A small business today deals with AI in fragments: a support bot at every vendor, plus its own writing copilot, SEO tool, analytics agent, each with its own setup and no knowledge of the others. Research firm Gartner predicts that by 2028, 60% of brands will use agentic AI across marketing, sales, and support. Zendesk’s 2026 CX Trends report found that 81% of consumers want their conversations with companies to carry on where they left off, without starting over. What that requires is context: an AI that already knows what the customer runs, owns, and is trying to do.

Hostinger Agent starts with much of that context already in place. Its specialized agents for marketing, SEO, content and visuals, analysis, and recurring tasks can draw on the customer’s website or store, domain, business email, newsletters, previous conversations, and ongoing work, so they can move straight to action.

In practice, a customer can arrive with a broken DNS record and leave with the launch campaign written and the weekly report scheduled. Another can come asking how to get more traffic and leave with an email campaign created and sent through Hostinger Reach, the company’s email marketing product.

“The AI industry has spent the past two years giving people more assistants, copilots, and agents to choose from. We want customers to stop choosing between them,” said Emilis Strimaitis, Head of Product Innovation at Hostinger. “When the AI already knows what the customer is building and what they are trying to achieve, fixing the immediate problem is only part of the job. The real value is helping them grow online.”

Hostinger Agent is also available directly inside AI Builder, Hostinger’s agentic environment for creating websites, stores, apps, and other online projects. That means customers can build and consult the agent at the same time: change the site, ask how to improve its SEO, plan the launch, analyze what is working, or get help when something breaks without switching between tools. AI Builder already brings creation, backend infrastructure, ecommerce, and marketing into one environment; Hostinger Agent adds an ongoing business conversation on top of it.

Around one in ten conversations goes beyond what the AI can confidently resolve alone. Instead of transferring the customer or risking a weak answer, a Customer Success specialist can step in when needed to add context and validate the response, while the same conversation continues.

Hostinger calls these specialists AI CX Engineers. Their role is shifting from taking over difficult conversations to helping the AI solve them, so the next thousand people with the same problem get the right answer immediately. Customers who prefer to speak directly with a person can still ask for a specialist at any time, on any plan and in every market.

The model is already showing results. Since the change at the end of June, specialist-guided AI resolution rose from 41% to 72%, while live chat demand fell from 10% to 4.5%. Customers also reach a solution much faster, in a median of around three minutes with specialist-guided AI, compared with more than 50 minutes for live chats.

Hostinger Agent began rolling out from mid-August 2026, replacing Kodee across customer touchpoints. Support and account management remain available at no additional cost, while specialized agentic work is available through a tiered subscription at hostinger.com/hostinger-agent.

Hostinger has spent the past year rebuilding its product line around AI. In August, Website Builder and Horizons became AI Builder, a single tool for creating and launching online projects. Hostinger Ecommerce, which lets customers sell through their website, social channels, and shareable links, launched in July, and Reach, the AI email marketing platform, arrived last year.

Hostinger is moving beyond AI-generated websites toward an agentic platform for building, running and growing online with AI Builder. It brings AI-led creation and visual control together with backend infrastructure, ecommerce, embedded AI and marketing, allowing AI to set up and operate the systems behind a project rather than simply generate its first version.

The launch follows a marked change in what Hostinger customers build. A year ago, fewer than 4% of projects created on the platform fell outside traditional website categories. Today, nearly one in five are software-as-a-service products, internal tools, or learning platforms, a fivefold increase in 12 months.

Those projects require more than a traditional website. A customer portal needs authentication. A software product needs data. A store needs ecommerce infrastructure. An AI-powered service needs AI inside it. And every business needs a way to reach customers and keep them.

Assembling those components has always been the customer’s responsibility – the handoff point where most AI building tools stop. Hostinger removes that handoff. Because the backend, ecommerce, and marketing systems are native to its platform, AI Builder can open a store, create a user management system, or send a campaign itself, rather than sending customers off to find and configure third-party providers themselves.

“The next battle in online presence is not about who can generate a homepage in 30 seconds,” said Auksė Žirgulė, vice president of product at Hostinger. “It is about what happens next. Can the AI open the store, create the user management system, help attract customers, and keep improving the project? That’s the direction we’re taking with AI Builder.”

The wider market has responded by adding AI and agentic features to existing products. Hostinger is taking a different approach: alongside those additions, it has built an agentic platform from the ground up. One project and one account take a customer from building and editing to backend, commerce and email, without switching between separate products.

A prompt is only one way to begin

Hostinger Website Builder helped millions of customers create visually, while Horizons opened the door to more open-ended, AI-native creation. AI Builder brings both into one broader platform as the line between website and app building continues to fade.

A restaurant can upload a menu PDF, a designer can share a screenshot or reference image, and a business owner can paste the link of an outdated site they want rebuilt. AI Builder turns any of these into the foundation for a website, store, app, or internal tool.

From there, customers decide how they want to build. In agentic mode the AI leads, creating and developing the project as the customer describes what they need, while manual mode gives them more granular control, including moving sections and editing individual elements directly.

What happens behind the website

AI Builder’s backend is Hostinger’s own. Data, authentication, user accounts, file storage, and application logic all run on the company’s infrastructure rather than through third-party services, and that is what allows the AI to act rather than advise.

Asked to let people create accounts, AI Builder provisions the database and sets up sign-in, from passwords and one-time passcodes to Google and Apple logins, together with the confirmation and reset emails that go with them. Asked to start selling, it opens the store. Asked to reach customers, it works through Hostinger Reach, the company’s email marketing product. None of it requires the customer to research providers, open accounts elsewhere, or connect APIs.

An upgraded AI architecture makes the process stronger from the start, producing better results earlier while reducing unnecessary prompt iterations and AI credit usage.

Throughout, the AI works in an environment kept separate from the published project. Changes reach the public only when the owner chooses to publish them – which is what makes it safe to let AI act on a business that’s already trading.

Agentic operations are also available from outside the platform. Hostinger Connector, included free with every plan, allows a customer’s own AI assistant, including Claude Code, Cursor, and VS Code, to work on the same account, deploying a project, connecting a domain, updating inventory or drafting a campaign.

“A platform is not a platform if only your own AI can use it,” said Žirgulė. “A developer’s assistant and our own agent carry out the same operations against the same account. AI Builder is the door we have opened for everyone who does not write code, and it is the beginning of what we are building rather than the finished version of it.”

AI Builder is now available globally to new and existing Hostinger customers. Existing projects will continue to work as they do today. For details on plans, pricing, and AI credit allocations, visit Hostinger’s AI Builder page.

Hostinger Horizons now removes that step: users paste a link to a website, and it generates an editable version.

The website cloner reads a single web page at a publicly accessible URL and produces a working version of that page inside an AI project, where every element is open to change through prompts or visual editing: rewriting copy, adjusting layout, adding sections, or translating it into other languages.

The generated page is a starting point rather than a fixed copy. Nothing has to be rebuilt from scratch, and nothing has to stay as it is.

“The hardest part in the AI era is not building the website – it’s explaining what you want,” said Auksė Žirgulė, VP of Product at Hostinger.

“If you already have a site you’ve outgrown, or you’ve found one whose design works for you, you shouldn’t have to describe it. Point at it and start from there.”

What it’s for

A business whose website has aged badly can generate a modern, editable version in minutes and spend its time improving the site rather than reconstructing it.

Anyone using a website builder that has become too expensive or too limiting can switch without rebuilding manually.

Freelancers and small agencies can onboard clients at scale. Importing a client’s current website as a base turns the first week of a project from reconstruction work into actual design work.

Someone who finds a website they like can use it as the starting point for their own – generating a first version, then replacing the content and branding to make it theirs.

What it does not recreate

The feature works from publicly accessible front-end content only. Databases, user accounts, backend systems, and other sensitive data are never copied, so business and customer information stays where it is.

Anything that runs behind the scenes rather than on the page itself has to be set up again afterward. This includes login systems, booking flows, online checkouts, and connections to external tools. These can be added in the same project, though some need accounts or setup from outside the platform to work.

Generated projects are meant to be built on, not published as they arrive. Text, images, logos, and brand identity belong to whoever created them, and anything carried over from a source website needs to be replaced with the user’s own before going live.

Impersonation and phishing break Hostinger’s terms. Hostinger monitors published websites for abuse across all of its products, whether they were built with WordPress, written in code, or generated from a URL.

Availability

The website cloner is available today to all users, new and existing, on every plan including the free trial. AI credits can be topped up as project scope grows. All plans include 24/7 multilingual support and a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Hostinger Horizons is a platform that creates websites, stores, web apps, and internal tools from a description, a link, an image, or a PDF. Whatever the starting point, the result is built and hosted with no code required.

To learn more, visit Hostinger Horizons.

VILNIUS, Lithuania – AI coding tools spent the last two years getting better at writing, testing, and debugging code. Now that AI is part of everyday coding, with more than half of professional developers using it daily, that phase is becoming the baseline. The harder problem is what developers and their coding agents do after the code is ready: deploy it, configure it, and keep it running.

At Hostinger, more than 19,000 customers have already tried doing exactly that through Hostinger Connector, the free add-on that lets developers and coding agents manage Hostinger services directly from their AI-assisted coding workspace. Around 1,500 use it every day, completing 30,000 to 40,000 actions daily to manage websites and services.

“AI helped developers move faster from idea to code. Now they want the same speed from code to live project. The fact that people are coming back every day and taking tens of thousands of actions through the Connector shows this is no longer a nice-to-have. It is the next workflow they want AI to help with,” said Saulius Lazaravičius, vice president of product at Hostinger.

Hostinger Connector closes the gap between code and launch by giving developers and their coding agents a way to manage websites, domains, servers, and other Hostinger services from the same workspace. It works across AI-assisted coding environments such as VS Code, Cursor, Devin, and Antigravity, as well as coding agents like Claude Code and Codex.

Once connected, users can deploy websites, edit files, change settings, manage DNS, update nameservers, check server resources, manage firewall rules, handle SSH keys, and more. The Connector also supports AI-assisted workflows, such as generating a frontend and connecting it to WordPress, Hostinger Ecommerce, a CMS, or a custom backend.

Hostinger is continuing to expand what the Connector can do, with recent additions including Hostinger Reach for email marketing and Hostinger Ecommerce for online sales.

Hostinger is not the only signal that AI coding is moving beyond code suggestions. Popular tools such as Gemini Code Assist, Cline, Continue, Amazon Q, and others now help developers generate and review code, run commands, write tests, edit files, and connect to external tools. The pattern is clear: the IDE is becoming a workbench for more of the software workflow, not just a place to write code.

As AI coding tools become more capable, the developer workflow will keep moving toward fewer separate tools and more connected environments. This phase will be defined not only by how well assistants generate code, but by how safely and reliably they help people turn that code into working products.

From online stores and business websites to SaaS products and VPS-based projects, Hostinger clients get a stronger foundation to serve visitors smoothly as demand grows.

A record order ahead of the market crunch

Behind every data center is one thing the whole industry has been fighting for: hardware.

The cloud and server market has faced a major supply shock often called RAMageddon. AI infrastructure demand, reduced memory production after the post-COVID price drop, and depleted global inventories created a shortage in the market. It affected not only RAM, but also CPUs, NVMe storage, and server components overall.

As a result, server prices increased sharply. Depending on configuration, Hostinger’s overall server costs rose roughly 5–6x compared with the previous year, while some infrastructure components are now 6–8x more expensive than in early 2025.

It’s not only about price. Some manufacturers were sold out for this year, and hardware lead times stretched from a few weeks in 2025 to around 30 weeks today.

Hostinger anticipated this shift and secured 3,000+ servers from leading manufacturers, giving the company enough infrastructure capacity to cover its needs for the full year. This record batch marks Hostinger’s largest server order to date:

What’s inside the new fleet?

The expansion is tied directly to Hostinger’s rapid growth, supported by platform-wide AI adoption and increasing demand across hosting services.

Hostinger has already started deploying the new servers to support the full product ecosystem, including web hosting, cloud hosting, VPS, and related infrastructure products. They use a mix of the latest AMD architectures, including AMD Genoa and AMD Turin, together with the latest-generation technologies such as:

• Read-intensive NVMe SSD storage for faster website and file loading
• DDR5 RAM for smoother performance on data-heavy websites
• RAID storage configurations to help protect data and improve reliability
• Dual redundant power supplies to keep services stable 24/7

This upgrade gives Hostinger clients a firmer ground to build, launch, and grow online with confidence, backed by infrastructure designed for speed, stability, and scale.

Hostinger, an AI-driven business growth platform, has partnered with Patchstack, a leader in open-source vulnerability intelligence, to introduce built-in vulnerability management for its Node.js hosting. Applications are now continuously scanned for newly disclosed vulnerabilities in their dependencies, with customers automatically alerted and guided through remediation when issues are identified.

AI-powered development tools have lowered the barrier to building full-stack applications. While applications can now be built and deployed in minutes, they often rely on dozens of third-party packages that builders never manually review, making them a common source of security vulnerabilities. New security issues in popular npm packages are disclosed constantly, and the rapid growth of AI-generated code is only accelerating the problem. Yet many solo builders and small teams lack the time or resources to continuously monitor these dependencies after deployment.

“When you’re building with AI tools, you’re focused on getting the product live, not on what happens to your dependencies six months later,” said Arnas Donauskas, Web Hosting Product Manager at Hostinger. “That’s where the risk builds up, and that’s what this partnership with Patchstack is designed to handle.”

To address this challenge, Hostinger has integrated Patchstack’s open-source vulnerability intelligence directly into its Node.js hosting platform. When a vulnerability affects a customer’s application, Hostinger automatically flags it and guides how to resolve it. The monitoring runs continuously in the background, allowing developers to focus on shipping features instead of manually tracking security advisories.

Designed with AI-built, or “vibe-coded,” applications in mind, Hostinger’s Node.js hosting enables developers to export projects from tools like Lovable to GitHub and deploy them in minutes with automatic framework detection. The platform supports major frontend and backend Node.js frameworks across versions 18.x through 24.x.

As Donauskas highlighted, “You connect your GitHub repo, your framework is detected, and you’re live in minutes. No servers to manage, and with flat pricing, your bill stays steady while you build.”

With the Patchstack integration, ongoing vulnerability monitoring becomes part of the hosting experience rather than another tool developers need to configure and maintain. Combined with Hostinger’s flat-rate Business web hosting, the platform aims to reduce both operational complexity and unexpected costs.

“AI has made it much easier to build applications, but security doesn’t end at deployment. Open-source dependencies keep changing, so developers need ongoing visibility into new vulnerabilities, not just a one-time scan,” said Oliver Sild, CEO and co-founder of Patchstack.

Patchstack-powered vulnerability management is now available for Node.js applications hosted on Hostinger’s Business web hosting and cloud hosting plans, including Cloud Startup, Cloud Professional, Cloud Enterprise, and Cloud Enterprise Plus. The feature is enabled by default and requires no additional setup.

About Hostinger

Hostinger is an AI-powered platform for building and growing businesses online – web hosting, domains, email, website creation, and business tools. Founded in Lithuania in 2004, the company develops its AI capabilities in-house, enabling rapid iteration and AI-driven customer support. Ranked the 2nd fastest-growing company in Europe by the Financial Times, Hostinger employs nearly 900 people and serves more than 5 million users across 150+ countries, with its largest markets in India, Brazil, Indonesia, the United States, and France. Learn more at hostinger.com.

About Patchstack

Patchstack is one of the world’s largest vulnerability intelligence providers, covering the entire lifecycle from detection to mitigation. Powered by RapidMitigate – a technology that combines software composition analysis, threat intelligence, and contextual prioritization – Patchstack delivers site-specific protection rules automatically and only to sites where a vulnerability is actually present, with near-zero false positives and no code changes. Learn more at patchstack.com.

It starts with the business itself: products, inventory, orders, payments, shipping, and customer data. From there, sellers can connect their store to websites, social networks, messaging apps, and, soon, AI agents – all from a single dashboard. No rebuilding when a new channel emerges.

The easiest way to understand it: Hostinger Ecommerce is the kitchen behind the business. It handles the work behind every sale, from products and inventory to orders, payments, and shipping. Websites, TikTok shops, and other customer-facing channels are different dining rooms where customers can discover products and place orders, all served by the same kitchen. Adding a new channel doesn’t mean rebuilding – it means opening another door.

From product photo to sale in minutes

Sellers start by defining their business, then connect to any combination of sales channels from a single dashboard. A standout feature at launch is Quick Links: sellers upload product photos, and Hostinger’s AI creates product pages with full descriptions, key details, and even a suggested price. From there, they can easily connect a payment method and share the product link anywhere their customers already are. Each link works out of the box with the essentials included: cart, checkout, payments, shipping, and store management. No website needed.

As AI agents enter the buying journey, with companies like OpenAI, Google, Visa, and Mastercard already building ways for agents to recommend, compare, and buy products, Hostinger Ecommerce is preparing sellers for that future. Agentic commerce capabilities are in active development, and the platform’s architecture is designed to structure merchant data for future AI-powered shopping tools.

“Commerce is moving from simple stores to ecosystems, where people discover products across channels and AI agents increasingly help them choose, compare, and buy,” said Auksė Žirgulė, Head of Hostinger Website Builder and Ecommerce. “For small sellers, the opportunity is huge, but only if their business can move as fast as their customers do. They should not have to guess which channel will matter next. They should be able to focus on growing their business, while providers like Hostinger Ecommerce build the future-ready infrastructure around them.”

Guided by Kodee, built for beginners

At the center of the experience is Kodee, Hostinger’s AI support agent. It guides users through setup by asking practical questions: what and where they sell, what their business details are, and which sales channels they want to connect – a website, a social shop, a Quick link, or all of them. Based on the answers, Kodee prepares store settings and nudges users toward the next steps.

Once the store is live, Kodee shifts from guide to operator. It manages products, runs flash sales, fixes SEO, and handles day-to-day operations through conversation rather than menus and settings.

Availability

At launch, Hostinger Ecommerce is included for free for existing customers on Business or higher-tier plans. For new users, pricing starts at $2.99/month. The product also connects with the wider Hostinger ecosystem, including domains, Business Email, website and web app building, as well as growth tools such as email marketing. 24/7 multilingual support and a 30-day money-back guarantee are also included.

To learn more, visit Hostinger Ecommerce.

The change reflects Hostinger’s pivot from a hosting provider to a fully AI-first company, one focused on delivering best-in-market AI products for small and medium businesses, scaling automation across operations, and ensuring that fast growth and long-term sustainability can go hand in hand.

“I started here 14 years ago answering customer tickets,” said Zakaitis, CEO of Hostinger. “Back then, getting a small business online meant fighting with technology, which was too complicated for most people. That is still the problem we solve, now with AI doing the hard parts. My focus is simple: make sure anyone with an idea can build it and run it, even if they never write a line of code, and run the company itself smarter and faster because of AI.”

Recent years have marked Hostinger’s successful transformation from a hosting provider to an AI-powered growth platform for small and medium-sized businesses. Over the course of the past year, the company launched four AI products, including Hostinger Horizons, a vibe coding tool, and Reach, an AI-powered email marketing platform. Meanwhile, Kodee evolved from a chatbot into an agent capable of performing more than 500 admin-level tasks, including access to and control of users’ IT systems, saving the company approximately €14 million in operational costs in 2026.

“Giedrius has led product brilliantly and is the right person to run the whole company and turn AI’s potential into real growth. I couldn’t be more excited. Stay tuned,” said Jankus.

