AI is changing not just what hosting companies sell, but how they run. Customer support, internal tooling, website development – all of it is being rebuilt faster and at a fraction of the previous cost. Munir is the Founder of aeServer.com, Dubai’s leading .ae domain registrar and web hosting provider, operating across the UAE, Bahrain, and Qatar. At Hosts Del Mar, we talked about how his team used vibe coding to automate a domain registration process that used to take a week, why customer support remains the real edge in a crowded hosting market, what the current situation in the Middle East is doing to online demand, and the latest on Domain Days Dubai.

This interview is part of a series recorded at Hosts Del Mar – a private, invite-only hosting industry gathering on Ibiza, organized by Atarim, Monarx, Patchstack, and StorPool Storage.
All Hosts Del Mar interviews →

Konrad: Is this your first time at Hosts Del Mar?

Munir: First time, yes. I was invited last year but couldn’t make it. I’m very happy to be here now. The energy is good, the people are great. Ibiza and an IT event – that’s an odd combination. But it works. There’s no conference hall, no scheduled talks. It’s about being relaxed, catching up with people, and finally meeting someone in person after years of emails and LinkedIn messages. That’s the part I like most about this format.

Konrad: What is your read on where the hosting industry is heading right now?

Munir: AI is the big topic, and for good reason. In Dubai specifically, there’s serious investment happening at the government level – data centers, partnerships with companies like NVIDIA, infrastructure being built to power AI at scale. Dubai is already an economic hub, and it’s now also the AI hub of the region. As a hosting company, we’re trying to figure out what our role is in that picture.

What we’ve focused on is using AI to make our team more efficient, particularly in customer support. That’s where hosting companies actually differentiate. Everyone sells hosting, cPanel, domains, email. How do you compete with the bigger players? Customer service is the answer. We’ve been implementing AI in our live chat and support ticket systems, and it changes how fast we can respond and resolve things.

Konrad: You mentioned vibe coding. What does that actually look like inside your business?

Munir: Our CTO and the tech team started building internal tools and plugins with vibe coding to solve internal process problems. One concrete example: we work with some registries that still run on a pen and paper process. You fill in a form, send it, and wait a week for the domain to be registered. That was a tedious process for us and for the customer. We built internal tools that now handle the same thing in two minutes.

Beyond that, we’ve been redeveloping our website, our domain search, our support systems – all using vibe coding. And what surprised me most is how much these models already know. You open Claude, you start talking about WHMCS, cPanel, WordPress – it knows all of it in depth. And without you asking, it tells you what it thinks you should be doing in May 2026. What the trends are. What you should actually implement. That part genuinely shocked me.

Konrad: What does this mean for business owners who are not developers?

Munir: That’s the part I find most significant, because I’m no coder. I’m not a CTO. I have ideas, but sometimes I can’t put them into an email or a Slack message in a way that translates into something my team can act on. You end up with a backlog. The developers are busy. Hiring someone takes time and money. The idea stays stuck.

Now I can sit down late at night, open a model, and think through the idea properly. The AI helps me make it coherent and concrete – and I get answers almost instantly. That changes how fast a business owner can move from an idea to actually doing something with it. It’s a new kind of land rush for people who have always had the ideas but couldn’t get them out fast enough.

And it’s not just about having access to AI. The skill is in prompting. Many people say they can prompt, but that’s not true. You have to go much deeper. There is no one-size-fits-all solution. The results are individual. Getting the right output takes real practice – talking to the model in a way it understands and you understand back.

Konrad: How is the business overall? The region has been going through a difficult period.

Munir: Business is going well, considering the situation. What I’ve seen – and it’s similar to what happened during COVID – is a new wave of people coming online. People who lost their jobs and have had an entrepreneurial idea sitting somewhere for years are now acting on it because they have no choice. Survival mode pushes you to start. And businesses that used to be mostly offline, or running on Instagram, are now building proper websites because they realise they can’t depend on a platform they don’t own.

That’s the argument for hosting that doesn’t go away. You can have a hundred thousand followers on Instagram. Someone files a complaint, your page is gone. You don’t own it. With your own domain and website, you own the address. That is still very relevant – and right now, people are coming back to understand it.

Konrad: You’ve been in the region for 31 years. How do you read the current situation?

Munir: I’ve been here through the 2008 financial crisis, through COVID, and through the past three months of this current conflict. I haven’t left. And yes, it is difficult to watch what’s happening. I genuinely hope it resolves very soon.

But what I’ve also seen, across all three of those situations, is that serious businesses survive and come out stronger. Dubai emerged from 2008 stronger in real estate. After COVID it became a global hub for talent and technology. I believe the same will happen again. The businesses that make it through are the ones that slow down, rethink the strategy, and keep building. It’s not comfortable, but the pattern is consistent. The strongest ones make it through.

Konrad: What is the current status of Domain Days Dubai? Is it happening this October?

Munir: So this is the exclusive for your audience. [laughs] We launched Domain Days Dubai in 2023 with 169 attendees from around the world. In 2024 we had 270. Last year, 2025, we were close to 400. This year we were aiming above 400, with good timing because the ICANN AGM is set to happen in Oman in October – one hour from Dubai by flight. The plan was for people to come for Domain Days Dubai, spend a day sightseeing, and then head to Oman for the ICANN meeting.

Given the current situation in the region, I’ve been waiting for the right moment to finalize everything. We booked the venue in January, we have sponsors and partners confirmed, including some very big names. But I don’t feel comfortable yet asking them for financial commitments, because I don’t want to deal with refunds later.

The official position as of today: the event is going ahead as planned. We are giving ourselves until the end of May to make a final call. If things haven’t settled by then, we may extend that window by a few more weeks. Safety and convenience of attendees come first. Some airlines have already suspended flights to the region, and I don’t want people spending time and money rerouting just to be there. We will make an announcement very soon, because people need to plan. October is a busy period for the whole industry.

Konrad: Any final thought?

Munir: We keep pushing. Persistence and patience. We keep building, talking to people, sharing ideas. That’s what we do best.