Hostinger Promotes Its Product and Technology Chief to CEO as AI Becomes the Business

On June 16, 2026, Hostinger announced that Giedrius Zakaitis becomes chief executive of the company, with outgoing CEO Daugirdas Jankus moving into a role focused on new strategic initiatives. Both men confirmed the change on LinkedIn. Zakaitis framed it as the next step in a long arc inside the business: “14 years ago, I opened my first customer success ticket, and it’s been quite a journey since then.” Jankus, who had led the company since 2023, called it “the right call” and said he is “not going anywhere,” staying on to build through new initiatives. The handover places a product and technology leader at the top of one of Europe’s fastest-growing hosting companies at the exact moment that company is reorganizing its entire customer experience around artificial intelligence.

A 14-Year Insider Takes the Top Job

Zakaitis is not an outside hire brought in to shake things up. By his own account he joined Hostinger roughly 14 years ago and started on the front line of customer support, where hosting companies absorb their hardest problems. He rose to become the company’s chief product and technology officer, and along the way served as CEO of Hostinger’s website-builder subsidiary, Zyro, so he reaches the group’s top job with prior chief-executive experience inside the same house. Promoting from that seat tells customers and staff that continuity, not rupture, is the plan.

The choice also reflects how Hostinger has come to define itself. The company’s public messaging over the past two years has leaned heavily on product velocity and automation rather than on price alone, the lever that traditionally defines the shared-hosting segment. Elevating the person who oversaw that product engine is consistent with that positioning.

Why a Product and Technology CEO, Now

The timing is the story. Hostinger spent 2025 pushing artificial intelligence into the core of its operation, and the results are central to how it now describes itself. Its autonomous support agent, Kodee, handled 81% of customer support interactions by the end of 2025, up from roughly 50% at the start of the year, work the company estimates saved it about EUR 9 million annually. Kodee does more than answer questions: it connects domains, updates DNS records, and installs plugins directly inside a customer’s account, across more than 50 languages.

That is only part of the AI build-out. Hostinger Horizons, an AI platform that lets non-developers build functional web applications from natural-language prompts, launched in early 2025 and reported more than 800,000 customers by year-end. A separate AI email-marketing product, Hostinger Reach, claimed 150,000 users by December. In a company where the product roadmap and the margin story have effectively merged, putting the product and technology lead in charge is a logical, not a surprising, move.

The Numbers Behind the Handover

Zakaitis inherits a business with momentum. Hostinger reported EUR 275.4 million in revenue for 2025, up 51% year over year, its fourth consecutive year of growth above 50%. The customer base reached 4.6 million users across more than 150 countries, a 35% annual increase. Measured from 2022, when revenue stood at EUR 69.6 million and the company served 1.5 million customers, that is a compound annual growth rate of roughly 58%.

The growth and the AI bet are linked. Hostinger has been explicit that automation, led by Kodee, is what allowed it to scale support and margins together rather than trading one against the other. A CEO transition rarely lands at a cleaner moment, which also raises the stakes: the incoming leader is expected to sustain a growth rate that would be difficult to hold even without a change at the top.

A Familiar Playbook

Hostinger has run this kind of handover before, and the pattern is worth noting. When Jankus became CEO in October 2023, he stepped up from inside the company after six years leading marketing, while long-serving CEO Arnas Stuopelis moved to chairman of the board to focus on long-term vision and investor relations. That transition was deliberately gradual rather than abrupt.

The 2026 change rhymes with it: an internal promotion, paired with the outgoing CEO staying on in a strategic capacity rather than departing. For a privately held company that has avoided the disruption many fast-growing firms experience at the top, that continuity is part of the brand. It also means accountability stays concentrated among a small group of long-tenured insiders, which cuts both ways depending on whether outside perspective is what the next phase needs.

What It Signals for the Hosting Market

For the broader hosting industry, the appointment is a data point in a clear trend: the center of gravity at consumer and SMB hosts is shifting from acquisition marketing toward product and automation. Jankus came from marketing; Zakaitis comes from product and technology. In a market where an AI agent can now resolve the majority of support tickets, the skills that matter at the top are changing with it.

Competitors selling to the same small-business buyer will read the move as confirmation that Hostinger intends to keep competing on automated product experience rather than retreating to price. That is a harder thing to match than a promotional renewal rate, and it raises the bar for hosts whose AI roadmaps are still mostly marketing language. The trade-off Hostinger is making is real, though: a product-led, AI-heavy strategy concentrates risk in execution and in customer trust, since an automated support layer that mishandles edge cases can erode goodwill faster than a human team would.

What to Watch

• Whether the 50%-plus growth streak survives the transition. 2025 was the fourth straight year above that mark; 2026 is the first test under new leadership.
• How far the AI agent penetration goes. Kodee moved from 50% to 81% of support interactions in a single year. The next leg is harder and more visible to customers.
• Whether Horizons becomes a durable revenue line. 800,000 users in year one is a strong start; retention and monetization are the open questions.
• Jankus’s “strategic initiatives” mandate. An outgoing CEO who stays on can stabilize a handover or blur lines of authority. Which one this becomes will show over the next several quarters.

The announcement itself is a single day’s news. The real read on Zakaitis’s tenure will come with Hostinger’s 2026 financial results, the first full scorecard for a product-and-technology CEO running an increasingly AI-defined business.