Beyond Server Space: Large Hosting Providers Are Turning Into Small Business Platforms

Hosting plans have long been marketed on storage, speed and price. Several of the industry’s largest providers now present hosting as one part of a broader small business platform. Hostinger puts the question to itself on its about page: “Is Hostinger only a web hosting company? No. Hosting is a core part of Hostinger, but the platform now goes beyond web hosting.”

Four other large hosting providers point the same way in their own materials. GoDaddy’s chief executive speaks of “a company-wide AI transformation with Airo at the center,” IONOS presents itself as a “one-stop shop” for digital transformation, and group.one names a “shift from hosting to SaaS.” At Bluehost, after decades of helping small businesses get online, “the next chapter is helping them run their business,” in the words of Sachin Puri, who led Bluehost Group in July and became chief executive of its owner, Newfold Digital, on October 1.

Depending on the provider, a small business can now build a site with AI, run an online store, take bookings, send newsletters or launch ad campaigns from the same account that holds its hosting and domain. The change shows in how these companies describe themselves, in what they bundle and in where they report growth.

Five Companies Describe Themselves as Platforms

The vocabulary has converged. Each company now describes itself as a platform or partner for running a business, and where hosting is named, it appears as one component among several.

Hostinger names small businesses as its most common use case. Since late September, the standard text of GoDaddy’s press releases has described Airo as “the company’s agentic operating system for small businesses.”

What Sits Next to the Hosting Plan

The bundles are presented as answers to gaps in how small businesses work. In a group.one survey of 1,022 European small business owners, cited in its May announcement, 78% used social media but 74% of those managed their accounts entirely by hand, around 11% used a CRM, and fewer than 5% offered online booking.

The tools differ, but the categories overlap: site building, selling, customer contact and marketing. The table lists examples each company has launched or described in 2025 and 2026.

Several of these products are still being rolled out. In its August investor presentation, IONOS listed parts of its Momentum suite as “Partially live” and its CRM, booking and document management modules as “Planned.” Ask Aida is due to reach one.com “in the coming months,” and one.com’s September update still listed a social media section and order management among features coming soon.

Where the Numbers Point

GoDaddy’s segment reporting gives the clearest figures. In the second quarter of 2026, its Applications and Commerce segment brought in $514.8 million, up 11.0%, while the Core Platform segment, which includes domains and hosting, grew 3.9% to $783.2 million. Applications and Commerce, which covers far more than the newer products, now accounts for about 40% of revenue, up from 38% a year earlier. Airo, the newest of them, reached an annualized bookings run rate of $50 million in the quarter, five times the $10 million GoDaddy reported a quarter earlier. Average revenue per user, measured over the preceding 12 months, rose to $250 from $230. In the two preceding quarters, GoDaddy cited “softness in non-core GoDaddy Hosting” among the factors weighing on its Core Platform segment.

IONOS reports a single segment with two divisions. Its Web Presence & Productivity division, which covers domains, hosting, website builders and dedicated servers along with e-commerce, email and marketing tools, grew 7.3% in the second quarter to €290.3 million. The company’s investor slides put AI products at about 20% of the division’s “additional revenue” in 2025 and project about 50% for 2026, counting AI in MyWebsite, WordPress, email and Momentum. Average revenue per user stood at €16.7 a month, and IONOS reports churn of about 1% a month. The same August slides report about 15,000 “total services” of the AI Phone Receptionist since launch, after an early-access start in Germany and the US with limited marketing spend.

Hostinger and group.one publish usage figures instead of segment revenue, and Bluehost gives a customer total. According to Hostinger, the share of projects on its platform that fall outside traditional website categories rose from under 4% to nearly one in five in a year. In 2025, group.one reported that 85% of its website builder users choose to build with AI, and in May 2026 that its Aida AI platform is embedded across 67% of its product portfolio. Bluehost’s press releases put that total at over 5 million customers but give no usage figures for the new tools.

The Third-Party Services Behind the Platforms

Several of these offerings run on outside services. Hostinger’s Google Ads campaigns use Google’s Performance Max format, and its WhatsApp campaigns connect through Meta’s Embedded Signup. IONOS launched Momentum with partners including agorum, Blockbrain and NXAI. Its IONOS GPT assistant runs on open-source models such as Llama and Mistral, and the launch announcement states that IONOS does not develop or train its own AI models. GoDaddy Capital funding is “provided solely by GoDaddy’s partners.” Bluehost’s AI All-Access Pack bundles access to ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Grok, and one.com names payment gateways “like Stripe and PayPal” on its about page.

How the pieces come together differs by provider. Some tools sit in the hosting dashboard, some are sold as separate add-ons, and some connect through the customer’s own account with a third party. Hostinger’s Google Ads campaigns run through the customer’s Google Ads account, Google bills the ad spend directly, and Google sets the promotional ad credit and can change it at any time. Nor does every brand in a group get every product at once: Ask Aida launched at Uniweb first.

What the Shift Changes

In the strategy statements of IONOS and GoDaddy, the domain or basic website is the entry point. IONOS’s annual report sets out a growth strategy that “follows the customer’s lifecycle,” in which “the cost-effective entry point is often a domain or website” and customers move through upselling and cross-selling to e-commerce, cloud and AI applications. GoDaddy calls domains “a long-term funnel to drive GoDaddy’s growth.”

Pricing is moving with the product. GoDaddy speaks of “capturing value through paywalls within the experience” and reports customers “purchasing incremental credits” in its AI builder. At one.com, Aida AI pauses once a plan’s monthly AI usage allowance runs out, although the site stays live and can still be edited by hand. In the US, IONOS’s AI Receptionist starts at $39 a month with 30 calls included and $0.49 for each further call, with appointment scheduling in the $69 plan.

Two of the companies are also explicit about the effect on customer relationships. On its Aida AI page, group.one calls the product “a core lever in how we expand our market, retain our customers” and credits AI with turning “one-off users into recurring SaaS customers.” IONOS’s investor presentation from March lists “Ecosystem lock-in” among the points of its AI strategy. Under that heading, the slide describes AI products “deeply integrated into the IONOS platform” and “embedding IONOS into customers’ daily operations, increasing customer lifetime value and creating natural cross-sell opportunities.” Hostinger puts it from the customer’s side: “there’s no stack of separate subscriptions to connect and pay for.” The other side of the same integration is that more of a business runs with a single provider. The more of its bookings, contacts and campaigns sit in one account, the more there is to move if it switches, although the companies’ materials describe an intent rather than a measured effect on retention.

Final Thoughts

The five companies point in the same direction, and their self-descriptions, bundles and pricing show it clearly. Their results show it less directly: GoDaddy’s Applications and Commerce segment is growing faster than Core Platform and Airo’s bookings run rate rose fivefold in a quarter, while the other four publish adoption figures, revenue shares, customer totals or forecasts rather than standalone revenue for the new products.

For hosting buyers, the choice now extends beyond storage, speed and price to the business tools that come with the account. Providers that stay with hosting alone compete on infrastructure against companies that sell the server as part of a wider subscription for running the business.

About the Data

This analysis draws on company websites, press releases and investor materials published by October 23, 2026. All figures are company-reported and use each company’s own definitions, so they are not comparable across companies. GoDaddy’s segments, IONOS’s divisions and its share of AI in additional revenue, Hostinger’s project mix and group.one’s adoption shares each measure different things. Usage shares describe what customers build, not what they pay for. Bluehost information comes from its press releases. GoDaddy reports third-quarter results on October 29 and IONOS on November 12, which may update the figures.