“Customer obsession was the guiding principle behind Hostinger’s growth. Agents and bots now create more of the internet’s traffic than people do, and we’re building for them too, because behind every agent is the same customer, acting on their behalf. So our job doesn’t change: make Hostinger work as well for someone’s agent as it does for them,” said Zakaitis.

Zakaitis brings deep product and technology expertise to the CEO role. Before this appointment, he served as Chief Product and Technology Officer, driving Hostinger’s product innovation and AI agenda. He joined Hostinger as a customer success specialist, progressed to software engineering and head of product, and led Zyro, Hostinger’s website-building subsidiary. In 2024, Zyro was rebranded as Hostinger Website Builder and fully integrated into the company.

Jankus steered Hostinger through a period of exceptional growth, including 51% year-over-year revenue growth in 2025, reaching €275.4 million. In 2026, Hostinger was ranked second in the Financial Times & Statista Long-term Growth Champions: Europe 2026 report. This ranking specifically recognizes companies showing sustained revenue growth over a decade, distinguishing those that maintain momentum at scale from those experiencing short-term spikes.

Founded in Lithuania in 2004, Hostinger employs nearly 900 people. Today, the company serves more than 5 million users in over 150 countries worldwide. Hostinger’s largest markets by active user base are India, Brazil, Indonesia, the United States, and France. The top ten also include the United Kingdom, Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, and Spain.

Personal AI agents are becoming one of the hottest areas in AI, with tools such as OpenClaw, n8n, and Paperclip racing for attention. Hermes Agent joined the race with a powerful, self-improving approach, but it has been hard to use without terminal skills. Now, Hostinger’s Managed Hermes Agent makes that power accessible to everyone, thanks to a visual interface and Telegram access out of the box.

Hermes Agent, developed by Nous Research, is designed to “grow” with the user. It learns from previous interactions, turns successful workflows into reusable skills, and becomes more useful the longer it runs.

Expert quote

User behavior and community feedback show Hermes Agent is already one of the top open-source agent projects and still gaining momentum. The demand hints at a split in what users actually want from AI agents. OpenClaw brought them into messaging apps, while Hermes Agent is pushing the category toward more advanced automation, with memory, self-improvement, and long-running work.

Saulius Lazaravičius

VP of Product at Hostinger

Until now, however, that power came with a technical barrier. The setup was controlled through the command line, required users to configure AI provider keys, and often involved technical steps around servers, messaging connections, and maintenance.

Managed Hermes Agent from Hostinger removes all of that.

Easy mode for Hermes

The new solution turns Hermes Agent into a 1-click experience, complete with a managed environment, built-in integrations, and security features:

• Visual interface so users can interact with their agent without typing terminal commands
• Built-in AI credits so the agent is ready to use out of the box
• Simplified Telegram connection with no webhooks or manual setup needed
• Web scraping support so the agent can access fresh online information
• Agentic Mail access for a dedicated inbox with pre-installed skills to manage email workflows
• Managed updates to keep the agent current without manual upkeep
• Managed security with anti-DDoS, malware scanning, and automatic backups

The result is an all-in-one way to run a private, always-on Hermes Agent without having to become a system administrator first.

For users who want more control, Managed Hermes Agent also preserves full CLI access. This lets them configure the environment, connect OAuth to authenticate with various large language model and tool providers, install skills, run scripts, and monitor activity.

Developers who need full root access and total server control can continue using Hermes Agent on a self-managed VPS.

Instead of forcing developers to bend legacy inboxes into modern systems, Hostinger Agentic Mail moves beyond outdated IMAP polling and complex SMTP protocols, delivering a reliable, webhook-first solution that works at the speed of modern programmatic systems.

“Email is still one of the most important interfaces on the internet, but most of the infrastructure behind it was never designed for autonomous systems,” said Povilas Skrebutėnas, Head of Email at Hostinger. “That’s why we built Agentic Mail. It gives developers an email layer that behaves the way agents do, with real-time triggers, controlled interactions, and programmatic workflows.”

At launch, Agentic Mail is built around three things developers actually need:

• Instant webhooks let workflows react the moment an email arrives, without polling loops or delays. 
• Allow and block lists give teams precise control over who an agent can interact with at both the domain and email levels. 
• Prebuilt integrations help users connect quickly with popular agentic and automation platforms like OpenClaw, n8n, and Claude. 

A full REST API for programmatic control and an MCP server connection for deep integration with agentic stacks are also on the way.

The result is an email layer designed for real automation use cases. For example, a cold outreach agent can send personalized emails, qualify leads, and pass warm prospects into a CRM. A support workflow can route inbound issues to the right agent, draft responses, and escalate only the conversations that truly need a human. Scheduling agents can handle meeting requests and reminders entirely through email.

The setup is built to stay simple. Users create an inbox on their own domain, connect a webhook endpoint, and define who gets access. From there, the inbox becomes part of the workflow itself: receiving, triggering, filtering, and responding at machine speed.

Agentic Mail is available as part of the Hostinger Premium Business Email plan, giving developers and builders access to agent-ready email infrastructure and seamless integration into their stacks.

Small business owners rarely have a full team of specialists, so they end up handling marketing, SEO, legal, and sales themselves. We’re closing that gap with Hostinger Agents, a suite of purpose-built AI agents that give you instant access to expert support for running and growing an online business.

A freelance copywriter can cost $50 an hour. An SEO consultant starts at $75. A lawyer reviewing your privacy policy bills in six-minute increments. For most solopreneurs, specialist support is simply out of reach. You either can’t afford it, can’t justify it, or don’t know where to start.

Expert’s comment

For most small businesses, the ceiling isn’t ambition, it’s access to the specialist expertise larger companies take for granted. We’re changing that by giving every owner a team behind them. Not a chatbot or a FAQ page, but specialists who understand the problem, offer real solutions, and help move the business forward.

Giedrius Zakaitis

Chief Product and Technology Officer

Meet the team

Begin exploring Hostinger Agents with Atlas, a separate onboarding agent designed to deliver quick wins in minutes. It starts with context already in place, analyzing your site or setup and jumping straight into action: highlighting issues, suggesting fixes, and helping solve a real problem right away.

From there, you can unlock the full Hostinger Agents suite: seven specialized AI agents, each with a distinct personality and domain expertise, available under a single subscription.

Unlike generic AI tools that try to do everything, each agent is built around a specific discipline and works like a specialist:

• North – business advisor. Strategy, planning, pricing, positioning, and growth decisions.
• Quill – creative writer. Blog posts, website copy, product descriptions, and content ideas.
• Scout – SEO consultant. Keyword research, competitor analysis, site structure, and on-page SEO.
• Buzz – marketing planner. Campaigns, channel strategy, email marketing, and promotions.
• Shield – legal advisor. Privacy policies, terms of service, and compliance guidance.
• Ally – customer comms. Client emails, responses, and business messaging.
• Arrow – sales and outreach. Prospecting, outreach, pitches, and proposals.

From day one, agents understand your context, generate images, and deliver practical outputs, with deeper automation and integrations on the way.

How Kodee fits in

AI support agent, Kodee, isn’t going anywhere. It remains a free assistant for technical help, handling hosting setup, DNS, and configuration.

If you ask broader questions, like how to get more traffic or write a better sales email, Kodee will still help. But it will also point you to the Hostinger Agent trained specifically for that task, where you can get deeper, more specialized support.

One subscription, full access

Hostinger Agents is now available to all existing clients. A single subscription, starting at $6.99/month, unlocks all seven agents and includes 1,000 monthly Hostinger Agent credits, enough for 100+ blog posts, dozens of SEO audits, or numerous marketing campaigns. You can top up anytime if needed.

Hostinger Agents is the latest addition to our AI ecosystem, designed to help you create and grow online faster. Recent launches include Hostinger Horizons, an AI platform for building websites and web apps through conversation, Hostinger Reach, an AI-powered email marketing tool, and Web2Agent, a one-click service that makes websites readable and navigable by AI tools.

“We launched our stock option program nearly a decade ago, when we were still far from today’s results. Now, we are able to share the financial returns with colleagues who have contributed to the company’s growth over many years”, – says Daugirdas Jankus, Hostinger CEO.

About 10% of the company’s employees are part of the stock option program and will be able to exercise their options in the future under set terms.

According to Jankus, sharing the company’s success with employees is an integral part of its long-term talent attraction and retention strategy. The existing stock option program, launched in 2017, has been continuously refined in line with the company’s development.

Hostinger’s international team currently consists of around 900 employees, nearly 500 of whom are based in Lithuania. To sustain its growth and continue developing AI solutions for clients, the company plans to open 200–300 new positions this year alone.

Europe’s fastest-growing companies 

Hostinger has seen rapid growth over the past decade, with its customer base rising from 100,000 in 2015 to 4.6 million at the end of last year. In the past year alone, the number of clients grew by 35%. The company’s revenue also increased significantly in 2025, climbing 51% year-on-year to €275.4 million.

Such fast and steady growth has been recognized internationally: last year, Hostinger was named to the Financial Times FT 1000 list of Europe’s fastest-growing companies for the sixth consecutive year. It also ranked second in the Financial Times and Statista “Long-term Growth Champions: Europe 2026” ranking, which highlights companies achieving exceptional revenue growth over a decade.

In recent years, Hostinger has been increasingly expanding the use of artificial intelligence across its products and operations. Last year, the company launched two new tools for its customers: Hostinger Horizons, a no-code platform for creating websites and web applications, and Hostinger Reach, an AI-powered newsletter marketing solution. Both make it easier for customers to engage with their audiences effectively—no technical skills required.

The company has also made a major leap forward with its AI assistant, Kodee. Today, upon user requests it can independently handle more than 350 different technical tasks. Over 80% of customer inquiries are now resolved with the help of Kodee, saving Hostinger more than €9 million annually. 

Hostinger, a no-code AI-driven platform for building and growing online businesses, today reported 51% year-over-year revenue growth in 2025, reaching €275.4 million. This marks the company’s fourth consecutive year of over 50% revenue growth and positions it among Europe’s most consistently high-performing technology companies.

Hostinger’s customer base expanded 35% to 4.6 million businesses across more than 150 countries. The company attributes these results to steady demand for its core hosting and cloud infrastructure services alongside accelerating adoption of AI-driven tools designed to simplify how businesses build, manage, and scale their online operations.

Hostinger’s 2025 performance extends a remarkable multi-year growth trajectory. Since 2022, the company has grown revenue from €69.6 million to €275.4 million, a compound annual growth rate of 58%, while expanding its customer base from approximately 1.5 million to 4.6 million users. Over this period, Hostinger added €205.8 million in cumulative new revenue and 3.1 million net new customers.

“Our customers don’t want to manage infrastructure or tools – they want to run their businesses,” said Hostinger CEO Daugirdas Jankus. “AI allows us to take more of that complexity off their hands, whether that’s building something new or keeping existing services running smoothly. The results we’re seeing reflect how strongly that approach resonates across markets, from New York to Mumbai and from São Paulo to Jakarta.”

Agentic AI drives operational transformation

Hostinger has increasingly embedded autonomous AI agents into everyday workflows across its platform, allowing users to perform tasks that previously required technical expertise through a simple chat interface.

One such agent, Kodee, which evolved from a chatbot into an AI agent, can perform more than 350 different admin-level tasks – some of which include access to and control of users’ IT systems. These tasks include website migrations and backups, store management, configuring DNS, checking server health, and handling billing – areas that historically created technical friction for small and medium-sized businesses operating online.

By year-end 2025, Kodee handled 81% of customer support interactions across Hostinger’s 4.6 million users, up from 50% at the start of the year, saving the company around €9 million for the year.

The company’s AI-powered web-application platform, Hostinger Horizons, which launched in early 2025, attracted more than 800,000 customers by year-end, enabling them to build functional web applications without writing code. Hostinger Reach, the AI-powered email marketing service that allows users to draft professional campaigns and create customer segments through conversational AI, reached 150,000 users by December 2025.

Collectively, these innovations have driven strong customer satisfaction, evidenced by a Net Promoter Score of +59, a metric indicating how likely customers are to recommend the product to others.

Sustained recognition as Europe’s growth leader

In 2025, Hostinger was listed among the FT 1000 of Europe’s fastest-growing companies for the sixth consecutive year and ranked second in the Financial Times & Statista Long-term Growth Champions: Europe 2026 report. The Long-term Growth Champions ranking specifically recognizes companies demonstrating sustained revenue growth over a decade, distinguishing companies that maintain momentum at scale from those experiencing short-term spikes.

The company’s consistent performance across multiple years and market conditions reflects both the resilience of its business model and the compounding advantages of operating at scale.

Founded in 2004, Hostinger benefits from a mature, geographically diverse customer base spanning India, Brazil, the United States, Indonesia, and France. This established foundation has enabled it to roll out new AI capabilities across millions of users simultaneously, a structural advantage unavailable to newer, AI-native startups.

To prove that commitment, we’re now officially certified by the Secure Hosting Alliance (SHA). It’s a collaborative initiative dedicated to building a more trusted, secure, and ethical web hosting industry.

Why SHA certification matters

For us, certification wasn’t just a formality – it was a way to validate how we operate and push our standards even higher. Our security, legal, and operations teams worked closely to meet every requirement of the SHA’s rigorous Trust Seal program.

This certification ensures you benefit from:

• Enhanced security: Industry-leading protections keep your data safe.
• Reliable infrastructure: Our systems are built for performance and maximum uptime.
• Full transparency: We follow best practices in compliance, support, and service.
• Verified responsibility: We meet – and aim to exceed – industry standards to maintain your trust.

Security you can count on

Being your online business partner means taking full responsibility, staying ahead of evolving threats, and providing security you don’t have to think twice about. Our ISO 27001 certification, alongside this new recognition, reflects the high standards we follow and our commitment to keeping you protected.

Not our client yet? Choose your hosting plan today and experience the difference of a SHA-certified provider – risk-free with our 30-day money-back guarantee.

“Back in 2004, Hostinger started as an experiment that, over the past two decades, became a trusted brand for many,” says Hostinger CEO Daugirdas Jankus. “Our focus has always been on understanding our clients’ evolving needs and delivering the newest technologies, helping them succeed online faster and more easily. This approach has fueled our growth and continues to guide us forward. These achievements are made possible by our clients – individuals and businesses who trust us to help bring their ideas online and inspire us to keep raising the bar every day.”

Hostinger’s growth is driven by AI-powered innovations, an expanding customer base, and increasing operational efficiency. In 2024 alone, the company’s consolidated revenue grew by 65% year-over-year to €182.4 million. Hostinger has been listed in the FT 1000 list of Europe’s fastest-growing companies for six consecutive years.

Founded in 2004, Hostinger now operates 13 data centers in Asia, Europe, and North and South America. Hostinger closed last year with over 3.45 million customers from more than 150 countries, maintaining strong growth in both developed and emerging markets. India, Brazil, the USA, Indonesia, and France had the highest number of active users last year, while Pakistan, the United Kingdom, Spain, Mexico, and Colombia also ranked among the top 10. 

AI innovations powering client success

A key driver of Hostinger’s growth is its focus on AI-driven tools that simplify the website-building and online business journey. In 2025 alone, two major AI products reached the market.We introduced Hostinger Reach, an AI-powered email marketing tool. In March, we launched Hostinger Horizons, a no-code AI platform for building websites and web apps. Meanwhile, Hostinger Website Builder uses AI to create professional websites, write content, generate images, and handle SEO tasks. WordPress users also benefit from AI tools to build, troubleshoot, and optimize their websites.

“We’ve seen incredible breakthroughs in AI. What used to take companies years to build is now happening in just months. This fast-paced change is removing barriers to technology, and it’s becoming easier than ever for individuals and small businesses to succeed online,” says Daugirdas Jankus. 

To make technologies even more accessible, Hostinger introduced Kodee more than two years ago, an AI agent designed to help users build and grow online faster. Today, Kodee can act on command, migrating websites, finding and registering domains, writing blog posts, and managing WooCommerce products – all instantly and 24/7. It now supports more than 350 actions, helping users handle tasks that once required technical skills or extra time – with new capabilities added to Kodee every day. 

In September 2025 alone, Kodee handled 855,000 conversations, fully resolving 76% of them without human help – up from 50% at the start of 2025. This improvement allows Hostinger teams to focus on complex, high-value interactions while making it easier for customers to get started and succeed online. That same month, Kodee saved over €750,000, projecting to annual savings of more than €9 million. Greater efficiency on our side translates into more value for customers – affordable prices, more useful features, and faster, safer service.

“We’re just getting started – with many plans and big bets ahead, we remain committed to delivering even more value to our clients,” says Daugirdas Jankus.

Services enhanced by global innovation

“13 years ago, Niagahoster began as a small experiment – a way to see if building a web hosting business was even possible. It laid the foundation for what would later become Hostinger, a brand that now supports over 4 million website creators around the world. By joining forces with Niagahoster and creating a unified brand, we are bringing together everything we’ve learned from the Indonesian market with Hostinger’s passion for tech innovation”, says Daugirdas Jankus, CEO of Hostinger. 

According to Jankus, this means faster, more reliable service and more helpful support, powered by advanced AI and backed by a dedicated team of people who will continue to serve complex customer needs. We believe this step will make a real difference for the next wave of Indonesian creators: curious young business owners, determined solopreneurs, and bold content makers. 

Existing Niagahoster clients will experience no disruptions in their services during the transition. They will be seamlessly redirected to Hostinger. All of the company’s services will remain available in the Indonesian language, and the prices of service plans will stay the same. Under the Hostinger name, the local team will focus on the specific needs of customers in Indonesia. 

Indonesia has long been central to Hostinger’s operations, and is one of the company’s biggest markets globally. Hostinger has an office in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, with over 200 local team members, representing 20% of the company’s total headcount. Indonesia is a rapidly growing digital market, with 77% internet penetration and over 1.5 million new users joining the digital ecosystem annually, showing huge entrepreneurial potential that is still untapped. 

More value to customers

The unification will allow for more efficient operations, resource allocation, and feedback collection. This focused approach, a key tenet of Hostinger’s strategy, means customer needs can be addressed more rapidly and effectively. Customers will also benefit from Hostinger’s advanced technology infrastructure, which is renowned for its speed, security, and reliability. This includes access to a wider range of cutting-edge products and features developed for a global audience.

As part of a single global brand, Indonesian customers will experience quicker access to new tools, updates, and AI-powered solutions that Hostinger is pioneering. Hostinger’s ability to test and ship new features, improvements, and products at high speed will now directly benefit the Indonesian market. Recent innovations include an AI-enhanced Website Builder, which allows anyone to create a unique online platform in just a few minutes with no IT knowledge required. As well as Hostinger Horizons – the easiest solution to start an online journey. This AI tool unlocks new possibilities by generating websites and web applications in just a few minutes from a text or voice prompt in real time. 

As part of its ongoing mission to empower small businesses around the world, Hostinger launched the Hostinger Microgrants pilot project for the Indonesian market. This initiative will support five entrepreneurs or small businesses in the country with the resources they need to grow their digital presence. Each selected recipient will receive IDR 20,000,000 in funding, along with a package of Hostinger services worth an additional IDR 4,000,000.

