Hosting Is the Next Layer AI Will Transform – Vito Peleg, CEO of Atarim

Hosts Del Mar gathered around 80 senior hosting industry figures on Ibiza for a relaxed weekend of off-record conversations rather than a classic conference. The hosting industry is split on what AI does to it: one camp sees obsolescence, the other sees the biggest opportunity in fifteen years. We met with Vito Peleg, CEO of Atarim and one of the lead organizers of the event in Ibiza and again in a follow-up afterwards. The conversation covered why he sits firmly in the second camp, why reactive agencies feel like a tax and proactive ones keep winning, and how Atarim is moving from agency workflow software to autonomous AI operations for hosting brands.

Konrad: How did Hosts Del Mar come to be in the first place?

Vito: It started with Saurin, one of the founding members of Cloudfest. He wanted to put up his own birthday party and found there was a rock festival in Ibiza around the same time, so the infrastructure was already there to do another event next to it. The cost started rising. He thought about getting sponsorships, but there was a conflict of interest with Cloudfest. So he called me and said, “Vito, I’ve been putting this event together but I can’t do it. Do you want it?” I said yes, that sounds amazing, let’s do it. We took it on. I reached out to Patrick from Monarx and we partnered to run the first edition together. It’s the kind of opposite approach to what Cloudfest is.

Konrad: How is the event different from Cloudfest?

Vito: I love Cloudfest. It’s our main event of the year. But there are so many people, it’s back to back. You do ten to fifteen meetings a day. It’s crazy, and that is exactly what we want from Cloudfest. The purpose of that event is rapid-fire meetings. Hosts Del Mar is the exact opposite. You might talk business next to the pool or at the bar or after the show, but there’s no strict agenda. There’s no ask. It’s executives and C-level leaders from our industry coming together to get to know each other better. You talk about family, hobbies, things like that. Business is the in-between because we like what we do. No pitches. No presentations. Nobody pulls up a laptop.

Konrad: What changed at the second edition?

Vito: We wanted to go a little bigger. After the success of the first year, we had a few other partners that wanted to join us in organizing this. The interesting part here is that it’s not Atarim collecting sponsorships. We work together as a group to do the outreach, figure out who we want to invite, plan the agenda. It’s run as a partnership between those different companies, which is a completely different perspective. It contributes to the community concept we’re trying to nurture. We had a luxury boat planned for the second day, but the port was closed for the first time in fifty years in May because of heavy winds. We pivoted to a fancy bar at the hotel overlooking the ocean. Matt Russell, the co-founder of Namecheap Hosting, proposed to DJ, so he was DJing from his own table. Then Panos, the COO of hosting.com, replaced him and took over. People dancing, drinking, the sun eventually came out and everyone was outside watching the sunset. That was exactly the picture I had in my mind.

Konrad: After two days of conversations with industry leaders, what is your read on the market?

Vito: AI is creating a lot of uncertainty in our space. Everywhere, but especially in our space. There’s already more than 40% market penetration in the dev world. The thing right after that is the builds, the devops, the hosting. That all comes together. We are the next imminent layer to be transformed by AI. Way before accountants, lawyers, construction, and the other industries are going to see this. Because we deal with code, designs, the computer. AI can make a much bigger impact on our industry. And you see it in layers. Devs first, then who is next? It’s us.

Konrad: How do you see this shift playing out?

Vito: There are two sides of the spectrum. Some are excited and bullish. They see the future as bright and open and they see opportunity. That is where my mind is. The other side thinks the industry is gone, that everyone is going to Vercel, Netlify, GitHub Pages, Cloudflare workers. I don’t see that unless you take no action. The reason those guys are getting traction is because they took action. They positioned themselves first to leverage this revolution. We all have the same opportunity. We’re just getting started.

This is not the first time something like this has happened. In the 1990s, the people who had a server in their bedroom won the next revolution. By the time the second wave came, those guys had built website-builder companies, agencies, multi-million-dollar businesses. Matt Russell, server in his bedroom in the 90s, ended up as co-founder of Namecheap Hosting in the next wave. That is not a unique story. There are a bunch of others who had the same experience. They were ready for that revolution. Now there is another one coming, and there will be another million people in it. The vibe coders. They are us fifteen years ago. They are going to be the next leaders.

Konrad: What separates the people who will win from the people who won’t?

Vito: Action. If you’re using AI, you’re in the top 5%. If you’re using agents, you’re in the top 0.1%. The technology is ready. The opportunity is at your fingertips. You just have to do something with it instead of sitting on it.

Konrad: Where do you draw the line between reactive and proactive agencies?

Vito: There are two types. Normal agencies are reactive. They are like yes men. If you ask for something, they might do it within their 72-hour SLA, if they’re not busy and it’s not the weekend. The rest of the time you’re paying and it feels like a tax. They might click update on a few plugins every month. From their perspective, the client is paying for insurance. From the client’s perspective, it’s a tax. There’s a disconnect in the value exchange.

Then you have proactive agencies. They act like advisors. They get on a call every two weeks. They send reports every few weeks showing what they actually did and what they’re going to do next. They look at the homepage in their spare time to figure out what other opportunities they can bring to the customer. They resurface things, create upsells, add value, extract more value. These are the ones that are winning. That has been the case for the past ten or fifteen years. If you’re proactive, you’re going to win.

Konrad: What is Atarim shipping for this transition?

Vito: I was lucky to be one of the first thousand people with access to GPT-2 back when it was in beta. I built the first AI inside WordPress in 2020. So we’ve been observing this space very closely for a long time. A year ago we started implementing AI into Atarim at the core. I was waiting for the technology to catch up with my vision.

All we are doing at Atarim is digitizing human experiences. We’re not trying to invent new use cases out of the blue. We observe what people do with our app and in the industry, and we figure out how to digitize the same experience so they need to click less or not at all. That brings us to two sides of the product. One side already powers the do-it-for-me operations for some of the largest hosting brands in the world, where they sometimes build thousands of websites a month through our software or through our domain-in-a-box service. The other side is the AI web agency, which is coming in a handful of weeks if the dev gods are on my side.

The thesis is simple. There are already more than 400 million websites that exist. Some companies, like Nova or Lovable, focus on how to build new websites. That is fair, there is room for that. But I see the bigger opportunity in AI-enabling the 400 million sites that already exist, so people don’t need to start from scratch. They continue where they are with the new technology baked into the website. The other thing I think the current approaches get wrong is that tools like GoDaddy Airo or Hostinger Kodee bring the user back into the website to tinker with it. The stated goal of a website owner is to not manage the website. And those bots are reactive. They don’t think for you, initiate, strategize, suggest, and execute. Atarim has always been about workflows, not tasks. With agentic capabilities we’re bringing that into the hands of every agency owner, and through hosting brands to their agency programs. Picture agency.hoster.com as a dashboard. AI mode for web designers.

Konrad: What does that ultimately give an agency?

Vito: The gift of unlimited scale. It’s the holy grail for website professionals. You don’t need to fill bodies in seats every time you acquire another customer. You can act like a SaaS and serve like a local business.