When you look at the hosting industry, you don’t expect much change. Most companies move slow, stick to old playbooks, and call it innovation when they add a new control panel theme. I even dedicated an entire article outlining Why Hosting Providers Are So Slow To Change? Understanding the reasons is one thing, but being slow just lets others take the market.
By the end of September, I had the chance to meet the team at Hostinger and even visit their office. What they showed me blew me away and proved that Hostinger is playing in a completely different league from the rest of the market (maybe except for GoDaddy). They move faster than anyone else with new ideas and bold decisions. They don’t see web hosting as a commodity but as a product.
That mindset is why they’re winning.
From BalticNOG to Hostinger HQ
I was in Vilnius for BalticNOG, a new event for network geeks in the Baltic region, organized by my old friend Vincentas. Of course, Hostinger sent their engineering team there. I tried to get an interview, but they politely declined (honestly, I can’t blame them). Still, after just a few minutes of casual talk I already felt what kind of company I was dealing with.
They were genuinely proud to work there. And they told me something that stuck in my head:
"Anyone at the company, even the lowest-level engineer, can have an impact. If you have an idea and you can prove it will help clients and the business, you can make it happen."
The post I have wrote on LinkedIn that day got very popular:
So… they didn’t give me the interview but Nerijus, one of their engineers pointed me to the right contacts. Two days later I found myself inside their HQ (which, by the way, proves their point that they indeed can have an impact).
Cyber City and the Tech Hub
Hostinger’s office is in Cyber City, a modern complex that brings together many of Lithuania’s biggest tech companies. At the center is Tesonet, the group behind Nord Security (NordVPN, NordPass), Oxylabs, and Surfshark. In fact, Tesonet made a partial investment in Hostinger a few years ago.
The location itself gives Hostinger something rare: direct contact with other fast-moving tech leaders. For example, marketing and communications teams share their knowledge, insights, and support each other across companies.
Growth That Turns Heads
At the office I was welcomed by Gediminas, their communications manager with years of experience in the tech, even being a news reporter back in the day so we immediately get along. He walked me around the office and showed me a presentation with Hostinger’s growth numbers and recent products. Summarizing it shortly for you: The stats are wild!
- From 2017, Hostinger is growing ~60% YoY!
- 2023 customers: 2.4M (57% growth)
- 2023 total billings: €139.1M (61% growth)
- Top markets: India, Brazil, USA, Indonesia, France
The 2024 numbers are not public yet, but keeping in mind their recent innovations, you can be sure the numbers may be as impressive! As Gediminas told me, Hostinger expects to keep the world’s fastest-growing hosting company’s name in the coming years.
Not a Hosting Company, a Product Company
GoDaddy has said this about themselves, but it’s true here too: Hostinger is not just a hosting provider. It’s a product company. Until recently most of their staff were in customer success. Now the majority are in product. That shift means they push out about 20 new features every month and at least one major release every quarter.
Just in 2025 they have already released:
- Hostinger Horizons, the AI partner for building websites and web apps without coding
- Hostinger Reach for AI-driven email marketing
- AI Website Builder for WordPress with AI text and image generation
- SEO→GEO tools to make websites readable and indexed by AI engines
On top of that, they now host 5M WordPress websites and keep a 4.7/5 Trustpilot score from 40k reviews.
Horizons in Three Months
Hostinger Horizons is definitely the biggest one and absolute differentiation between any other player on the market. It is their AI website and web application builder, a competition to Lovable. But what amazes me is the PACE that they were able to pull it off. This what completely blew my mind: they went from idea to live launch for all customers in less than three months!
By the end of December 2024 Giedrius Zakaitis, their Chief Product and Technology Officer, made a decision to move forward with Horizons development. Yes, they had a green light by the end of December to START building it.
One month in – they have an internal concept. Another month later, full scale release. By the end of September, they already had hundreds of thousands users on it!
Name another hosting company that can execute ANY product like that.
We even had a little demo with a concept site for my wife and I must admit it looked pretty solid right away. It took us 5 minutes to get there:
Kodee and AI at Scale
Then there’s Kodee, their AI agent. As I said multiple times, using a generic “AI Support” tool is not going to get you anywhere in this industry and it is also the reason why I decided to invest in Konrado.AI. What Hostinger did was to integrate it deeply across their entire product ecosystem.
Again, the pace is insane. They have released the first, simple version in September 2024 more as an “AI assistant”, but then gradually started supporting all their products and for example you can now use it to set up your firewall, reboot a VPS or even migrate a website.
The result after a year? Kodee now handles over 750k customer requests per month, solving 3 out of 4 cases. According to Gediminas, that equals savings of about €9M each year(!). To handle that volume without Kodee, they estimate they would need 700 to 800 extra staff. Instead, they run it with a 14-person team and it scales without limits.
What I Think This Means for the Industry
Being impressed by the presentation and the numbers I must admit – it got me a little depressed. Thinking about almost all the web hosting market, most companies are stuck. Hostinger pushes a product from zero to hundreds of thousands of users in three months. They automate support with AI at scale while saving millions each year. They build and ship faster than anyone else in the industry.
If you compare that to the rest of the market, it’s not even close. For the last 20 years the “big innovations” in this space were things like CloudLinux and Softaculous, maybe a sitebuilder. That’s the pace. Slow, incremental, nothing that changes the game. Too many players act like it’s still 2010, waiting months to set up a single integration or still debating if growth is worth chasing. Hostinger proves that execution, speed, and a product mindset are what win.
And unless the rest of the industry wakes up, they’ll stay behind watching Hostinger (and maybe one or two others) set the pace for what hosting will look like in the future.
How Can Others Compete?
Let’s be real. You cannot beat Hostinger or GoDaddy by pretending you’re on the same level. They have the teams, the capital, and the execution to push product ideas into the market fast. They don’t wait for someone else to build it. They build it themselves and they are always ahead.
Most of the industry depends way too much on vendors. A panel here, a billing plugin there, some AI tool glued on top, and suddenly you have a mess of half-integrated systems. I’ve seen it firsthand. For some hosting companies, even rolling out something like PanelAlpha inside a WordPress-focused shop takes a year. A year for what should be weeks. That’s the reality.
To me, one of the options, at least in theory, is what I would call a “supervendor.” A vendor that delivers a complete platform, moves at high product speed and keeps up with the pace of players like Hostinger. With a setup like that, a hosting company could push one button and instantly start selling managed WordPress hosting with a builder included. One button and you add Office365. The vendor would handle documentation, updates, scaling, support, even centralizing customer success. Your only job would be making sure your clients use these products the right way.
The other option is consolidation. Merge into larger providers that understand the product game and can stay ahead through innovation. In my opinion however, not one is really close to that.
What’s clear is this: the pace is not just fast, it keeps accelerating. Pressure on the market is growing.
The question is: Will you keep up?
Konrad Keck
Web hosting enthusiast, connecting technical expertise with business strategies. Revolutionizing the industry with automated, user-focused solutions since 2011. Founder of various innovative solutions including ModulesGarden, PanelAlpha, MetricsCube, and EasyDCIM.