Meet the Microgrant winners:

Bersama Adya – Bringing literacy and emotional wellness to rural Bali through locally inspired books, workshops, and parenting sessions.
Panarima – Crafting eco-printed fashion using real plants and natural fabrics, while empowering artisans in Boyolali.
biscuit.dust – Creating digital promotional material and brand design for Indonesian SMBs.
KarstVenture – An upcoming initiative aiming to promote ecotourism in West Java to protect karst ecosystems and support local livelihoods.
Reracik – Creating gluten-free treats from local flours like cassava and sorghum to support health.

Anyone, from first-time entrepreneurs to experienced developers, can now build software products without the need for programming skills. The tool guides users through the entire creation process and enables instant edits via chat. This is a new buzzword in the community – vibe coding. 

According to Dainius Kavoliunas, Head of Hostinger Horizons Product, vibe coding is the next step in democratizing tech creation. “Many people have great ideas but no coding skills. With vibe coding tools, they can now turn their ideas into real products using just words, and AI does the rest. We’re thrilled to see people bringing real tools online faster than ever. This is only the beginning.”

Currently, Hostinger Horizons is available to all new and existing clients worldwide. The product has already been tried by users from more than 120 countries. The highest number of early adopters came from Brazil, India, the United States of America, Mexico, and France, with positive feedback highlighting AI speed, affordability, and ease of use.

“To better understand and serve the vibe coders, we conducted 100 interviews that revealed just how diverse and driven our user base truly is – from a 15-year-old student in Azerbaijan using Horizons for a school project, to a 72-year-old tech-savvy enthusiast in the Netherlands. These stories not only validate our product’s wide-reaching potential but also inspire us to keep building for real impact,” says Dainius Kavoliunas.

Interviews revealed a broad age and skill spectrum: 10% are under 25, often students building portfolios; 70% fall between 25 and 44, ranging from hobbyists to business users; and 20% are 45+, frequently using Horizons for client work and lead generation. Regarding technical skill, 32% have little to no coding experience, 54% are intermediate users who value the platform’s speed, and 13% are advanced users pushing the platform’s limits for prototyping.

What people are building

Horizons users can describe their idea in simple, daily language, edit their project through chat, and publish with a single click. Horizons also lets users iterate endlessly – adding new features, redeploying, and testing in real time.

What are people building with Hostinger Horizons? A wide variety of things. While Productivity & Tools stands out as the most popular defined category, users are also creating projects in E-commerce, Social Media, Entertainment, Finance, Education, and Health & Wellness categories. The majority of prompts – over 70% – fall into the Other category. This share highlights just how creatively people are using AI, often in ways that defy traditional labels. It’s clear that Hostinger Horizons isn’t just helping users build websites – it’s empowering them to bring bold, unconventional ideas to life.

The tool is constantly evolving. The most recent update includes free auto error fixes. The tool automatically detects and fixes the most common errors at no cost. This resolves the issue in four out of five cases, saving time and messages to improve projects further or to build new ones.

In April, Supabase integration was released for Hostinger Horizons, simplifying back-end management for clients’ websites and web apps. Users can integrate Supabase to handle data storage, user logins, and file management with just a click. This provides a hassle-free way to establish back-end functionality.

Meanwhile, Stripe payment integration provides a seamless and secure way to start earning from your projects – whether through premium features, memberships, or recurring subscriptions – empowering creators to turn their ideas into sustainable income.

Soon, Hostinger Horizons will introduce a faster, easier way to make quick updates with new visual editing capabilities. Users will be able to take full control by changing text directly on their website or web app – instantly and visually. This update will allow for small edits to be made with precision and speed, while reserving Horizons’ AI messaging for larger, more complex changes. For more advanced users who want greater control, Hostinger Horizons offers the option to download projects and access the code. 

Hostinger Horizons supports over 80 languages. You can speak to the AI, upload sketches or screenshots, and receive live updates. All plans start from $9.99/month and include one month of free hosting, plus a 30-day money-back guarantee. 

At the moment, more than 350,000 pupils are enrolled in Lithuania’s general education school system. More than 25,000 of them will obtain their mandatory basic education this year, and 20,000 will obtain a secondary education. This means that 45,000 young people will be moving on to pursue further studies or enter the job market, which has been fundamentally transformed by the evolution and wide adoption of AI models in recent years.

According to the initiative’s organisers, the rapid development of AI is not a challenge but an opportunity for the country to ensure its talents excel on the global stage and accelerate the emergence of Lithuanian innovations. The current generation of schoolchildren has witnessed the rapid progress AI has made during the later years of their studies. And the earlier students learn how to use AI, the easier it will be for them to effectively adapt it to their needs.

“We are talking about a nationwide initiative unlocking access to the latest AI models for more than a thousand schools and hundreds of thousands of students. This is going to be a springboard that brings teachers, parents, families, and communities together, and a turning point for AI adoption in Lithuania. Estonia, Sweden, and the UK have already rolled out similar initiatives, so we need to take action now – while this investment might be expensive for us, it is necessary for Lithuania and its high ambitions,” says Tomas Okmanas, co-founder of Tesonet.

“Our country maintains its prominence on the global stage thanks to our talents, even if our population numbers are quite humble. That’s why unlocking the potential of every child is crucial for Lithuania, whether they’re studying in major cities or in smaller towns. When these young people – equipped with proper AI skills – seamlessly become experts in their fields, future technology builders and startup founders, that will mark a true triumph for the Lithuanian education system. And we want to be a part of that,” adds Eimantas Sabaliauskas, co-founder of Tesonet.

Globally used AI tools to unlock Lithuania’s potential

Through this nationwide initiative, schools will gain access to AI tools developed in Lithuania that are seeing success worldwide – nexos.ai and Hostinger Horizons. These cutting-edge tools are designed to be safe to use in an educational context. So, the only limit to what students can achieve with these tools will be their own creativity.

This initiative will enable students to become familiar with the latest technologies and, crucially, to apply them in practice. AI-driven solutions are fundamentally changing how we think about programming. In today’s workplace, bringing ideas to life requires creativity rather than technical expertise. This levels the playing field for innovation and helps students build confidence and problem-solving skills while they’re still in school.

One of the rapidly growing uses of AI tools is building websites or web apps without writing a single line of code. Instead, you simply instruct the AI in natural language and provide it with feedback. Building this way allows students to unleash their imagination, achieve tangible results, and grow as people who know that they have the power to create anything they want.

How to sign up

All Lithuanian schools are eligible to participate in this initiative, with registration open at www.tesonet.ai until September 15. The program will begin on September 30, kicking off with onboarding for schools and educators, and the progress of this nationwide initiative will be regularly evaluated based on student engagement in collaboration with schools.

“Hostinger Horizons is like having a top-tier software expert by your side – ready to brainstorm, tweak, and improve your web app on the spot. It opens up limitless opportunities to iterate and improve. If you don’t like something or want to try a different design, layout, or checkout mechanism, you can edit it right away. It is a new buzzword in the community – vibe coding – and we are here to help you catch this wave,” says Dainius Kavoliūnas, Head of Hostinger Horizons Product.

When it comes to bringing ideas online, most people and businesses build traditional websites like portfolios, business showcases, or online shops. Tools like Hostinger Website Builder and WordPress are perfect for that. But web apps are a whole new niche – they allow users to interact, input data, and collaborate in real time. 

Think appointment schedulers, fitness planners, QR code generators – simple yet powerful web apps you can build with Hostinger Horizons.

Introducing Hostinger Horizons: Build web apps with AI:

We’re looking for innovative, exciting, and beautifully crafted web apps. Whether you’re a seasoned developer or just starting out, this is your chance to push boundaries and create something amazing.

How to enter

1. Build a stunning web app using Hostinger Horizons. Use the code DC10 and get a 10% discount!
   
2. Share your creation’s live link on X with a screenshot and a short description of what it does.
   
3. Tag @Hostinger so we don’t miss it.
   

Only fresh, new websites qualify!

Timeline

• April 9–15: Build your web app and share it with us.
  
• April 16–20: The community votes for their favorites on Discord.
  
• April 21: We announce the winners and celebrate your achievements.
  

Prizes

• Everyone who meets all requirements gets featured on Hostinger’s blog and social media.
  
• 10 lucky participants will receive a 200-message Hostinger Horizons gift each day.
  
• Grand Prize: $1,000* in cash! The 2nd and 3rd place winners will get Apple AirPods 4.
  
• 4th–10th place: 4 years of free Business Web Hosting (new or renewal) + 200 messages each.
  

It’s a chance to connect with fellow creators, get valuable feedback, and potentially launch your project into the spotlight. Your innovation could be the next big thing!

How to start using Hostinger Horizons:

Want to learn more? Check out the FAQ

*If payment is not feasible, a voucher of equivalent value will be agreed upon and issued to the user.

Hostinger partners and employees are not eligible to participate.

Winners:

1st place $1,000 cash: Lofi Nations –  Make chill beats, not excuses —a free, cozy lofi track maker right in your browser.

2nd place Apple AirPods 4: StudySuite – All-in-one study buddy: timers, tools, and to-dos to turn chaos into study zen.

3rd place Apple AirPods 4: TradeMaster – For the traders who wanna win —log your moves, track gains, and crush goals like a Wall Street wizard.

4th – 10th place:

EcoTrack – Track your carbon footprint like a boss —log your day, get eco tips, and feel smug (sustainably).  

Haha Toolz – Procrastinate productively —AI roasts, excuse machines, and silly tools for stressed-out students.  

YouTube App Opener – Hate browser links?  This one-click wonder opens vids straight in the YouTube app.  

StreetSeen – Discover dope street art —snap it, map it, and share it with the city’s coolest crowd.  

PillPal – Never miss a med —this clean reminder app keeps your health happy.  

Echoverse – Talk to AI in alternate realities —a sleek portal to deep convos and multiverse vibes.  

Buddy Not a Bully – Are you the hero or the villain?  This fun, empathy-boosting quiz shows you how to be the good guy.

A big thank you to everyone who participated. Look forward to more competitions in the future.

“We’ve focused on deeply understanding our clients and working relentlessly to create solutions and empowering them to succeed online faster and more easily. We plan to continue this approach moving forward. Our fast growth only proves that it works. With a strong team and a long list of future plans, we believe there’s even more value we can create for our clients. We’re just getting started,” says Daugirdas Jankus, CEO of Hostinger. 

The FT 1000: Europe’s Fastest Growing Companies list ranks the top 1000 European companies with the highest percentage of revenue growth. The list is ranked through extensive research on the candidates, checking various criteria, including independence, headquarters in Europe, organic growth, and more.

A key driver of Hostinger’s growth was AI-driven innovations. We continued to develop AI-powered tools designed to simplify the website-building process. Hostinger Website Builder empowers users (even those with little to no technical experience) to create a personalized website in under a minute with AI. Up until the end of 2024, our clients published more than 500,000 websites with Hostinger Website Builder, with 85% of them generated using AI. We also launched other integrated AI tools to help our clients write content, create images, and improve the overall user experience. 

Almost a year ago, we also introduced Kodee, an AI chatbot that now handles over 50% of our Customer Success team’s workload. This allows our customers to receive help more quickly and our team to focus on more complex, high-value interactions.

We closed 2024 with over 3 million customers across more than 150 countries, maintaining strong growth in both developed and emerging markets.  

To further empower our clients, we are expanding our product lineup this year with Hostinger Horizons, an AI-powered web app development tool. After identifying a unique market need, our team developed this solution in just two months.

Founded in Lithuania in 2004, Hostinger currently employs around 900 professionals globally. To sustain this momentum, we opened over 200 new career opportunities. “AI is already handling technical tasks, guiding customers, and solving common inquiries. But the AI era is just getting started – it opens the door to even bigger opportunities that only skilled professionals can turn into reality,” says Daugirdas.

To harness AI’s potential, we are recruiting for various positions, including experienced front-end, back-end, and PHP developers, product designers, and system engineers. The marketing team is also looking for new members to help further expand into existing markets and unlock new ones, as well as to work globally on TV, radio, and digital marketing. We also have open positions in the partnerships, content creation, and design teams.

We grow fast. You’ll grow faster. Check out our open positions. 

The market of AI-powered coding tools is expanding fast, but so far these solutions have shared a common drawback: you needed external platforms to publish and host the software you create. Hostinger Horizons removes that barrier. It has hosting, domains, emails, and other essential tools – all in one place.

We are rolling out the new product to a select group of clients, with full availability for new and existing customers in March. 

Early access trials show that simple web apps, such as a personal calorie tracker, a language-learning card game, or a time management tool, can be built and published in minutes without any coding. 

“Web apps have turned ideas into million-dollar startups, but building one always required coding or hiring a developer. We believe it is time to change the game. Just like Hostinger AI Website Builder introduced a new kind of site-building experience, Hostinger Horizons will democratize web apps so that anyone can bring their unique and exciting ideas online,” says Giedrius Zakaitis, our Chief Product and Technology Officer. 

Join Hostinger Horizons Community

Connect, collaborate, and celebrate with fellow creators.

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Web app creation without coding

The vast majority of our 3.5 million customers build and manage traditional websites, such as portfolios, business showcases, and online shops. Web apps, however, offer interactive experiences, allowing users to input data, collaborate, and engage in real time. Well-known startups, such as Duolingo, Notion, and Airbnb, started off as simple web apps that captured market interest and became successful companies. 

“Coding such web apps from scratch takes weeks or months, and hiring a developer can cost thousands. For larger projects, both time and costs grow exponentially. Hostinger Horizons is a lifesaver for entrepreneurs and startups looking to build fully functional online tools and test ideas quickly. It’s like working with a developer or an agency, only much faster and at a fraction of the cost,” says Zakaitis.

Hostinger Horizons operates through a simple chat interface. AI instantly creates, adds, and edits what users ask for, showing a preview next to the chat. It supports 80+ languages, voice prompts, and image uploads, allowing users to provide sketches or screenshots for reference. 

When the web app is ready, users can publish it on a custom domain with a few clicks, making it instantly accessible. They can refine and update the web app anytime, redeploying whenever needed.

Powering innovation with AI

We are leveraging AI to provide tools that help individuals and small businesses succeed online faster and more easily. 

AI-driven solutions played a key role in expanding our customer base and improving customer support last year. Over a year ago, we introduced Kodee, a chat assistant that now handles over 50% of the Customer Success team’s workload. This allows the team to focus on complex, high-value interactions with customers.

We continue to develop AI-powered tools designed to simplify the website-building process. Our flagship Hostinger AI Website Builder builds a personalized website in under a minute with just one prompt. Integrated AI tools then help write content, create images, improve user experience, and more. Over 80% of Hostinger Website Builder clients use AI features to streamline site-building and improve the results.

Hostinger employs more than 900 team members worldwide, with over 400 professionals in Lithuania. This year, we plan to add over 200 new positions, further expanding our global team. 

“Our work requires a lot of speed, concentration, and creativity. New experiences help develop these qualities,” says Hostinger’s CEO, Daugirdas Jankus. “Our team has already tried various exhibitions and activities at MO Museum that help us build relationships and discover new perspectives that are inseparable from innovation. That’s why we decided to strengthen our collaboration with MO Museum and give the team even more opportunities to be inspired and discover new ideas.”

Milda Ivanauskienė, Head of MO Museum, notes a growing trend among businesses and tech companies that recognize art and culture as engaging and educational for their teams. She says that employees increasingly visit museums to seek inspiration, expand their creative thinking, and explore new perspectives in a stimulating environment – an approach valued by talents across generations and sectors.

“Partnering with Hostinger is an excellent way to start the new year following a successful 2024. Last year, we opened the MO Museum exhibition at the Pompidou Centre in Paris and launched the unconventional exhibition “From the Inside” in Vilnius dedicated to emotional health,” says Milda. “Hostinger is the first technology partner of this scale to support MO Museum. This is a testament to the global trend that art and culture can provide meaningful leisure time and help teams develop creativity and critical thinking in a different way. The partnership will not only help us grow our activities but also allow us to understand the expectations of IT talent better.”

“AI already performs many technical tasks, advises customers on product purchases, and resolves common inquiries. However, the AI era brings even more opportunities and more ambitious goals requiring experienced and skilled professionals to make them a reality,” said Hostinger CEO Daugirdas Jankus.

He assures that the company’s AI solutions are primarily aimed at improving the customer experience and making various tools even easier to use. Daugirdas Jankus says that these solutions are not intended to replace existing employees, but rather to create new opportunities for professional growth. Chat assistant Kodee successfully handles simple customer tasks, allowing customer success team to focus on complex issues and developing innovative solutions. According to Daugirdas Jankus, some of the employees who started their careers in the customer success team are now programmers or developers of cybersecurity products. 

AI drives new career opportunities

This year, Hostinger plans to develop new AI solutions to make it even faster and easier for customers to succeed online. To harness AI’s potential, the company is recruiting for various positions, including experienced front-end, back-end, and PHP developers, product designers, and systems engineers. 

The marketing team is looking for colleagues to help further expand into existing markets and unlock new ones, as well as to work globally on TV, radio advertising, and digital marketing. There are also open positions in the partnerships, content creation, and design teams. 

According to Daugirdas Jankus, one of Hostinger’s core objectives is to ensure that every employee grows both professionally and personally. Analyzing employee survey data, it is evident that a large proportion of employees choose to pursue a career at Hostinger because of its strong learning culture and the growing opportunities the company provides – from participation in global conferences and internal academies to strong support and mentoring from managers to develop professional knowledge. The freedom and responsibility to create your own working conditions and the opportunity to implement your own projects are also among the company’s key strengths.

Hostinger was founded in Lithuania in 2004. The international team currently consists of around 900 professionals, with 400 based in Lithuania. For the fifth consecutive year, Hostinger has been featured in the Financial Times’ annual FT 1000 ranking of Europe’s fastest-growing companies. Not only is the company’s business consistently growing, but so is Hostinger’s brand awareness – according to Google Trends, it is now the second most searched hosting provider in the world. 

Join our team. And grow faster!

Customer success stories

Behind almost 60% of our annual growth is a team of 900 people and over 3 million trusting clients worldwide. Among them are many small business owners who we help leverage the Internet and bring their ideas to life. 

One example among many is a unique experience – Woof Yoga puppy yoga in Kaunas and Vilnius.

“Creating and hosting our website on Hostinger allows us to develop a strong business and attract a growing stream of interested people to the site, where it’s easy to learn about our service and register for classes using Hostinger’s e-commerce functionality. This automation of registrations has freed up time and resources, enabling us to focus on improving the service itself and growing the business,” explains David Erenburg, one of the founders of Woof Yoga. 

Working as a sports team

Our CEO, Daugirdas Jankus, notes that Hostinger began as a small company with just a handful of people and rapidly grew into one of the world’s leading hosting companies, currently serving clients in more than 150 countries.

“We achieved this growth by paying close attention to client needs and operating similarly to a sports team. Every employee feels responsible for the outcome, strives for victories, learns quickly, and outpaces competitors with speed and persistence,” says Daugirdas.  

Focus on clients

Hostinger ads will be shown during Euroleague and Lithuanian Basketball League (LKL) games at the Žalgiris arena, focusing on attracting future employees and raising awareness among clients. This demonstrates our commitment to one of our core principles – ‘Customer Obsession’ – which guides us at every step.

As Daugirdas says, clients are at the center of the company’s operations, and the partnership with Žalgiris will become yet another platform to celebrate customer successes, giving them the opportunity to be seen by millions of viewers on television and live in the arena.

We strive to understand clients and their needs through various initiatives, like Client Interviews in which clients share feedback and suggestions. Our colleagues also get the chance to try out client services and products – an initiative called Meet the Client. Moreover, authentic customer success stories can be heard in all Hostinger advertisements.

