Episode summary
On the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern, Nathan Wrigley speaks with David Snead about efforts to improve trust, security, and cooperation across the web hosting ecosystem. David has worked in hosting since 1999—as in-house counsel, policy advisor, an i2Coalition co-founder, and most recently as leader of the Secure Hosting Alliance. The conversation centers on cross-industry collaboration, the Internet Infrastructure Forum (IIF), and practical steps hosts, registrars, DNS providers, and agencies can take to detect and stop abuse faster.
Who is David Snead
David began his career as legal counsel for one of the early shared hosting companies and later assisted roughly 50 hosting firms with policy and legal matters. He helped found the i2Coalition to advocate for internet infrastructure providers, spent a decade at cPanel and WebPros, and now runs the Secure Hosting Alliance—an i2Coalition working group focused on raising ethical and operational standards across hosting.
Problems the industry faces
Hosting is distributed by design. Registrars, registries, DNS services, CDNs, and hosts each operate in their own silos, so abuse investigations and remediation are often duplicated, slow, and inefficient. Small hosts, with limited resources, are especially vulnerable: a single large abuse incident (for example, a credential harvesting campaign or a fake-shop scam) can overwhelm their support and abuse teams, increase costs, and harm their reputation.
What the Internet Infrastructure Forum (IIF) aims to do
The IIF is a voluntary cross-industry initiative facilitated by the Internet & Jurisdiction Policy Network. Its purpose is to create common, real-time methods for sharing actionable abuse information across the full infrastructure stack so responsible operators can coordinate responses and mitigate threats faster than attackers can pivot.
How it works (prototype phase)
– Participants submit standardized incident data (timestamps, domain names, IP addresses, and other non-proprietary details) to a neutral secretariat.
– The secretariat enriches that data with contributions from other participants and routes actionable intelligence to the appropriate operator (for example, telling a hosting provider which registrar and IP are linked to a malicious domain).
– Shared data is formatted in abuse-reporting standards such as X-ARF to make it machine-friendly and interoperable.
– Distribution to members is intended to be via an API or file feed so organizations can automate ingestion into their workflows.
The project is currently in an experimental phase, using a test case focused on “fake shops” and credential-harvesting scams to validate the workflow and data model. This staged approach is intentional: early iterations use a smaller group to refine processes before broad rollout.
Legal and privacy considerations
A major design constraint is global data protection rules. What can be shared freely in one jurisdiction may be restricted in another. To address that, the IIF is working with legal experts and a privacy-focused working group to vet what data can be shared safely. The aim is to restrict shared fields to non-proprietary, non-sensitive indicators that still enable effective remediation.
Who benefits and why
– Small and medium hosting providers gain outsized value: actionable intelligence saves hours of research and reduces the operational burden that abuse incidents create.
– Large providers benefit because coordinated takedowns stop large-scale campaigns sooner and reduce downstream costs.
– Agencies and freelancers get more reliable hosting partners and, where applicable, a trust signal to evaluate providers.
Business and trust incentives
The Secure Hosting Alliance complements the IIF by promoting ethical and customer-friendly practices in hosting. It runs a Trust Seal Certification that, among other things, requires presenting a clear contract to customers before signup—an example of simple steps that improve transparency and consumer trust. The Alliance also plans a similar trust program for security vendors in 2027.
Membership and governance
The Secure Hosting Alliance operates as a working group of the i2Coalition. Membership in i2Coalition (with fees scaled to self-reported revenue) gives access to the Alliance’s working groups. Governance is based on rough consensus: despite commercial competition, operators in the hosting community tend to collaborate on shared problems like abuse, and the group has expanded from a few charter members to dozens of members in a little over a year.
Practicalities for operators
– Data exchange is intended to be machine-readable and delivered by API/file feeds.
– The initial rollout is deliberately cautious to ensure the process works and legal constraints are managed.
– Participation requires willingness to share non-proprietary abuse indicators and to use the intelligence to take corrective action.
How to get involved
If you’re a hosting provider, registrar, DNS operator, agency, developer, or anywhere else in the infrastructure stack and want to learn more or join the conversation:
– Visit hostingsecurity.net for details about the Secure Hosting Alliance and its initiatives.
– Contact David Snead directly at [email protected] (note: the address contains the numeral 2).
– The i2Coalition and Alliance participate in industry events (including ICANN meetings and major hosting and WordPress conferences), where members and interested parties can meet and contribute.
Final note
The initiative is rooted in a pragmatic argument: coordinated, operational collaboration reduces costs, eases the burden on small operators, and makes the overall web ecosystem more resilient. While legal and technical challenges remain, early participation and testing—starting with focused abuse types like fake shops—aim to prove the model and scale it in a way that helps hosts of all sizes act faster and more effectively against abuse.
