI's AI Agent Took 17,600 Actions on Its Own. Should Hosts Care?

AI Agent Security: Why OpenAI's 17,600 Actions Matter to Hosts
By: Jordan Sprogis • 8/25/2026
This summer has been eventful for the internet, to say the least. Cyberattackers went after U.S. water systems. OpenAI watched one of its own AI agents escape into... read more »
Fast Speeds, Low Latency: The 10 Best Big Cities for Online Gamers Ranked

The 10 Best Big Cities for Online Gamers
By: Jordan Sprogis • 8/24/2026
A genuinely good online gaming experience is about so much more than simply having an internet connection. The technical details matter just as much: Latency affects... read more »
Namecheap’s Outage Shows How One Data Center Can Disrupt an Entire Hosting Platform

Namecheap Outage Shows the Risk of Data Center Dependence
By: Jordan Sprogis • 8/24/2026
Namecheap took more than 5,000 servers offline on August 13 after a cooling system failure at RadiusDC’s Phoenix facility put the equipment at risk of overheating... read more »
Hostinger Adds 3,000+ Servers Across Three Global Markets

Hostinger Adds 3,000+ Servers Across Three Global Markets
By: Jordan Sprogis • 8/20/2026
Hostinger recently secured more than 3,000 servers across Düsseldorf, Germany; Paris, France; and Asheville, North Carolina. That’s a lot of servers, so we went... read more »
Hosting Customers Shop on Price. So Why Don't They Stay for It?

Hosting Customers Shop on Price. So Why Don't They Stay for It?
By: Jordan Sprogis • 8/18/2026
Web hosting has a bit of a problem: Everyone is fast, everyone is reliable, and apparently everyone is secure, too. So when every host sounds the same, what is a... read more »