“It took 17 years to reach the first million clients, less than three to reach the second, and just over a year to achieve the third. Even at this scale, we regularly talk to our clients, striving to understand them better every day, listening to their needs and suggestions, and delivering better products and services. Both our clients’ feedback and success stories inspire us to keep moving toward even more ambitious goals,” says Daugirdas Jankus.

According to Daugirdas Jankus, the global market is also changing. A global trend where more people are interested in starting their own businesses and seeking greater flexibility and independence is becoming more visible. Consequently, the number of freelancers, solo entrepreneurs, and small businesses worldwide continues to grow steadily. The development of AI, allowing to start online journeys easier, will undoubtedly accelerate this growth even further.

Pakistan and France experienced the fastest growth in clients 

Clients use the company’s products and services in more than 150 countries. In the first half of 2024, the largest number of active subscription users was recorded in India, with Brazil, the USA, Indonesia, and France also standing out in market size. The top ten countries include the United Kingdom, Pakistan, Spain, Mexico, and Colombia.

For several years in a row, Hostinger’s growth dynamics have remained similar in both developed and emerging markets. For example, in the first half of 2024, the fastest client growth was recorded in Pakistan, where the number of clients increased by 112% compared to the same period in 2023. The client base also grew rapidly in France, where the number of clients increased by 73%.

AI helped 590,000 clients build their websites

Hostinger’s clients most frequently choose hosting, domain registration, and management services. Many clients are discovering a website development tool – Hostinger Website Builder. Nearly 914,000 websites were created using this tool in the first half of 2024, with approximately 590,000 of the websites created using AI.

Clients using Hostinger AI Website Builder can publish websites in less than a minute, even without an IT background. AI tools can also create domain names, write blog posts, and assist in optimizing SEO.

“To provide even better and faster customer service, we implemented an AI chat assistant in May 2023, which fully resolves almost half of client inquiries. Hostinger’s chat assistant resolves nearly 5,000 client inquiries daily and communicates with clients in 50 languages, with an average response time of just 20 seconds. The chatbot has specific information about each product and tool, enabling it to provide accurate, customized recommendations for each case,” shares Daugirdas Jankus. 

Hostinger was founded in 2004 in Lithuania and employs about 900 people. 11 data centres in Asia, Europe, and North and South America ensures quality of services. 

Hostinger has been listed in the FT 1000 list of Europe’s fastest-growing companies for five consecutive years. The consolidated sales revenue of the group in 2023 increased by 57% compared to the previous year, reaching 110.2 million euros. Hostinger also achieved its first year of EBITDA profitability, reaching € 2.4 million while maintaining positive cash flow. According to Google Trends data, Hostinger is currently the world’s second most searched hosting service provider. 

As of July 8, 000webhost no longer accepts new users. The platform’s full shutdown is scheduled for October 14. Current users can choose the most suitable hosting plan or download their website backups and take some time to decide what to do next. 

All 000webhost’s users will receive a special discount via email. Don’t worry – the transition to Hostinger will be smooth and automatic.

Get the Hosting Quality You Deserve

Check out Hostinger’s affordable web hosting plans. Starting at only $1.99/month, you can enjoy a fast and secure website you can manage on Hostinger dashboard, our custom-built hosting control panel.

This plan includes a free SSL certificate, a professional email account, and, most importantly, a 24/7 Customer Success team for any questions you might have. 

If you want to build a new website, we offer a 1-click WordPress installation and AI Builder. With this tool, you will only have to answer a few questions, and AI will create a website. Then, fully customize it with a drag-and-drop editor. 

Get started in complete confidence – we offer a 30-day money-back guarantee.

The Mission to Help Everybody Succeed Online Continues

We want to thank millions of 000webhost users. Working for you, we built a better free hosting platform, and we have transferred the lessons learned, efficiency, and security improvements to our paid platform. This has helped us continuously learn and improve, offering a truly high-quality hosting experience at an unbeatable price.

Precisely, we have built WordPress AI content creation tools you can access straight from the Gutenberg editor, Hostinger Website Builder – an AI-powered tool that can help you fully build your website in just one afternoon, an in-house CDN, a malware scanner, and many more.
Stay tuned – we will continue working on our products.

Hostinger – The World’s Fastest-Growing Hosting Company

The company started its operations in Lithuania and creates products and services to help clients successfully develop their online activities while offering tools for e-commerce, blogs, portfolio websites, etc. 

“Each year, we are growing rapidly towards our ambitious goal of becoming the world’s No. 1 web hosting business. 2023 was no exception when we steadily grew our results. While we may look like a big business in our region, we still have a long way to go in the global market. We will continue to compete for the best talent, learn fast, and apply our knowledge to develop competitive products,” says Daugirdas Jankus, CEO of Hostinger.

Hostinger ended last year with 2.42 million customers (57% more than at the end of 2022). The company serves customers in more than 150 countries. Hostinger has been growing at a similar pace for several years in both developed and emerging markets. Last year, India, Brazil, USA, Indonesia, and France were the largest countries in terms of active users. The United Kingdom, Spain, Pakistan, Mexico, and Colombia are also in the top 10. 

Total billings rose by 61% year-on-year to €139.1 million. As the company provides subscription-based services over several years, for which customers have the option to pay in advance, part of this revenue will be offset against the financial results of the following year.

Hostinger has been ranked among the fastest-growing companies in Europe for five consecutive years in the Financial Times’ annual FT 1000 list. 

Customer Centricity and Automation Powered by AI Investments

Newly introduced innovations have helped grow the customer base in the previous financial year. Hostinger team is actively developing AI-enriched IT products that make it even easier for customers to get started and succeed online. “Hostinger AI website builder allows you to build your website in less than a minute, even for those with minimal IT experience. All you need is a few written or spoken prompts describing your idea. AI can now also offer a website address tailored to your business, write blog posts, articles, and other content, generate unique images, and optimize content for search engines. Customers value these services and choose them with confidence,” Daugirdas Jankus commented. 

Additionally, numerous products have received significant behind-the-scenes upgrades, improving hosting speed, automating tasks, and enhancing client experience. The upgrades include Kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) virtualization for VPS hosting and an in-house content delivery network (CDN). 

To provide even better and faster customer service, Hostinger developed an AI assistant to help clients get answers to their questions and resolutions to their issues in a matter of seconds. It solves part of the simple customers’ questions, automates, and helps increase the efficiency of the work of customer success specialists. 

Hostinger would have had to grow headcount by around 112 CS specialists to serve the additional demand, but significant investments in the company’s AI stack – which has led to the automation of numerous business functions – meant that staffing levels were comparable with the prior financial year. 

Hostinger also invested in opening a new data center location in Paris, France, expanding the business’s geographic reach. 

Having said that, the increase in customer satisfaction was measurable. There was a 6% decrease in the number of customer queries relating to their subscriptions.

Hostinger was founded in Lithuania in 2004. It employs almost 900 people. The quality of services is ensured by 11 data centers spread across Asia, Europe, North and South America. Last year,  the website development tool developed by Zyro was integrated into Hostinger’s product portfolio finalizing the merger of the subsidiary company.

We invest heavily to ensure we live up to it, and the latest example is the 800 server purchase from our long-term partners Dell Technologies and AMD. This is our biggest investment in servers to date.

Reliable and Innovative Technologies for All

“We work hard every day to deliver the best experience to our customers. I am excited that a year of record growth is followed by a record investment in hardware. This will enable us to continue offering quality and robust services at the most competitive prices out there,” says Giedrius Zakaitis, Chief Product Officer at Hostinger.

In fact, we’ve already started deploying the latest-generation Dell PowerEdge R6615 servers with the 4th generation AMD EPYC™ processors. They will power our web, cloud, and virtual private server (VPS) hosting and help handle infrastructure tasks.

“For years, Dell servers have reliably powered Hostinger services worldwide. As one of our largest and most significant clients in the Baltic region, this deal solidifies our partnership. With Hostinger’s remarkable growth, we anticipate further opportunities for close cooperation in the future,” adds Darius Korys, Account Executive for Dell Technologies in Lithuania.

“For demanding workloads, AMD EPYC processors have become the cornerstone of modern data centers. Their robust performance and efficiency underpin the advancements that shape our world. As a key partner, we’re committed to collaborating with Dell and Hostinger to deliver ever-more powerful solutions that fuel innovation”, says Alexander Troshin, EMEA Product Manager, Server Business Unit at AMD.

All-In-One Solution for Quality Hosting

Dell Technologies describes the new PowerEdge R6615 as the “best investment per dollar,” providing performance, flexibility, and low-latency storage options.

At the core of this one rack unit (1U) single-socket server lies the powerhouse AMD EPYC 9354P processor. It comes equipped with 32 cores and 64 threads, each operating at 3.25GHz, with the capability to reach a maximum boost speed of 3.8GHz.

The processor is built on AMD’s Zen 4 microarchitecture and manufactured using advanced 5nm FinFET technology. This design not only ensures top-tier performance but also brings superior stability and energy efficiency.

The server and processor are so well-tuned that they are over 20% more powerful than our current solutions, as shown by our internal tests. Additionally, the system is inherently safeguarded, as encryption is built-in at the processor level, thanks to AMD Infinity Guard which delivers an industry-leading set of modern security features.

Other notable features of the servers we use include:

• Read-intensive NVMe SSD storage ensures instant loading of websites and their components.
• The latest DDR5 RAM technology boasts increased data transfer rates and capacities, essential for managing data-intensive websites.
• RAID data storage configurations with dual, redundant power supplies offer robust protection against data loss.

Want to give the new servers a try? Order or move your hosting services to our new data center in Boston. We use servers with this exact configuration here.

From now on, all Zyro clients can continue their online journey with Hostinger Website Builder. It combines Zyro’s user-friendly website-building capabilities with Hostinger’s robust hosting solutions.

Thanks to this change, we can improve and develop both our web hosting and building services. We firmly believe that offering a one-stop shop for web development delivers the best value to our customers.

“Our mission is to develop IT services and products enabling entrepreneurs to achieve their goals online successfully. With Zyro’s team expertise, we can take that mission a step further. This integration brings together the best of both companies, combining Hostinger’s hosting expertise with Zyro’s experience in developing website builder platforms to offer customers a seamless experience”, says Daugirdas Jankus, the CEO of Hostinger.

Currently, all sales and services of Zyro are discontinued. If you used to be a Zyro client and have any questions or need help, our Customer Success team is here for you at all times. You can also refer to this knowledge base article for more details regarding the migration.

Scale Your Online Presence

As Hostinger Website Builder blends user-friendly website-building capabilities with robust hosting solutions, all Zyro clients will now enjoy:

• Smoother site management. Manage your websites, domains, web hosting plans, business emails, and more from one dashboard.
• More innovative AI tools. Use our AI technology to build a brand new website in minutes from scratch. Let AI craft unique and SEO-friendly blog posts, pages, and images for your site, or update your brand with a new bespoke logo.
• Better user experience. Access in-depth tutorials directly from the dashboard, or chat with our Customer Success team any time.

Whether you’re a small business owner, a freelancer, or a creative individual, we will help you create and maintain your dream website.

AI-Powered and Mobile-Friendly Website Development

With Hostinger Website Builder, you can generate a fully functional site by briefly describing your idea. Share your brand name, tell us what it does, and watch as AI creates a website or a landing page.

The best part? You can generate up to 100 websites and customize them using a drag-and-drop editor.

With our mobile editor, you can make changes to your website with just a smartphone – no need to look for a computer once you notice something needs to be fixed.

Top Customer Support

Get access to renowned customer support, no matter your query. With Hostinger, you can expect a response in less than three minutes, expert assistance, and multilingual support.

You can access it all via live chat – no need to submit a ticket or write an email.

Extensive Learning Resources

Get access to a wealth of educational materials, including detailed tutorials, a comprehensive knowledge base, and informative videos from Hostinger Academy.

Besides covering topics like your website maintenance and development, we also share tips on marketing and eCommerce strategies to help you reach the full potential of your online business.

Ready to experience the next level of website building? Try Hostinger Website Builder today. 

Our forecast is that in these years, traditional computers and phones will become obsolete. The internet will offer immersive experiences driven by augmented and virtual reality, allowing us to interact naturally through voice commands, gestures, or even thoughts.

But what will it all look like? Let’s see!

Behold: This Is the Internet in 2050

Here’s how it went: Hostinger experts in artificial intelligence (AI), web development, and design came together to share their thoughts on the future of the internet.

Then, we selected today’s most popular websites from seven distinct categories. We want to get a picture of how we will do different things on the web, like searching for information, watching video content, communicating, shopping, what communication solutions they’ll use for connecting, and so on.

Then, we asked DALL·E 3 to act as a web designer and visualize how these websites may look in 2050. In some cases, the AI improvised too much, but as we refined our requests, we eventually found the answers we wanted: images of the websites we might expect to visit in the future.

Here are the results, along with some insights into how it could all work:

1. Search Engines: Google.com

Thanks to advancements in AI and machine learning, every online search will be unique and highly personalized to your specific needs, your habits, the time of search, and even your mood.

We anticipate that instead of typing, you’ll trigger searches just by thinking, and results will appear in a virtual environment as interactive 3D objects. You can quickly save the information you want directly into your memory, akin to an inner dialogue with the superintelligence.

The Google we know now might even cease to exist, and AI models will handle online searches instead.

2. Streaming & Online TV: YouTube.com

YouTube will offer immersive experiences through virtual and augmented reality. You’ll interact with the content, shaping stories as you go, guided by customized and personalized AI recommendations.

Social features let you watch together worldwide, boosting connections and community online. Expect interactive widgets and more dynamic videos, like 360-degree views, touch and smell senses, and augmented reality extras for an even richer viewing experience.

In terms of live streaming, we’ll capture our lives from a third-person perspective.

3. Social Media: Facebook.com

In 2050, social media platforms such as Facebook will transform into massive virtual spaces where you can connect with friends and communities as if you’re in the same room. You’ll join events, play games, and engage in various activities with just a touch or even a thought.

Of course, there’s still a news feed, only more personalized and less cluttered, with smart previews of posts.

Moreover, our experts foresee that social networks will serve as hubs for collaborative projects and shared experiences, nurturing a strong global sense of community.

4. Dictionaries and Encyclopedias: Wikipedia.org

The homepage of the world’s largest encyclopedia will contain a dynamic, interactive globe that you can rotate to explore articles related to different regions of the world. Personalized AI assistants will provide tailored recommendations and insights based on your individual learning preferences and interests.

A chip implanted in your head will store all the information you need, and AI algorithms will add and review content instantly so you can trust it’s accurate and up-to-date.

5. News & Media Publishers: Yahoo.com

Embracing the future, Yahoo meets us with an interface rich with holographic elements and dynamic widgets that appear to float above the surface.

Each column will have interactive elements featuring essential data and live updates. But you don’t have to read anything to learn more: just select a news item or topic of interest, and the information will be transferred to your brain.

6. eCommerce & Shopping: Amazon.com

Shopping online with augmented reality will feel similar to shopping in a physical store but with less walking around. Amazon’s interface will show products in 3D holographic displays, letting customers see them as if they were right in front of them.

You can even feel them using sensory gloves, and if you’re interested in clothes, just try them on in virtual reality.

Same-day delivery will become the norm, as the items that best suit your needs will be prepared in advance.

7. Technology and AI: OpenAI.com

Today, OpenAI.com is essentially just a chat window. However, in the future, the interface is set to undergo significant changes.

It will transform into an environment where people can learn, create, and collaborate. Users will have the ability to interact with AI in different ways, including through holographic displays, interactive 3D projections, voice commands, and, of course, thoughts.

Bonus: Hostinger.com

Regardless of how the internet evolves, people will still create websites to share their stories, showcase businesses, or sell products and services.

Sure, these websites will look completely different, adapted to meta verses, virtual reality, and AI devices such as the Rabbit R1. But one thing is clear: Hostinger will be there to help.

In the future, publishing a website will be as simple as discussing a business idea with a friend. And it won’t take a long time to get to that point, as we’re already heading in that direction.

Our AI Website Builder understands speech-to-text and can create a unique website filled with bespoke content from a single prompt. You can then tailor it to your specific needs and go live without coding a single line.

This is just one of the many ways we leverage AI to help our clients succeed online, from crafting SEO-friendly content and outstanding visuals to selecting a domain that perfectly aligns with your business concept.

Conclusion: Stepping Into the Future Online

To summarize, here are the main insights from our experts into the future of the internet, considering current predictions, advances in technology, and what the tech giants such as Apple, Google, and Meta are creating and developing:

• Innovative gadgets like virtual reality glasses, smart earbuds, bracelets, holographic projectors, and more will replace traditional computers and phones.
• Augmented and virtual reality will make browsing the internet a completely different experience.
• We will interact with technology through voice commands, gestures, or even thoughts.
• Websites will prioritize hyper-personalization, customizing content and layouts for each visitor.
• AI-generated content will boost creativity and diversity, at the same time ensuring relevance and reliability.
• In terms of web design, 3D shapes and neumorphism will gain more popularity.
• Brain implants are still being tested. However, if we can use them to send and receive data, the possibilities are endless. Online searches become a monologue in our heads, and the most important news of the day or encyclopedia entries could simply be uploaded into our memory.
• Starting an online business or another type of website will be as simple as talking to a friend about your idea.

Of course, these are predictions based on current perceptions. Technology is changing and improving at a swift pace, and sometimes progress moves in a different direction than expected. Only time will reveal the future, but one thing is certain: it holds exciting possibilities.

Discover how Hostinger thwarted attempts by malicious actors to compromise the websites of over 2 million customers in 2023. Together with the five lessons learned, we will also share some insights to help you avoid cyber threats.

Sales Attract Malicious Actors

The Hostinger malware scanner, powered by Monarx, identified and cleaned nearly 500 million instances of malware throughout the year. The number of cleaned malware is twice as low as it was in 2022, mostly because we have learned how to deal with Phoenix, an uploader delivering other malware to systems. 

After excluding the influence of Phoenix, there’s actually been a significant increase in the number of unique malware pieces over the past year, a trend likely to persist. 

Malicious activities peak during sales when more people are online, spending money, and may not be as cautious about security. Our malware scanner was working tirelessly during major sales in November and December, and minor spikes were observed in May and August. 

Additionally, generative AI is increasingly contributing to an arms race with hackers by making malware more sophisticated and destructive.

Enterprise Raiders Target Small Businesses

Webshells, uploaders, and adware continue to dominate website malware charts, but new threats are emerging for small businesses and mom-and-pop shops.

First, ransomware is increasingly targeting them by encrypting data and demanding a ransom for recovery. A year or two ago, it primarily targeted large, solvent businesses.

Second, cryptocurrency miners are intensifying their activities, particularly when bitcoin prices fall and the number of traditional miners drops, making mining on web servers lucrative. 

Finally, redirects are gaining popularity and pose a significant threat due to their rapid mutability, often infiltrating both good files and databases. The wp_posts table is particularly popular, but they can be all over the place.

Dealing With 500 DDoS Attacks per Day Is the New Normal

In 2023, our infrastructure faced over 185,000 distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, averaging 500 attacks per day. Data centers in the US witnessed the highest number of attacks, followed by Brazil and India. 

Our advanced traffic filter efficiently thwarted the majority of DDoS attacks, automatically activating within seconds and diverting malicious traffic to the filter instance. This method allowed us to reduce the use of remotely triggered black holes by up to 95%, resulting in a better uptime for our services and clients. 

The traffic filter has handled some really powerful attacks. Several of them took place just before the major holidays, on December 21 and 24, in our Singapore data center. The first one persisted for over 6 hours, hitting customer websites with 2.3 million packets per second (Mpps) and 18 gigabits per second (Gbps). A few days later, another attack unfolded, peaking at 3.6 Mpps and 1.3 Gbps.

The good news is that neither these nor the myriad other attacks had any impact on our infrastructure or your websites.

The Power Struggle Between Botnets and CDNs

Botnets, notably Mirai, represent another type of malware that saw a rise in tandem with improvements in content delivery networks (CDNs). To simplify, the better CDNs become, the larger botnets you need to flood websites successfully, and vice versa.

An illustrative example lies with Hostinger CDN. Launched in the middle of last year, it automatically mitigated numerous attacks, including one of considerable potency. Over a three-hour period, more than 10 million requests per second (Mrps) engulfed a client’s site. Following the incident, our experts analyzed the data and leveraged it to enhance our CDN, making it three times more powerful than it was before the attack. 

Obviously, this incident doesn’t measure up to the record-breaking 71 Mrps attack that Cloudflare mitigated last year. However, it’s important to note that our clients are not among the Fortune 1000.

Beware of Fake and Unsecure Plugins

WordPress, used by 43% of all websites, including over 3 million hosted by Hostinger, stands as the most popular content management system. No wonder it continues to be a prime target for cyber threats.

Major WordPress security vendors such as Patchstack, WPScan, and Wordfence identified over 4,000 Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs), constituting around 14% of all CVEs discovered last year.

Plugins are at the core of these vulnerabilities, with fake plugins taking the lead. The details of these plugins may vary, but both their quality and quantity have been rapidly increasing. We anticipate this trend to persist throughout 2024 as generative AI makes the creation of fake plugins even more accessible.

For Hostinger clients, WordPress automatic updates and a vulnerability scanner come to the rescue. The scanner promptly notifies clients if vulnerabilities are detected on their websites and provides advice on necessary actions.

How to Keep Your Business Safe Online in 2024

While the challenges may seem overwhelming, securing your business online is within your control. Choosing a reliable hosting provider is crucial, alleviating concerns about most potential threats.

Look for SSL certificates, a malware scanner, a web application firewall, DDoS filtering, built-in CDN, automatic updates, backups, and 24/7 monitoring. Luckily, as you’re already on the Hostinger blog, the solutions you need are just a click away.

The flagship event – held in National Harbor, Maryland, from August 24-26, 2023 – drew over 2,000 WordPress enthusiasts. Since the first-ever WordCamp was held in the US, it’s always nice to see the WordPress community come together in the region.

This year, Hostinger participated as a Super Admin sponsor. Some of our team members also attended the Community Summit, participated in Contributors Day, and volunteered for the event. Read on as we walk down the memory lane and relive the good times.

Watch Our WordCamp US 2023 Highlight

Here’s a glimpse at our WordCamp US 2023 experience.

Community Summit

Before WordCamp’s three-day main event began, there was the Community Summit. Participants gathered in person at the Summit for cross-project discussions to advance the WordPress open-source project.

The Community Summit took place on August 22-23, 2023, at the same venue as the rest of WordCamp US 2023. Not every WordCamp has a Community Summit, so this year’s WordCamp US was even more special.

The Summit was an invitation-only event to ensure everyone present could actively participate. The organizers attempted to include WordPress contributors from various backgrounds to cover as many perspectives as possible. This year, it was attended by 125 participants.

It’s worth noting that the Summit is not intended to be a space to see “who’s who” in WordPress. The participants were a mix of new and experienced contributors, facilitating more inclusive dialogues.

The topics discussed during these two days were pretty comprehensive. They ranged from technical ones like aligning processes and contributions between WordPress Core and Gutenberg to human-oriented issues like ensuring Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DEIB) for all contribution teams.

No decisions were made at the Summit. Instead, the event focused on identifying issues the community should address in the project’s future.

Fortunately, notes about each discussion are available on the Make WordPress website so that contributors who couldn’t attend the Summit can catch up with the conversations.

Contributors Day

Next, it was time for the WordCamp US 2023 main event!

As usual, WordCamp kicked off with Contributors Day. Here, attendees could join any of the 22 Make WordPress contributor teams and get actively involved in the project.

What’s wonderful about Contributors Day is that it’s open to everyone, regardless of skill level. So, the more experienced contributors could help newcomers onboard and share hands-on guidance to navigate the tasks. Attendees could also join multiple tables and were highly encouraged to explore their interests.

What was new about Contributors Day at WordCamp US 2023 was the room setup. Instead of everybody gathering in one big room, they were spread into multiple rooms.

Closely related teams were put in the same room to encourage deeper cross-collaboration initiatives. Although the camaraderie of being in the same room with all the other contributors is unrivaled, it was nice to have a more focused space to elaborate on an initiative.

Hostinger has some sponsored contributors involved in the Five for the Future initiative. Some of them attended this Contributors Day alongside other Hostingerians.

“I joined the chat about cross-team collaboration to translate WordPress documentation and training material,” says Leonardus Nugraha, our WordPress Content Specialist and a Documentation team contributor. “This idea had been brewing for a while. At the WordCamp US Contributors Day, we had all the reps from the different teams we needed.”

Meanwhile, Aditya Remy Shah, our Affiliate Partnerships Manager, joined the Sustainability team’s table. “We had a discussion from the hosting brand’s point of view. We brainstormed ways WordPress can become more sustainable from four angles – social, economical, event, and environmental,” he says.

By day’s end, contributors connected and gathered actionable ideas. As contribution is at the heart of WordPress, Contributors Day is surely one of the most effective ways to strengthen the collective effort.

Conference Days

Moving to the second and third day of WordCamp US 2023 – the Conference Days! This is when attendees got to join various talks and workshops.

More than 30 talks and workshops covered a broad spectrum of WordPress-related topics, from core web vitals to community building.

One talk wasn’t directly related to WordPress, but it spoke to the anxiety surrounding AI and the future of the writing profession. Ken Liu, an award-winning fiction writer, delivered “Tell the Story You Want To Tell”, where he talked about rediscovering storytelling’s meaning in human lives. His session challenged attendees to rethink how and why we, humans, tell stories.

Another interesting talk was “For All Userkind: NASA Web Modernization and WordPress”. During this talk, Abby Bowman and J.J. Toothman discussed the beta.nasa.gov website redesign, which uses WordPress.

In a breakout session afterward, they took attendees on a site tour, including its back end. Some people still think WordPress only suits small businesses or personal websites, so it was fascinating to learn how big organizations like NASA utilize the platform.

And since the WordCamp US 2023 venue is only around a 30-minute drive from the nation’s capital, it’s only fitting that we had a session about the most high-profile WordPress website in the US – whitehouse.gov.

Presented by Andrew Nacin and Helen Hou-Sandí, the session chronicled the behind-the-scenes story of the site’s launch by those who led the project themselves.

All the talks are now available to watch on the official WordPress YouTube channel. The presentation slides will also be available shortly on the WordCamp US 2023 website’s session pages. And like other WordCamps, the talks will also be public on WordPress.tv.

Hostinger Booth

Standing tall in the Sponsor Hall with our signature violet-and-black colorways, attendees stopped by the Hostinger booth to chat about our services, try our features, or collect merchandise.

Opening a booth is one way to connect better with our customers, IT professionals, and tech enthusiasts. “WordCamp is a perfect opportunity to hear our customers’ feedback directly so we can continue to deliver the best managed WordPress hosting experience,” says Domantas Gudeliauskas, WordPress Marketing Manager at Hostinger.

Among the features attendees could try at our booth, they were mostly excited about Hostinger’s WordPress AI Assistant. Most attendees said they loved the way it can speed up the website creation process.

Another crowd favorite was Hostinger dashboard, Hostinger’s own custom control panel. We were glad many customers and attendees found Hostinger dashboard easy to navigate and informative. Advanced users were also enthusiastic about Pro Panel, which empowers users to handle multiple websites efficiently.

The Future of WordPress

In a recognized WordCamp tradition, Conference Days usually wrap up with two signature sessions.

The first session by WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy reviewed important conversations and ways to drive the project forward.

During “Josepha Haden Chomphosy on the future of WordPress”, Josepha reflected on how WordPress has evolved in the past 20 years and how it keeps growing thanks to the WordPress community.

Josepha emphasized the importance of making WordPress accessible for everyone, so that it can thrive in the future and last longer than the community who builds it. “We deserve an open web that is secure in the future,” she says, highlighting WordPress’ vision to democratize publishing and give voice to the voiceless.

Next, WordPress co-founder and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg’s session, to discuss current and upcoming technical improvements, followed by a live Q&A.

During “Gutenberg: Next with Matt Mullenweg.”, Matt discussed the then-newly released WordPress 6.3, and highlighted improvements on the upcoming WordPress 6.4.

This next WordPress release is being led by a squad of gender-underrepresented contributors, which only happened once before with the historic WordPress 5.6, code-named “Simone.”

WordPress 6.4 will come with a new default theme, Twenty Twenty-Four. Unlike past default themes, Twenty Twenty-Four is a multipurpose theme. It can look equally beautiful for displaying lots of images or chunks of text.

Matt also highlighted that Gutenberg is now entering the third phase of its development, which will focus on collaborative workflow. Users will soon be able to work simultaneously with their team on the same post or page and see who made which edit. This could be a game changer for a team of remote workers.

As Josepha said in her talk, “We exist for as long as people want to use our software.” Indeed, the upcoming collaborative improvements can be one more reason for people to stay with WordPress.

It was Hostinger’s second time sponsoring WordCamp Europe, and this year we’re proud to have supported the event as a Super Admin Sponsor.

All talks and workshops were recorded and will soon be available for watching on WordPress.tv. In the meantime, you can also watch the recorded live streams on WordCamp Europe’s official YouTube channel.

We took notes of some of the event’s highlights – read on to find out about the fun we had at WordCamp Europe 2023 and what’s coming at the next WordCamp Europe.

Watch Our WordCamp 2023 Highlight

Curious how vibrant the event was? Check out our WordCamp Europe 2023 Highlight video.

20 Years of WordPress and Its Future

WordPress turned 20 on May 27, 2023, so a celebratory spirit was still very much apparent during WordCamp Europe 2023. Some of the sessions reflected on how far the content management system has come.

One such was Aaron Reimann‘s Where did we come from?, which went through some of WordPress’s major features over the years, including WordPress version 0.71 and search feature version 1.0. It showed attendees the gradual development of the CMS while WordPress community members could see how their contributions had helped along the way.

Meanwhile, the Variations on a theme: 20 years of WordPress session had WordPress’ Co-founder and Project Leader Matt Mullenweg, WordPress’ Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy, and Automattic’s Product Architect Matías Ventura come together and review the year’s accomplishments and learnings.

This session was followed by a live Q&A, during which Matt shared his reflections on open-source innovation and disruption in the past 20 years.

Instead of retrospection, other sessions covered the possibilities for the future of WordPress.

For example, Let’s make WordPress & its community sustainable today invited attendees to envision sustainable practices in the WordPress ecosystem. The Women and non-binary folx of WordPress panel discussion examined underrepresented people’s involvement in the open source project, including tips to take part in the initiative. This was especially important since the upcoming WordPress 6.4 release is led by an all-women and non-binary release squad. It will be the second release version with such a team formation.

As a member of the WordPress community, Hostinger joined the anniversary celebration as well.

Besides an anniversary blog post and a podcast with Tammie Lister, we also set up a WordCamp Europe booth highlighting our WordPress clients. This way, we could engage with WordCamp visitors on a more personal level.

The event finished with a bang – the WordPress 20th Anniversary after-party allowed everyone to relax and mingle after hard and rewarding work.

Artificial Intelligence in WordPress

It comes as no surprise that the Artificial Intelligence topic was a high-traffic one at WordCamp Europe. Most sessions had at least one AI-related question during the Q&A. Many professionals from various industries, especially IT, were looking for ways to integrate AI into their workflows to promote smarter work.

It’s only natural then that there were several AI-themed sessions at WordCamp Europe 2023. They covered a broad ground – from much sought-after AI-assisted content creation to lesser-known areas like AI for accessibility.

Some sessions specifically talked about AI uses for WordPress, such as AI translation. Another panel discussion explored the active use cases of AI as an accelerator.

For those still unsure whether AI was worth their while, there was a session called How I learnt to stop worrying & love our AI rulers that discussed AI’s pros and cons and forecast the near future.

As veteran WordPress contributor Birgit Pauli-Haack pointed out in an interview with us, “The only constant is change itself.” Being open to any new technology while questioning it seems to be the best decision.

Contributors’ Team in Highlight: the Polyglots Team

Last year at WCEU22, the WordPress Community team highlighted the Performance Team. This year, the community booth highlighted the Polyglots Team.

Booth visitors could find out more about the team. They could also meet members of various local communities and learn what they do and how to get involved. This is one of the ways the WordPress community appreciates the global network of teams and contributors who build the project.

Polyglots Team is responsible for localizing WordPress’ core software, themes, plugins, and other components like support documentation. Half of WordPress installs use a localized version of the CMS, so Polyglots help lessen the communication gaps by making WordPress more accessible to users worldwide.

The team features translators, who suggest translations in local languages, and translation editors, who review the suggestions and ensure the quality. The team also works to set and maintain translation guidelines to ensure consistency.

WordPress currently supports more than 200 locales, with only around 70 fully translated. There’s always room to make this platform more inclusive, so multilingual contributors are always welcome to join the team.

Our WordCamp Europe 2023 Experience

The event started with Contributor Day. The attending Hostingerians contributed to the Support and Community table at the venue, while one of us joined the Training Team online from Indonesia.

Contributors explored WordPress Playground – a version of WordPress that runs entirely on your browser. It’s a handy sandbox for experimentation, like trying a theme, testing a plugin, or even building a site.

Contributor Day also hosted a lot of cross-team collaboration. Meeting other contributors in person and becoming immersed in an all-hands-on-deck experience are some of the perks of joining an offline WordPress event.

At the end of Contributor Day, an official announcement unveiled the addition of a new team to the WordPress ecosystem – the Sustainability Team. This team will focus on finding ways to make both WordCamps and WordPress more sustainable.

The second and third days of the event were conference days, allowing attendees to participate in various sessions and workshops. Emma Young, our Content Lead, volunteered as the event’s MC. She could mostly be found on Track 2’s stage.

“I volunteered as an interviewer in WordCamp Asia 2023, and that was fun, but I wanted to try something new. I also wanted to see how comfortable I would be on stage because I would like to be a speaker someday,” said Emma. “If public speaking excites you, definitely do it at your local WordCamps!” she added.

Meanwhile, visitors to Hostinger’s booth could view special videos with our clients who successfully developed businesses using WordPress. We also ran a personality quiz that would tell you which WordPress theme you were.

As connecting with fellow WordPress enthusiasts is the essence of WordCamps, we used the chance to meet our clients and customers. As always, we were after candid feedback to improve our products and services. We also introduced them to our newest product updates, such as our in-house Hostinger Blog Theme and AI Content Generator.

Our client, digital business card company Doup, supported us during the event by providing NFC cards to activate newly-signed hosting plans.

However, WordCamps are only complete with signature swag. That’s why we brought our Block and Roll-themed merchandise – a homage to WordPress’s very own Block Editor celebrating the 20th-anniversary. Within 3.5 hours, we had given out 500 T-shirts – we were happy people found them cool!

What’s Next

At the end of this three-day event, Torino, Italy, was announced as the host city of WordCamp Europe 2024.

Until then, there are many upcoming local WordCamps that you can attend. WordPress Community Summit and WordCamp US 2023 in National Harbor, Maryland, are the next flagship events.

Hostinger will also be sponsoring WCUS 2023, so we’re looking forward to meeting you there and geeking out over WordPress together. Block and Roll!

WordPress is almost synonymous with websites. After all, the CMS makes up 45% of websites on the internet, and over 70% of Hostinger clients use it to build their websites. As WordPress keeps evolving and growing its user base, we talked to Tammie Lister to find out how the core contributors are working to improve WordPress and bring more value to its users.

Tammie has been involved with WordPress since the project’s early days. She started using WordPress for blogging after someone introduced it to her as a solution for a customizable CMS, and she never looked back.

After attending WordCamp in Portsmouth, she started contributing to WordPress herself. She described her WordPress contribution journey as a beautiful spiral as she became increasingly involved until she eventually became a full-time core contributor.

Fast-forward to today, Tammie is contributing as a hobby and working between design and development, as she is interested in the product side of things.

In this podcast episode, Hostinger’s Head of Content, Emma Young, sits down with Tammie to discuss how the core contributors are working to improve WordPress to bring more value to its users. Tammie also shared some insights into the future of WordPress and Gutenberg.

Watch the Full Podcast

Watch the full podcast on the Hostinger Academy YouTube channel.

The Importance of Experimentation and Feedback

Experimentation is at the heart of Gutenberg. After all, the tool exists because people with different visions and ideas experimented for five to six years before the project officially began.

Tammie uses the old parable to describe the process:

“The whole process resembled the story of the blind men and the elephant. The men are all trying to describe what an elephant looks like without being able to see one in the flesh. Someone probably got the trunk right, and someone figured out the leg, but they all had to work together to piece out the complete elephant”, she explains. That’s what happened with Gutenberg – the project combined input from various contributors together to bring us the final result.

Experimentation will also be an important part of the upcoming Gutenberg development phase. After all, experiments could help develop game-changing features or uncover technical roadblocks that need to be fixed.

Or, as Tammie explains: “Someone could come up with an incredible experiment that completely pivots our plans.” In order to create the best possible tool out there, experiments, together with community input and feedback, have become a staple with Gutenberg and WordPress core updates.

For the project to be successful, it needs to cater to different users – from agencies and product people to multilingual users, and so on. Initially, it was difficult to get feedback on new developments, as the team didn’t organize calls for testing. Organizing in-depth feedback sessions can be time-consuming, but the team agrees that the benefits outweigh the hassle. Now, they are trying to make testing calls a habit.

“So we’ve had testing tables and tried to get different people to participate. Ideally, the people who are developing certain features would also attend to hear what users think first-hand. I did some user interviews in Japan. That was amazing,” Tammie shares her experience in gathering feedback. She agrees that it’s all about getting into the habit of collecting feedback rather than just expecting someone to report an issue or share their two cents with you.

And thanks to that habit, the project now has initiatives focused on user feedback. Full Site Editing (FSE) calls for testing are a prime example of this. People can run a user test at home, do tasks on WordPress, such as building a front page, and send feedback. This feedback is powerful because it can come from anyone, not just the contributors. “You don’t create the next evolution of WP just by listening to the people who are full-time contributors”, Tammie says.

Testing and sending feedback are also great ways to contribute to WordPress. Contribution is often tied to a specific WordPress team, like core or design. But in Tammie’s mind, contributing means you move the project on in some way or another.

Maximizing Gutenberg’s Potential

Tammie sees Gutenberg as a toolkit that should provide the bare minimum to help you achieve what you want. Ideally, the tool should have all the features for site editing, from beginners to pros and beyond.

Tammie’s main advice for WordPress users is to not go against the Site Editor, as it’s more of a sliding scale. Users don’t have to do everything with it – they can use it just to colorize the text or use theme.json for development. Ultimately, it’s in the user’s hands to choose their own adventures.

Beginners don’t have to learn everything either to get started. Tammie recommends using a default theme and core blocks, and getting to know how they work by using them. There’s also the Create Block Theme plugin that helps you create a child theme. If you feel brave, you could just start editing the theme itself, making it your own. It’s the easiest way to learn how to edit a theme without learning to code.

The Gutenberg and block themes have also grown, with more theme options available in the WordPress repository.

“Look at the themes that are out there and look at people who are building on top of them to start building one yourself,” Tammie says. Browsing for themes can open up more design options for you, and seeing how people build a website based on one can inspire your build, too.

Keeping your website light from the beginning is also important. “Don’t load too many blocks to start off with. Know the core blocks,” Tammie advises. While there are plenty of great block library plugins, it’s highly advisable not to install them before knowing what you can already do with the core blocks. Determine what you need first, and see if the core blocks fit them.

The Future of Gutenberg and WordPress

WordPress is celebrating its 20th anniversary on May 27, 2023, and Tammie shared her hopes for WordPress for the next 10-20 years with us.

Ideally, Tammie would have more diverse groups of people involved with WordPress. This way, younger people could also share their views and perspectives on the project. It’s clear that involving a wider range of people is key to developing WordPress further. “I want most of the things I’ve put into WordPress to not exist anymore – because then that means other voices have become part of WordPress,” explains Tammie.

Welcoming more investment in the WordPress ecosystem in the future is also a great way to bring in diversity. This also allows people who need a job or who want to pivot their career to find it in the WordPress community.

Tammie also expects more frequent changes in interfaces. In Tammie’s opinion, we tend to be tied to the interfaces, which can be a problem in terms of usability.

If we stick closely to an iteration of an interface, its extensibility will be limited. One size doesn’t fit all when considering accessibility and usability, especially with both aging and younger users coexisting in the WordPress ecosystem.

Meet Tammie Lister and Hostinger at WordCamp Europe 2023

Tammie will attend the WordCamp Europe 2023 in Athens, Greece. She’s looking forward to hearing some thoughts from other visitors and will also participate in the Contributor Day. She wants to be involved in many different teams, as more interesting discussions happen when you get multiple teams together and start talking together.

If you’re coming to WordCamp Europe, it’s your chance to talk with Tammie face-to-face. She will also be a part of the WordPress 6.3 Release Squad, so if you have any feedback or ideas for the upcoming updates, you can share them with Tammie.

Hostinger will also be in WordCamp Europe as a Super Admin sponsor. Be sure to visit our booth – we love to talk about all things WordPress and web hosting.

If you’re new to WordPress, WordCamps are offline conferences with various activities related to this open-source website publishing software. Attendees participate in presentations, workshops, networking events, booth exhibitions, contributing sessions, and more.

This year marks the second European flagship WordCamp since the pandemic. The first was in Porto, Portugal, last year, and over 2,500 WordPress enthusiasts came by, making it the biggest WordCamp to date.

Hostinger Is Contributing to WordCamp Europe

Just like last year, Hostinger is proud to take part in WordCamp Europe 2023 as a Super Admin sponsor.

WordCamps are invaluable: they allow us to engage with the WordPress community, learn more about the platform, and represent our clients. After all, 71% of websites hosted with us are based on WordPress.

Only by understanding the users better can we improve the customer experience and provide solutions that matter. For example, we’ve prioritized the inclusion of LiteSpeed Object Cache in our hosting plans because our clients kept asking for it and stressing its importance.

In WordCamp Europe 2023, connecting with our users and other WordPress enthusiasts remains our top priority – we’ll seek candid feedback about our products and answer any questions.

We also want to identify how we could further contribute to developing the WordPress ecosystem.

Hostinger is already involved in the Five for the Future initiative, where individuals and companies contribute resources to support WordPress’ growth. So far, Hostinger has been sponsoring contributors across nine teams, including Core, Community, and Documentation.

What’s awesome is that every WordCamp has a Contributors’ Day. It allows the attending contributors across various teams to work together. We’re excited to finally meet the people we collaborate with virtually! We’re very keen to brainstorm and learn from one another.

Why You Should Come to WordCamp Europe

WordCamps are events that bring together local WordPress communities. Usually, they are held for around one to two days.

But WordCamp Europe is a flagship WordCamp – a big gathering that spans three days and covers a broad geographical area. This larger scale means there are more activities you can join and more opportunities to socialize with fellow WordPress enthusiasts. Currently, there are three flagship WordCamps – Europe, Asia, and the US.

In general, flagship WordCamps are the best places to learn more about WordPress technology and community. They’re where you can better understand the platform’s ins and outs, including current trends, use cases, and how to make the most of WordPress.

WordCamps are also perfect for connecting with people you share interests with. Despite what some may believe, you don’t have to have solid coding knowledge to get the best of WordCamps. Everyone’s welcome – hobbyists, casual enthusiasts, and those whose work revolves around website development, digital publication, and marketing.

Love photography? You can meet fellow moment-hunters who contribute photos to the WordPress Photo Directory. Excited to learn more about themes? You can chat with theme creators or find ways to contribute to WordPress theme development yourself. If you want to expand your business network, you can also meet other tech professionals and agencies here.

Consequently, WordCamps feature sessions on all aspects of WordPress. For example, WordCamp Europe 2022 included the Accessibility for Dyslexia talk by Maja Benke and the Growing in WordPress Through Partnerships session by Jonathan Wold.

Usually, the sessions are held at three different tracks simultaneously. You might want to attend talks booked at the same time – you’ll have to choose!

Just remember to take a break and take advantage of other WordCamp experiences, like meeting new people and jumping into spontaneous discussions. They make WordCamps unique, so enjoy them while you can!

Where You Can Find Us

Coming to WordCamp Europe 2023? We’re excited to meet you and talk about all things WordPress and beyond.

Check out the map below to find our violet booth! We’ll be situated right next to the Atrium, beside Jetpack. See you there!

Hostinger is proud to sponsor WordCamp Asia 2023 and be involved with the worldwide WordPress community.

WordCamps are exciting gatherings of WordPress enthusiasts who share their skills and ideas. The events consist of a mix of scheduled talks, discussions, and informal workshops, all with the idea of fostering collaboration, communication, and the WordPress community.

In 2022, Hostinger participated in several WordCamp events, including WordCamp EU in Porto, Portugal, and WordCamp US in San Diego, USA.

This February, WordCamp is coming to Bangkok, Thailand, from 17-19 February 2023. It’s the first-ever flagship WordCamp to take place in Asia, and we’re looking forward to meeting you all there!

Hostinger and WordPress

Hostinger is committed to providing the best WordPress hosting service possible. Speed, uptime, and functionality are at the core of what we do.

• Our users get access to our 1-click WordPress installation tool, automatic updates, and pre-installed performance plugins.
• Our WordPress hosting plans come with LiteSpeed servers and LSCWP cache plugins to ensure maximum website speed.
• Our 10 data centers are distributed globally so our users can choose the one closest to their target audience for better optimization.

Want to Try Out Our WordPress Hosting?

You can get 20% off our WordPress plans using the discount code WCASIA2023.

Why We’re Taking Part in Wordcamp Asia 2023

Our main reasons for taking part in WordCamp Asia 2023 are simple:

• 70% of new Hostinger customers use WordPress for their websites. We want to gather feedback and insights on our service. How can we improve it, and what needs to change?
• We want to get involved in the community. How can we contribute to developing the ecosystem? What can we offer?
• We want to learn how to provide the best possible WordPress experience. How are others using WordPress, and what can we learn from them?

That’s why plugging into the global WordPress community and sponsoring an event such as WordCamp Asia 2023 makes total sense to us.

How We’re Contributing to the Community

In addition to sponsoring WordCamp Asia 2023, we’re also planning on volunteering throughout the event. In particular, we will participate in Contributor Day, where we will work on various WordPress projects to help build the ecosystem.

Hostinger is part of WordPress’ Five for the Future program too. That means 27 of our experts collaborate with WordPress development teams weekly to work on various projects. These include back-end development, support, documentation, marketing, and more.

Where Can You Find Us?

Take a look at the map below. As you walk in, you’ll find us on the left – just opposite Google and Jetpack.

If you know anything about websites, you probably have heard about WordPress. Many swear by its plugins and themes, but I would argue that the main thing that sets WordPress apart is its supportive and close-knit community.

And there is no better way to get the most out of this community than attending a WordPress WordCamp.

On November 5th, we did exactly that. A group of Hostingerians, myself included, took part in WordCamp Sevilla to learn, share, and connect with others passionate about improving WordPress.

Why WordCamp

With over two-thirds of our clients using WordPress, we have a very real and up-to-date idea of what users love about the platform – and of its shortcomings.

Since WordCamp events are informal and community-driven, we connect with new users and experienced developers. We get a good idea of how different types of users approach our services and who they need more support from – either their web host or the WordPress community.

It’s also a learning experience, as these events help us provide the best possible WordPress experience for our clients. From performance-specific conversations to up-and-coming releases and features, there is something for everyone at WordCamp.

Making Connections at WordCamp Sevilla

At WordCamp Sevilla, our main message was customer obsession. Since it’s one of our company principles, sharing our experiences of customer interviews with the audience was a no-brainer. During our time on stage, we discussed that simple and honest yet effective communication with clients is key to achieving results in business.

This led to many great conversations with the attendees at our booth later. We discussed topics like the pros and cons of cPanel and our custom-built control panel and the hosting needs of web agencies.

Attendees could also get some of our memorabilia and participate in our sweepstake. Four lucky winners walked away with hosting plans, backpacks, and jumpers.

We also gifted WordPress hosting plans for educational organizations that teach how to get the most out of WordPress. This way, we hope to do our part to bring WordPress closer to everyone and help them succeed online.

Why WordPress

We firmly believe that there’s a reason WordPress is so popular and successful. Behind nearly half of all the world’s websites, WordPress makes it easy for anyone to realize their dreams online.

From thousands of plugins and themes to choose from, the open-source nature of this CMS brings the community together in an unprecedented way. Web agencies, communities of sustainable farmers, and even fetish eCommerce stores use WordPress – it’s great for any business niche.

We are also part of the Five for the Future initiative, meaning that we are contributing 5% of our company resources to developing and improving WordPress.

What does that mean in reality, though? Every week, 27 of our experts collaborate with the WordPress development teams, working on various projects ranging from back-end development to support, documentation, marketing, and more.

Where Are We Headed Next?

We’ve been to WordCamp US, and now we have interacted at WordCamp Sevilla. It’s only natural to wonder where you can catch us next.

Our eyes are on WordCamp Zaragoza to meet the rest of the Spanish WordPress community in January 2023.

What Is eLearning?

eLearning is essentially digital learning. It represents all techniques and methods used to pass on information electronically. These can vary from simulations, quizzes, and games to more conventional forms such as online lectures and workshops.eLearning, for the most part, involves structure. Think of it like a regular course, but online. Typically, a Learning Management System (LMS) is used to deliver the course material in an efficient manner. Interest in eLearning is growing significantly, especially since the pandemic began. Statistics about online learning suggest the market is expected to grow by 110% by 2026. Our lifestyles have changed, with many of us eschewing the commute to work from home. We have clawed back time, and many of us are interested in using the extra hours to develop and educate ourselves.

What Are the Advantages of eLearning?

The advantages of eLearning are clear, both for the provider and the student. For the former, it opens up the chance to attract a more extensive base of learners. Class numbers are no longer restricted to lecture theater size, and lectures themselves can be pre-recorded and used repeatedly. To put it simply, it is very cost-effective. For students, eLearning offers the freedom to study however and whenever they like. Learning material can be repeated, notes can be shared, and teachers can be reached quickly. Multimedia implementation makes learning fun and engaging, not to mention more efficient.Consequently, eLearning speeds up the learning process. Many aspects of teaching, such as grading, can be automated, and answers can be obtained from learning resources without waiting for a teacher to be available. It also opens up the possibility of learning wherever you are and, for the most part, whenever you are available. eLearning does much to level the learning playing field, giving people from all backgrounds the chance to acquire knowledge in a way that suits them. eLearning is adaptable. Because of technological development, online courses can keep up and provide skills matching job requirements – courses can change or be adjusted to meet the job market’s needs. This is particularly true for tech-related courses focusing on the latest in-demand programming languages. As demand shifts, so do courses.

What Are the Disadvantages of eLearning?

There are plenty of critics of the eLearning style of teaching. Some say studying online with others takes away the social element of learning, a crucial aspect of education. While interaction is limited, many eLearning companies promote discussion between coursemates to foster camaraderie and knowledge sharing.Another point to consider is student self-motivation – retention rates for eLearning courses vary from 35% – 60%. eLearning requires a bigger personal drive and better time management skills. That’s because students are effectively on their own and must push themselves to interact with the course in a meaningful and effective way. This is why eLearning companies go to great lengths to encourage students, and many offer mentors whose aim is to keep up motivation and enthusiasm. Lastly, eLearning, by nature, focuses on theory, which isn’t that useful for some subjects. Conducting an experiment or carrying out a repair can be taught much more effectively in real life. That said, by providing an immersive online learning environment, this hurdle can be overcome.

How Is Online Learning Changing Education?

The pandemic forced learning online overnight. It was this need to bring learning resources online that has pushed through many innovative developments in education. By trial and error, new ways of passing on knowledge electronically have been developed. Higher Ed’s 2021 annual report, which provides plenty of online education statistics, notes that half of the professors surveyed said eLearning is an “effective teaching method.”

What Are the Most Popular Online Learning Courses?

Many courses follow eLearning trends, which are often related to job market demands. While more traditional academic curricula exist, eLearning courses often focus on preparing people for work. There are a few types of online courses that stand out due to how popular they are. Especially highly rated are eLearning courses that teach skills required by tech companies. Coding and analyzing data can be taught easily online and, more importantly, can be learned by anyone regardless of their language. Similarly, online marketing courses are also popular. Demand for marketing roles is very high, with Marketing Week reporting that such positions are increasing at the highest rate.Finally, the demand for online courses focusing on personal development has risen sharply since the beginning of the pandemic. This broad term encompasses everything from language learning to cookery classes. Future Learn reports that 40% of Americans are interested in studying the topic in the next five years.

How Much Do Online Learning Courses Cost?

Online course prices vary vastly. An analysis of online eLearning courses found that, on average, a course costs $177. The length of the course, resources needed, and perceived value all play a part in the overall pricing. The fact that eLearning courses can be expensive to create also contributes to this. 

What Does the Future Hold for eLearning?

eLearning is constantly evolving and adapting. There are many trends and technologies that are pushing eLearning forward. Of all the eLearning trends, the rise in adaptive learning is possibly among the most interesting. Adaptive learning is a user-centric method of education where all resources and assignments are adapted to the student’s individual needs. This highly personalized learning experience adapts in real-time to suit the individual student’s pace of learning. Social learning is another growing eLearning trend. The concept is simple – we all learn from people around us, so why not incorporate that into the eLearning experience? An instant chat feature in eLearning software helps students overcome boundaries in their learning. Similarly, having an online forum and dedicated communities can help foster a learning environment that provides invaluable help to students.

Elearning Is Forcing Through Progress in Education

eLearning solves many of the problems associated with traditional learning models, which often present geographical and financial barriers. It is more adaptable and dynamic than conventional forms of learning. But with this new learning model comes new challenges. The social aspect of learning is taken away, which is clearly valuable to many people. ”Learning by doing” is, for the most part, impossible, presenting obvious challenges. As a result, engagement is an issue.It’s undoubtedly clear that eLearning is here to stay and is revolutionizing the education industry. Stuffy lectures, unhelpful handouts, and unengaging exercises are being pushed out in favor of dynamic and exciting courses that engage students better. What happens next will be very exciting – and we’re curious to see it through.

Choosing a domain name is very important when building your online presence. Besides serving as an address for users to visit your site, it’s also an essential branding element, shaping how your target audience sees your business.

That’s why we’ve identified the most significant trends and developments in the domain name industry. We’ll cover which top-level domains (TLDs) are most popular and which ones are emerging.

Most importantly, we’ll answer whether it is essential to have a .com URL for your website.

Table of Contents

.com Still Leads the Market, While New gTLDs Keep Surfacing

Research has shown that .com remains the strongest contender among all domain extensions. 

As of June 2022, 52.8% of the internet use .com domains – far more than other generic top-level domains (gTLDs). For comparison, .org, which is the second most popular gTLD, only makes up around 4.4% of all registered domain names. 

To better illustrate the massive market, Verisign reports that over 161.3 million .com domain names have been registered as of the first quarter of 2022. That’s more than eight times the number of domains using .cn, China’s country-code top-level domain (ccTLD).

.com itself stands for commercial, as it’s intended to represent business entities. 

That said, according to Dataprovider.com, 33% of websites that use .com domains are content publications. The second largest share belongs to business sites at 24%, while eCommerce stores account for 4%. 

According to InternetX’s 2022 Global Domain Report, legacy gTLDs like .com, .net, .org, .biz, and .info make up more than half of all registered domains on the world wide web.

While these older domain extensions dominate the industry, new gTLDs are expanding the TLD market.

Our data reveals that .online and .xyz are two of the most registered top-level domains at Hostinger after .com. This trend has been consistent since August 2021.

At the beginning of 2022, all new gTLDs made up around 7.5% of all websites. Today, .xyz is leading the pack with over 4.8 million registered domains.

Although the combined market share of all new gTLDs is small in comparison to .com, newer gTLDs have a much more significant year-on-year growth. 

For instance, .xyz registrations rose 23.5% last year, whereas .shop saw a 31.4%. growth Contrast this to .com, which only grew by 4.5%. 

All of this reveals a vital trend – while .com is still the market leader, the number of available and attractive domain names with this ending is running out. This has led website owners to look for alternative gTLDs.

The Growth of ccTLDs and geoTLDs

A country-code top-level domain (ccTLD) represents a country code, like how .us signifies the United States. It’s a popular alternative if you’re building an online presence in a specific region or your desired .com domain name is unavailable.

As of June 2022, the most popular ccTLD was .tk for Tokelau, with over 26 million registered domains. Interestingly, the island only has a population of less than fifteen hundred.

The rest of the domain extensions that top the list are from Europe, like .de, .uk, .ru, and .nl. This trend signifies the prevalence of ccTLDs in the continent compared to the rest of the world – so much so that they account for 61% of domain registrations in the region.

Although ccTLDs are intended to denote a specific country, many of them have grown beyond their original function. For instance, .io, the domain extension for British Indian Ocean Territory, has become popular among tech companies, while a commonly used by media sites domain .tv was inititally a country-code top-level domain for the Polynesian island nation of Tuvalu.

.co domain name, which stands for Colombia, is a widely-used .com alternative. In fact, the sales volume for .co domains has doubled during the pandemic, going from $800,000 in 2020 to almost $1.5 million in 2021.

In recent years, we’ve also seen a rise in geoTLDs – a category of domain extensions linked with geographical or cultural communities. 

Some examples are cityTLDs, like .tokyo, .nyc, .berlin, and .london. They’re ideal for small businesses and establishments that want to build their brand and attract customers in the area. Reportedly, Japan has the largest share of business and eCommerce sites that use cityTLDs. 

How Crucial Is a .com Domain?

In our buying a domain name tutorial, we explain that the right name could boost brand awareness, establish visitor trust, and make it easier to find you online. 

Choosing a TLD that is short, easy to remember, and relevant to your niche will help you achieve these goals.

From a memorability standpoint, .com has become top-of-mind. Growth Badger’s survey results show that users can recall .com domains 44% more correctly than those with other TLDs. .co is second most memorable at 33%, with .org trailing at 32%.

When it comes to credibility, .com wins with a rating of 3.5 on a scale of 1 to 5. .co and .org are again second and third, rated 3.4 and 3.3, respectively.

It’s clear that .com still immensely helps establish a credible online presence. It’s concise, familiar, and highly versatile – virtually any website can use it.

That said, a .com domain is pricier – it starts at around $8.99/year. This is much more expensive than newer gTLDs, costing as little as $0.99/year. .com prices are going to increase by almost 7%, too, due to recent agreements between the US government and Verisign.

Paired with the fact that the .com market has become highly competitive, aspiring website owners will have to consider buying domain name alternatives.  

Use domain name generators. They can come up with multiple name options that sound close to the one you want the most. 

Secondly, consider buying other TLDs. If you want the same level of familiarity as .com and don’t mind paying more, .net is a good choice. Otherwise, try new gTLDs like .xyz, .online, and .site, which are cheaper but just as versatile.

More TLD Trends to Watch Out For

Here are some other trends that may rock the domain industry in the near future:

• Based on Sedo’s top searched keywords in 2022, terms related to NFT, cryptocurrency, and the Metaverse are highly popular. Since these industries may keep getting bigger, we can expect to see this trend continue.
• Google Registry released the .day TLD in early 2022 to celebrate national holidays and raise awareness of important issues. Many large organizations have registered a .day domain for their causes, like Comic Relief for rednose.day.
• Since March 2022, Australia’s ccTLD .au has been available to register as a direct domain name – such as example.au. Previously, users could only purchase it as a second-level domain. Only people with verified connections with the country could own this TLD. 

Key Takeaways

When choosing a domain ending, think about your website’s long-term goals.

Getting a .com domain may be worth it if you plan to grow your business in the future.  

For the new gTLDs, competing with .com will be tough. On the other hand, they are a great way to establish a unique identity. Furthermore, with .com domains running low, it’s safe to say people will gradually become more familiar with these domain endings.  

ICANN published a report on gTLD application procedures, stirring rumors that they will open submissions for new domain extensions soon.

In any case, we can expect to see even more domain endings for various niches down the line. While they may not have a significant domain market share, they have the potential to become major players in the internet landscape of the future.

Hostinger is proud to sponsor WordCamp US as part of our commitment and contribution to the worldwide WordPress community.

If we learned one thing from our experience at WordCamp EU in Porto this summer, it’s that we want to be with the WordPress community to help, learn, and grow together. 

From September 9 to 11, we’ll be at WordCamp US in San Diego to give as much as possible to make WordPress even better.

Why We’re Headed to WordCamp US

Becoming a part of the global community of passionate WordPressers presents a unique opportunity to interact with our clients and gather insight into the needs of WordPress users so we can continue to improve our service and facilitate our clients’ online success.

Most of our users choose WordPress as their go-to CMS – currently, 70% of all new hosting customers use it. This makes our goals at WordCamp US simple:

• Represent and pitch in on behalf of our users. 
• Help WordPress from the bottom-up by connecting with the community and contributing to the technology.
• Learn how to provide the best possible WordPress experience and performance for our users.

Preparing for Our First WordCamp

Customer Obsession is business as usual for us – we collect and analyze client insights, especially regarding our product and WordPress usage. WordCamp EU ‘22, however, presented an entirely different prospect.

We want to meaningfully contribute to the WordPress community and make a difference in how we serve WordPress users. And there’s no better place to trade knowledge and get the feedback we need to create more success for our users than at an event with over 2,300 WordPress gurus.

It was our first-ever WordCamp. We were very excited – but also had our reservations about jumping into the tightly-knit WordPress community. We wanted to start things off right. 

We did our due diligence gathering information on how we should approach the event and introduce ourselves. 

This led to us participating as a Super Admin Sponsor. Our crew of 29 Hostingerians armed with a Next-Gen web hosting solution came to contribute to and communicate with a community we believe in.

What We Learned at WordCamp EU

Our clients value transparency, and it is a guiding principle here at Hostinger. Instead of trying to sell the technology we brought with us, we looked for radical feedback. We asked about real-world experiences with our services, what we did right, and, most importantly, what we could improve. 

Even for a business, such feedback may be daunting – but we like challenges. Massively grateful for their input, we took note of what our peers had to say about us.

Then, it was our turn to talk about what we’re most proud of – the way we work.

Our quality standards and operating principles like Freedom & Responsibility, Courage & Candidness, Learn & Be Curious, and Bias Toward Action are the real reasons why we have our Next-Generation Web Hosting Technology in our back pocket.

At WCEU, we learned that the WordPress community is driven by people who share the same values. We met dedicated inspiring people who showed us where to direct our enthusiasm for WordPress and how to make sure our contribution is as efficient as possible. 

How We’re Giving Back

Mutual exchange is the foundation of every community, and the WordPress community is one that we want to grow alongside. 

While we’re proud of the developers who brought us the resources, experience, ideas, and technology to improve the WordPress experience for everyone, we are even more excited to be able to continue to learn and achieve by working to connect a truly global community. 

WordPress doesn’t like to speak about itself too much, but its Five for the Future initiative encourages organizations to dedicate 5% of their resources to the development of the CMS that powers over 40% of all the websites in the world and we’re all in.

Currently, we have 20 contributors pledging 71 hours per week and contributing to 7 WordPress development teams: core, hosting, meta, support, documentation, marketing, and polyglots. Our goal is simple – help make WordPress and its ecosystem better for everyone. 

The Essence of WordPress

Now it is time to start using our resources to shine a light on the individuals, self-starters, and small businesses who genuinely use WordPress every single day. 

Whether it is Sally and Edgar, proudly following their wildest dreams, Jake building his own business, or a group of 27 volunteers literally saving lives by raising more than 1 million euros to safely house over 33,000 Ukrainian refugees – our users are WordPress users, and we want to celebrate them even if it’s something as small as a bit of good old-fashioned blogging. 

The individuals who make the WordPress community more than the sum of its parts and the opportunity to meet more of them, learn from them, and do everything we can to give back are why we’re flying out to WordCamp US this week – and it’s why you can expect to see us at similar events in the future as well.

No wonder freelancing has become a primary source of income for many people as they enjoy the independence of the freelance economy. 

In 2022, freelancing can mean any sort of work that goes against the traditional 9-5 structures. Covid-19 and the worry of impending recessions, to name a few global anxieties, have contributed to the current freelance climate. As a result, many flexible jobs and side hustle opportunities that seemed implausible even a decade ago have emerged. 

Why Freelance Work?

The Bureau of Labor Statistics research showed that the percentage of people quitting their job rose from 1.6 % in April 2020 to 6.4 % in August 2021. The most significant shift is that many people are not moving onto a new payroll company but leaving for freelance independence. 

After falling 7% in 2020, mainly due to the pandemic, the overall number of independent workers grew sharply in 2021: up 34%, to 51.1 million from 38.2 million in 2020. The larger group of part-time independents, who regularly work fewer than 15 hours per week, rose 39%, or 9.1 million, from 24.6 million to 34.1 million. The fastest growing segment of Part-Time Independent is so-called occasional independents—people who work regularly but part-time and without set hours. Their numbers rose sharply, from 15.8 million in 2020 to 23.9 million in 2021, up 51%. 

With doors open to working in co-spaces, allowing networking and sharing ideas, many people get more creative. Furthermore, young people understand they may not be able to afford a mortgage, opting for work that frees them to travel and see the world. 

And so the pull for freelance makes sense; choosing one’s hours, working spaces, and clients. 

Success stories such as running a boutique gym or finding a flair in design have opened doors for many niche ideas to come alive. The latter is possible through people creating their own websites to promote their businesses or hiring a web designer and keeping the freelance economy turning. 

It might sound pretty simple, but the necessity of the internet in everyday life is the driving force behind freelance work culture. Remote working impacts this heavily; “In the United States alone, more than 4.7 million people work remotely at least half the time in the United States. 44% of companies do not allow remote work, and 16% of companies hire remote only workers.”

Without guaranteeing a stable and secure job as it was once known, many began to loom inwards at their knowledge base and how they could apply it. 

Why Is the Freelance Economy Flourishing?

The development of technology, in particular, the use of apps to buy and sell goods online as well as connect customers with freelancers worldwide, has enabled more individuals to pursue their passions outside regular working hours.

Covid-19 has blurred the lines at work and helped people be more prone and start doing business online.

In many traditional workplaces, flexible work is available for at least a day or two per week. It is becoming the norm. As a result, companies uncompromising in this are deemed unattractive to prospective employees.

Data Speaks Volumes

The eCommerce industry statistics prove that the industry is booming. Let’s go into more detail: 

1. There are approximately 57 million freelancers in the US.
2. An estimated 59% of freelancers in the US who responded to the survey are male freelancers.
3. 86% of freelancers work from home or in coffee shops.
4. 84% of freelancers say work lets them live the lifestyle they want.
5. 64% of freelancers said their overall health has improved.
6. 46% of freelancers choose their job because of the flexibility.
7. 41% of freelancers find new work through their past clients.
8. The US had the most demand for freelancers in 2020.
9. The freelance industry makes up almost 5% of the US GDP.
10. 53% of all Generation Z workers are freelancers.

Changing Landscapes, Changing Terms

In the past five years, the phrase side hustle rose from 11% to 75%, freelancing from 20% to 82%, and passive income from 28% to 75%. This Google Trends data represents search interest relative to the highest point on the chart for the given region and time. 

(A value of 100 is the peak popularity for the term. A value of 50 means that the word is half as popular. A score of 0 means there was not enough data for this term)

Why Freelancing Is The Future 

Recessions and global pandemics aside, the future of freelancing feels full of promise. There is constant growth in co-working spaces, with more nuanced professions, such as bespoke PR and creative web design. There is a distrust in the air with employee engagement down with more than 600 US businesses with 50-500 employees; 63.3% of companies say retaining employees is more demanding than hiring them.  

News travels fast; in the younger generations, the feeling that there are possibilities lying outside the traditional workplace has spurred the freelance movement forward. 

The increase has risen rapidly, and the industry keeps moving faster. In the United States alone, 58 million people regularly perform freelance work, with $1.2 trillion from freelance contributions to the United States economy. 

According to McKinsey, 500 million freelancers will be working through platforms to make money online before 2030. Not only is becoming freelance a way to be completely independent with your time, resources, and skills, but these statistics show a healthy marketplace growing each year. 

Hostinger makes web hosting simple, however you decide to build your website. That said, around 70% of all Hostinger users opt to create their site using WordPress, meaning that we have deep roots within the WordPress community. 

Since the strength of the WordPress community is so closely linked to the success of Hostinger users, we decided to talk to the best source of information on WordPress community building – Josepha Haden Chomphosy. 

Josepha is the Executive Director of the WordPress project, tasked with coordinating the work of volunteer contributors worldwide. After catching a WordPress bug at a WordCamp that she attended on her mom’s spare ticket, Josepha began contributing to WordPress as the lead of the open-source division at Automattic in 2015. 

Josepha is now well known as a leader in the WordPress community and for her involvement in volunteer training programs. She can tell us a lot about directing volunteer-based, open-source projects at scale. 

In our debut podcast, Hostinger Chief Marketing Officer Daugirdas Jankus quizzes Josepha on topics ranging from WordPress 6.1 and the WordPress roadmap to the Five for the Future initiative and ways our clients can contribute to the community. 

Why the WordPress Community Matters 

In Josepha’s words, “WordPressers like to hang out with other WordPressers,” but the sense of community around WordPress isn’t just about a shared love for a tech product. WordPress is an open-source project, and its forward momentum relies on the contributions of volunteers around the world. 

Becoming involved as a contributor offers not only the opportunity to learn about WordPress from a dedicated community of knowledgeable experts, but also the chance to really make a positive impact on the quality of the platform. 

To highlight the benefits of working with the WordPress community, both to the platform and contributors, Josepha points to the buzz around new WordPress releases. 

Carried out in a public Slack channel, these releases invite volunteers worldwide to follow along and help out. “When it’s time to test and package, they then test with dozens of people, where people test all kinds of things you’d never thought of.”

Josepha stresses the value of the skills you can learn and develop from being part of open-source projects. This can be as broad as understanding how work functions in the 21st century and how diverse cultures contribute to a project, or as simple as learning the correct way to write a ticket for a bug. 

It’s also simply great for meeting new people. A topic that recurred in our conversation is the spirit of generosity within the WordPress community. “You rarely see an old contributor who won’t help new ones.”

But how easy is it to contribute? Josepha highlights four simple steps to start your journey:

1. Sit down and think about how you’d like to contribute. Consider your strengths and what you’d like to learn. Go where you feel called to contribute. 
2. Next, attend a meeting. Most teams hold new contributor hours, which provide an excellent opportunity to introduce yourself, find out what the team is working on, and identify tasks you could complete.
3. Assign yourself to a task. Take that first leap to put your hand up and say, “I can do that.” Here, you can see all of Josepha’s contributions.
4. “Keep assigning yourself stuff until you’re leading a project.”

Five for the Future 

Josepha isn’t just interested in individuals contributing but also organizations. That’s why she’s a champion of the Five for the Future initiative, which invites companies that use WordPress to donate 5% of their resources to developing the platform. 

Originally intended simply as a call to contribute, Five for the Future is now a program for contributor recruitment and retention. “The aim is to coordinate sponsored time, especially around giving more guidance to new contributors.”

Organizations can choose how much time and resources to donate and where to focus their contributions. They could donate developer time, work on community projects, or help out in the training team.

The program is all about moving WordPress forward. That’s not just about developing the tech to take it further as a CMS, but also building the infrastructure in the community to make sure that everyone’s contribution is meaningful. 

Five for the Future also plays a crucial part in elevating underrepresented voices by offering targeted support and mentorship. This is particularly important to Josepha – “I am one of those underrepresented voices in technology, and would not have stayed in the WordPress project were it not for people who were checking that I had what I needed to really succeed here.”

Restarting WordCamp in the Post-Covid World

A fascinating part of our discussion with Josepha surrounded the post-Covid relaunch of in-person WordCamp events and the challenges of holding such occasions. “So much of our new contributor and new user onboarding takes place at those in-person events that we had to find a way to offer them while keeping everybody safe.” 

If you didn’t already know, WordCamps are informal, community-led events held worldwide by and for WordPress users. At WordCamps, you’ll come across everyone from casual users to core developers, and each individual has the opportunity to exchange ideas and meet others in the WordPress community.

While the opportunity to have safe face-to-face meetups is a priority, Josepha’s team also learned lessons from the pandemic and recognizes the value of making a similar experience available online. “We want to keep a hybrid option since online events opened up to people who otherwise couldn’t make it to events.” 

Did we mention that Hostinger is also preparing for WordCamp US? After a great experience as a Super Admin Sponsor at WordCamp Europe 2022, we’re thrilled to be sponsoring our second WordCamp in San Diego on 9-11 September 2022. 

Want to Hear More?

To hear Josepha’s take on the topics mentioned above and much more, we highly recommend listening to the full podcast episode. 

If you’re inspired to get your business involved in contributing to WordPress, there’s no better place to start than with the Five for the Future initiative discussed in the podcast.  

Finally, if you’re keen to hear more from Josepha, you can check out her own podcast WP Briefing for an even deeper dive into the world of WordPress. 

To avoid an attack, you need to know what’s coming your way. When you spot an attempt to disrupt the regular operation of a targeted server, service, or network by overburdening it with unwanted traffic, you’re dealing with a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.

A DDoS attack attempts to deny access to a targeted server by generating a large amount of malicious internet traffic which overwhelms the target’s available resources. We implement traffic filtering solutions to prevent such attacks and guarantee maximum uptime.

We’re constantly improving our services and renewing our systems to stay ahead of the game. Today, we’ll detail how we combat DDoS attacks and explain our Wanguard traffic filter setup and overall infrastructure.

What Does an Attack Look Like?

Here’s a real-life example of a DDoS attack. Picture 400 Mbps of UDP traffic heading to a VPS with an available bandwidth of 100 Mbps. 

Simple Jekyll website load time results:
Before the attack: 0.08 seconds
During an attack: 23.35 seconds (1st attempt), 30.86 seconds (2nd attempt)

DDoS attacks are often hard to mitigate because they usually involve whole or multiple botnets targeting you. A botnet consists of many infected systems, so fighting it on your own will, most of the time, prove useless.

How We Deal With DDoS Attacks

We have two DDoS mitigation solutions for dealing with incoming attacks in our infrastructure – remotely triggered black hole (RTBH) and traffic filtering.

RTBH filtering offers a way to eliminate unwanted traffic quickly before it enters our infrastructure. While this method effectively protects our infrastructure as a service provider, it prevents all traffic from hitting us – not something our clients prefer. Eventually, their websites and VPSs become completely unreachable. As a result, the attackers achieve their goals.

Traffic filtering is the next-level DDoS protection for our services. It only stops the malicious traffic instead of dropping all of it. Malicious traffic is identified by examining the packets flowing through our infrastructure. The following traffic elements are inspected for specific patterns: 

• packet payload
• source port
• source IP
• destination port
• country
• and more

This filtering process is done on our infrastructure before the traffic reaches our services, so our clients have nothing to worry about.

Traffic Filtering

Setup

We have implemented out-of-line filtering for our setup. Since we rarely experience powerful DDoS attacks, in-line filtering would be inefficient in actual practicality and cost – we have the RTBH method to combat them, instead. 

Our setup involves filter instances connected to spine switches through which diverted traffic flows. We use sFlows, which are sent from spine instances to the filter instance, to investigate and divert traffic if needed. Clean traffic is forwarded to leaf switches, while malicious traffic is dropped at the filter instance. It’s important to note that the traffic diversion and filtering processes are fully automated. 

If any destination host experiences a traffic spike above our set thresholds, we advertise that IP address to the spines using ExaBGP. When the traffic arrives at a filter instance, we examine the incoming packets to identify the attack pattern. Once complete, new rules are added to the firewall, preventing malicious traffic from reaching its destination.

Hardware

The main elements that the filter server depends on are the CPU and NIC. After some testing and research, we decided to go with the following:

CPU: Intel(R) Xeon(R) Silver 4215R @ 3.2 GHz
NIC: Intel XL710 (40G)

During a DDoS attack with ~1.5 Mpps and 8 Gbps of traffic, the CPU usage looks like this:

Automation

It would be tough to manage multiple filter instances across all data centers manually. As a result, the whole solution is fully automated, from attack detection to threshold settings. Currently, we use Chef and Ansible for our infrastructure as code (IaC). Changing thresholds or other settings for all instances at once is as easy as changing a few lines of the code.

Configuration

Here’s a sneak peek at our configuration:

Our instance must be able to route packets between interfaces, so forwarding is enabled for both IPv4 and IPv6. Since we don’t have any routes via interfaces used for traffic diversion, we must disable reverse path filtering or set it to “loose mode” – as we have done – so the packets coming via those interfaces don’t get dropped.

We have increased the maximum number of packets in one NAPI poll cycle (net.core.netdev_budget) to 1000. As we prefer throughput over latency in this case, we’ve set our ring buffers to the maximum.

We’ve been running this solution for six months and can see that these small changes are enough to handle any attacks of the anticipated scales. We didn’t go deeper into tuning the system as the default values are reasonable and don’t cause any problems.

Next, we have actions. An action is triggered when an attack is detected or finished. We use it to divert traffic (route announcement via ExaBGP), inform our monitoring team about the attack (a Slack message from the instance), and more.

Thresholds are also managed as code, providing numerous options for detecting an attack. For example, if we detect 100K UDP packets per second aimed at a single target, we start the filtering process. It can also be TCP traffic, HTTP/HTTPS requests, and so on.

The prefixes that should be under protection are also added automatically from Chef data bags.

Results

What does the handling of a DDoS attack look like on Grafana? Let’s look at a recent attack with 8 Gbps and 1 Mpps of traffic below.

Here’s the traffic incoming to the filter instance:

And here’s the traffic outgoing to the end device:

Incoming packets per second:

Outgoing packets per second:

As you can see, there is a short burst of traffic going from the filtering instance to the end device. It is the gap caused by the attack pattern identification process. It’s a short amount of time, usually between 1 and 10 seconds, but it’s something to be aware of. As seen on the graph, once the attack pattern is identified, you’re safe!

What about the speed of attack detection? This part depends on sFlows, and, as we know, it’s not as fast as port mirroring. That said, it’s easy to set up, flexible, and costs less. Once an attack starts, the time to divert the traffic to the filter instance takes between 20 and 50 seconds.

This is how the whole process looks from the target instance:

Traffic

Packets per second

There’s a short spike and we’re back to business as usual. Depending on the service you’re running, you may not even notice it.

At Hostinger, we like to know what is happening in our infrastructure, so let’s investigate this case a little bit further:

Attack source. We noticed an increase in IPv4 traffic from a few countries, with India and Taiwan contributing the most. There is a high possibility that those IPs were spoofed, so this information may be inaccurate. We have the list of source addresses and ASNs but won’t publish it here for the same reason (spoofing).

Attack protocol. This attack was mainly based on UDP as we didn’t see any unusual increases on the TCP graph.

Attack type. It generated a large amount of traffic to random UDP ports. A few of them are seen on the graph below:

Summary

RTBH, as DDoS protection, is effective but eventually causes downtime. After implementing the traffic filtering solution in our infrastructure, we only drop malicious traffic instead of all of it. We’ve noticed that RTBH usage has decreased by 90–95%, resulting in a better uptime for our services and clients.

Hostinger’s Research and Development team has been hard at work to bring you a next-generation web hosting solution. This prototype will be available for WordPress clients, providing even better performance at an affordable cost.

The Idea Behind the Innovation

Our goal is to improve four components of web hosting:

• Uptime – providing a highly available solution resilient to scaling, hardware failure, and maintenance time.
• Speed – optimizing the speed of account creation, page loading time, and data transfer.
• Simplicity – reducing moving parts and using only tried-and-true solutions.
• Base price – keeping costs low and making the solution available for all customers.

Developing new hosting technology requires a lot of time and resources. Most providers wouldn’t do this, especially when they can buy third-party solutions to build their product.

Fortunately, we’ve figured out an efficient way to innovate without starting from the ground up.

There are plenty of great micro solutions for containerization, database systems, proxies, caches, and accelerators. We’ve identified which aspects of each system are best and put them together in this new next-generation architecture.

The Technology We Came Up With

Our new web hosting solution will use separate units for different roles:

• Management nodes cluster for APIs and helper systems.
• Compute nodes cluster for containers and filesystem.
• Database nodes cluster.

With this architecture, your WordPress site will be much more resistant to system failures. It ensures high availability, even when individual servers go offline. The nodes inside the cluster work interchangeably to ensure maximum uptime. 

The system itself utilizes lightweight containers, a distributed filesystem (based on CephFS), and a custom-built Nginx web server that features:

• Optimized Zlib compression, 22-29% faster than the default.
• Brotli data compression support.
• Custom performance patches.

Combining these technologies and the new architecture results in top-performing web hosting with high uptime.

What Difference Will the Next-Generation Solution Make?

We’ve put this new tech stack to the test to see how it improves website performance. We set up a micro-scale buildout using 16 Intel NUC computers to imitate a data center cabinet with servers. 

We conducted tests using production websites of different sizes to compare how they perform with the new solution against our current LiteSpeed-based WordPress hosting. 

The result? The websites loaded faster on the new tech stack – scoring 99-100 on PageSpeed Insights without cache enabled. With the cache active, they consistently scored 100.

For comparison, the test sites set up on our current hosting were already optimized to the max – with LiteSpeed plugin tweaks, CSS/JS minification, and other file compressions. And yet, their PageSpeed Insights score was not as high.

When Will This New Tech Stack Be Available?

The next-generation web hosting is in the works and will be released as a beta version in a specially-crafted WordPress web hosting offer. We aim to keep the price the same as our current plans to provide you with more benefits without having to pay extra.

In the meantime, existing clients won’t be affected by the changes and can use our services as usual. 

Do look forward to future announcements!

This is an example of a reported phishing email:

If you received this or a similar email, please, don’t click on any of the links, delete it, and report it to us.

How to spot a phishing attack?

Although we maintain controls to protect our networks and systems from cyber threats, we don’t have control of what scammers are sending to personal customer mailboxes which are not hosted on our servers.

In an effort to protect our customers, we want to highlight a common cyber-attack that everyone should be aware of – phishing.

“Phishing” is the most common type of cyber attack that affects organizations and individuals worldwide. Phishing attacks can take many forms, but they all share a common goal – getting you to share sensitive information such as login credentials, credit card information, or bank account details.

Types of phishing attacks to watch out for

• Phishing: In this type of attack, hackers impersonate a real company to obtain your login credentials. You may receive an email asking you to verify your account details with a link that takes you to an imposter login screen that delivers your information directly to the attackers.
• Spear Phishing: Spear phishing is a more sophisticated phishing attack that includes customized information that makes the attacker seem like a legitimate source. They may use your name and phone number and refer to a specific company in the email to trick you into thinking they have a connection to you, making you more likely to click a link or attachment that they provide.
• Shared Document Phishing: You may receive an email that appears to come from file-sharing sites like Dropbox or Google Drive alerting you that a document has been shared with you. The link provided in these emails will take you to a fake login page that mimics the real login page and will steal your account credentials.

What You Can Do

To avoid these phishing schemes, please observe the following email best practices:

• Do not click on links or attachments from senders that you do not recognize. Be especially wary of .zip or other compressed or executable file types.
• Do not provide sensitive personal information (like usernames and passwords) over email.
• Watch for email senders that use suspicious or misleading domain names.
• Inspect URLs carefully to make sure they’re legitimate and not imposter sites.
• Do not try to open any shared document that you’re not expecting to receive.
• If you can’t tell if an email is legitimate or not, reach out to company support directly via chat or contacts provided on their website. Never use contacts provided in the email.
• Be especially cautious when opening attachments or clicking links if you receive an email containing a warning banner indicating that it originated from an external source.
• Enable 2FA authentication on your accounts where possible.

If you have opened an email but didn’t click on anything, don’t worry then.
Contact customer support via Live Chat if you have any questions.

Do you have a friend who’s considering starting an online business? Or a member of your family looking to showcase their photography skills online? 

This week, we’re launching the program for all Hostinger users who have a PayPal account. It’s a great opportunity for you to earn a solid passive income. 

What is the referral program?

The Hostinger Referral Program allows you to earn money by referring your contacts to become new Hostinger customers. It’s as simple as that. Get your friends using our products and you’ll benefit from it. 

You will get a 20% commission for each new successful sign-up, and your referral will get 20% off their purchase.

You can earn a commission if a referred friend clicks on their referral link to create a valid Hostinger account. The account must pass a probationary period of 45 days in order for you to begin receiving money.

Currently, the referral program is only available to users who have PayPal. We intend on rolling out the program for all of our users but for now, we’re limiting the program to a select few.

Earn money in just 3 easy steps

The process is simple and straightforward. You can access the referral program by clicking your profile icon on the Hostinger dashboard and selecting Earn With Us

1. Share your profile’s unique registration link with your community. It’s available on the Hostinger dashboard Earn With Us page.
2. Sit back and wait. Once your referral has signed up to a hosting plan of more than 12 months, you simply have to wait for the trial period of 45 days to elapse.
3. Start earning! You’ll begin collecting a commission on your referral. Once you’ve earned over $50, the money will be sent straight to your PayPal account.

You can visit our support page for more information on how to use our referral program.

What are the benefits to me?

Every referral made earns you money. 

You’ll be able to generate a solid passive income simply by sending your referral URL to your friends and contacts. For each referral, you’ll receive 20% of the value of their purchase.

We all dream about earning a passive income, and this is a real opportunity to do that. Your friends and family will also thank you for the complimentary discount that they get at the check-out.

Anything else I need to know?

The Hostinger Referral Program can not be combined with other Hostinger referral programs or incentives.

If you’d like to know the terms that are set for this program, you can read the Referral Program Agreement

According to Statista, there were over 1.88 billion websites on the internet back in August 2021, with this number growing exponentially since then. With roughly 1 million words in the English dictionary, it’s easy to realize that it won’t take long for single-word and phrase-like domains to run out.

Our data shows that as of today, there are only 19,945 available domains remaining. This indicates the end of the website domain era and we’re both proud and happy to have played an instrumental role in it. 

With the supply of domain names running low, the demand is expected to soar, along with the prices. If you still haven’t secured a domain, make sure to do so before it’s too late.  You can use Hostinger’s Domain Checker to check what’s still available.

What Comes Next? How Will Websites Exist Without Domain Names?

There are advantages to being considered the best website hosting services provider on the market by most review sites and having some of the simplest requirements for registering a new domain. It means we have the data, experience, and intel to know where the hosting industry is headed.

Anticipating the end of the website domain market, we’ve been quietly at work on the next generation of hosting services that will not rely on obsolete technology. Instead of telling you what it is now, we promise an exciting reveal in the nearest future. Make sure to savor the last few months of the “www” era and prepare yourselves for the next phase of website hosting evolution.

Stay tuned for our announcement of what comes next! ?

Disclaimer: This article is part of April Fool’s tradition and holds no truth or validity. There are more than 19,945 website domains in the world and they are not running out any time soon.

Even though the main sentiment of the article is a fallacy, some facts are still true. You can still use Hostinger’s Domain Checker to check what domains are still available and the requirements for registering a new domain are easy and simple.

Godmother of Software Engineering

In the 1960s, Margaret Hamilton walked the corridors of Project Apollo every day. She’d come into the lab carrying her infant daughter and prepare for another day of programming, which she’d always do after rocking Lauren to sleep. 

Her colleagues were outraged that a mother in her mid-20s goes to work, but that didn’t bother Margaret, a University of Michigan graduate and math prodigy. She was a self-taught programmer and Director of the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, developing navigation software for NASA’s Apollo program. Margaret’s mission was to send the first astronauts to the Moon, which meant writing the most complicated code in human history. The result was a towering stack of paper, immortalized in an iconic 1969 photo. 

Sending three people to the Moon was a significant achievement. But what’s more important is Margaret’s legacy. She convinced her stubborn male colleagues that programming is just as important as mechanical engineering and that spacecraft is only as good as its software. Nobody knew how to describe Margaret’s work, so she coined the term ‘software engineering.’ 

Tech Empowers Women

Margaret established software engineering as a scientific discipline that laid the groundwork for modern IT, paving the way for personal computers and the World Wide Web. She’s often called the world’s first programmer. 

Even more than 50 years later, Margaret’s achievements still inspire women to choose tech because the industry is growing, and it’s the best place for self-fulfillment. It offers an outstanding work-life balance, possibilities for remote work, and a people-centered culture that encourages employees to stay longer. Most importantly, it’s an industry where effort pays off. The dynamic nature of technology means that you’ll always see tangible results, and your contributions will always be visible. 

“The gender gap is still apparent (only 18,5% of EU women work in ICT), but it’s no longer popular to say that women can’t work in tech. We see an increase in female specialists and leaders. Talking about these women will make stereotypes seem less legitimate,” says Žydrūnė Vitaitė, co-founder of Women Go Tech.

Women Go Tech is an initiative that promotes female involvement in tech-based businesses. Its main goal is to show the benefits of working in the industry, offer guidance, and help women find jobs. Women Go Tech’s mentorship program provides a chance to meet IT professionals, company leaders, and HR specialists.

WGT Helps Find Jobs

Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither was the Women Go Tech community. But their efforts are already paying off.

“In the past five years, around 800 women finished Lithuanian STS studies. During that time, over 400 Women Go Tech attendees found jobs. I think we offer practical solutions in helping women find employment. And we’re taking small steps in narrowing the gender gap.” says Žydrūnė Vitaitė.

Women Go Tech revealed the groundbreaking potential of women in tech in Lithuania, showing that they’re brave, competent, and bring psychological balance to the workforce. We view Women Go Tech as a project of national importance because it acts as a talent pool for the whole industry, and its alumni will represent Lithuania both domestically and internationally. 

Every woman carries the spirit of Margaret Hamilton – persistent, independent, creative, and smiling in the face of adversity. Greatness starts with following your dreams, and you’re already on the right path. Next destination – tech.

This year, Hostinger is one of Women Go Tech’s official partners. We’re excited to start the QA workshop and help women build their success stories! Workshop participants will receive free hosting!

It’s no secret that all of us are heartbroken. Some of our colleagues are there together with their families and friends. Though it is hard to describe what they are going through, one thing is sure – their spirit is unconquerable.

We’re witnessing an invasion during which many Ukrainian citizens are losing their homes and are being killed or injured. So, taking a firm stance is necessary, which is why we are providing support without restrictions.

In support of Ukraine, we’ve done the following:

• Suspended all renewals and purchases connecting to Russia and Belarus for the foreseeable future.
• Stopped processing RUB currency and payments.
• Started raising awareness about the invasion among our customers and audiences in the form of warnings, banners, and notifications. Meanwhile, we’ve been promoting credible information and media sources, such as BBC News, wherever possible.
• Contacted other web hosting companies, inviting them to join the effort in finding ways to help.
• Initiated technical and financial support to charities and NGOs helping Ukrainian citizens directly, such as Red Cross, Save Life, and Stiprūs Kartu.

How You Can Support Ukraine

On a company level, start by restricting business operations based in Russia and Belarus. Instead, provide trustworthy information, which is hard to come by there.

There are many ways to support Ukraine, and every contribution counts – provide financial aid, donate to a charity, pay your Ukrainian employees in advance, and assist locals in the relocation process.

If you have any ideas on what Hostinger can do to help, or have any questions, please reach out to us at standwithukraine@hostinger.com. 

Be brave, be vocal, and stand with Ukraine.

The Hostinger team

As a person who lives and breathes web hosting, I took the liberty of giving a few takes on TechRadar’s insights. I recommend reading TR’s article by section and returning to this tab for my comments.

First – about Domains, and on Web3

I believe we are transitioning from “One World. One Internet.” (as the ICANN slogan currently says) into “Multiple Worlds. Multiple Internets.” 

People are starting to grasp Metaverses and NFT-based domains. For example, unstoppabledomains.com already registered 2 million NFT domains in a short time. Many new ways to create a presence online are emerging.

With the ICANN gTLD round around the corner, it will be interesting to see if crypto registrars with fat pockets attempt to secure their current Web3 extensions as gTLDs for Web2 purposes.

On the other hand, the good ol’ classic .com and country-level ccTLDs still hold prestige and are not going anywhere. But as businesses begin to see potential in Web3, we will see more convergent services that enable domains to be owned by the same entity and resolve in both DNS and ENS (Ethereum Name Service). Seamless resolution via a cross-connect point between Web2 and Web3 would be a good start to a new decentralized hosting shift.

Cloudflare already proposed a gateway service that gives IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) and Ethereum blockchain access. This way, you can retrieve Web3 content and serve it via HTTPS on a classic domain.

Second – about the Content

My most considerable concern is that we are still way behind with the mobile versions of websites. Website speed on mobile is still statistically about 2-3 times slower than on desktops and is usually not optimized for viewing, let alone purchases or interactions.

The shift from desktop to mobile-first happened a long time ago, and we need to start accepting that. We will see more and more sites with Apple Pay, Google Pay integrations, simplified and mobile UX-driven designs, pushing for mobile-first. Auto-login with iCloud or Google Auth, straight from the browser, could also be a new thing this year.

How many of you remember when websites had the “Best viewed on Internet Explorer”? It would be fun to see a website with a “Best viewed on iPhone” tag. 

If we want this to happen, we need to give our customers the tools to create mobile content. At this point, no-code SaaS and website builders like Hostinger will pick up, making it easier for them to adapt their toolkit quickly. 

Third – about Web hosting.

The digital world is trending towards convenience. People want to focus on what they do best, and usually, a website is more of a tool than a goal.

In 2022, as website hosting providers, we will need to focus on overlaying SaaS providers, agencies, and people doing the work for their clients. In fact, all web hosts should identify, prepare for, and adapt to that. We need to understand that our service will most likely be resold by someone doing middle-man work – for example, a developer coding a website or an agency selling WordPress sites. 

Fourth – about Threats

I very much agree with TechRadar’s prediction that cybersecurity will be a huge topic. As I noted, when the world trends toward convenience, security automatically declines. I believe the need for automated website scanning and automated hardening tools will rise. 

Finally – Sustainability

In 2022, sustainability will be one of the critical factors in selecting a web host. Everyone needs to start chipping in, I guess firstly, by doing the basic stuff. We have already begun auditing ourselves on how to become more sustainable and cause less harm to the planet. We choose green DCs, look after our power consumption, and choose the right hardware vendors. 

We can confirm that Hostinger’s web hosting servers do not support services that depend on Log4j, nor are they installed, making you and your data safe and unaffected by this Log4j vulnerability.

Our API and UI systems do not run on Java, except for our internally-used Elasticsearch instance which has been patched. Thus, even though we have noticed an influx of traffic hitting our APIs with “jndi”, “ldap”, and numerous variations of keywords trying to trigger the Log4j exploit, they are harmless to our systems and do not have any impact on customers’ data.

What is the Log4j vulnerability issue? How was Log4j found? 

Log4j is a portion of code helping software applications keep track of their past activities. Each time developers build new software, they can apply this existing code element, which is free on the internet and commonly used. 

In recent weeks, the cybersecurity community discovered that requesting the program to log a malicious code would lead attackers to take control of servers running Log4j. 

The origins of reporting this vulnerability still differ – some believe it was first noticed in a Minecraft-related forum, while others say it was Chinese tech company Alibaba’s security researchers. Either way, experts name it the most severe software vulnerability as numerous devices, sites, and services are exposed.

Do I need to do anything about the Log4j vulnerability?

We would like to inform our VPS host customers who are running their Java services on VPS servers, to please update Log4j to at least the 2.16.1 version. Otherwise, update the relevant software, including Log4j as a bundle, and restart your services. 

Specifically for VPS Minecraft users, the game will automatically be updated when you open the MC launcher. So please do not skip or try to stop the update. You will be safe once the game is newly-launched. For more information, go over this article on the security vulnerability in the Java edition. 

We recommend at least the 1.18.1 version for your MC clients and when running your server. 

How can I further protect myself from malicious traffic from the Log4j vulnerability?

Even though your website hosting accounts on Hostinger’s servers are safe, massive scans are running on full internet IP ranges. They scan all websites across the world just to find vulnerable hosts. This traffic is obtrusive, and it may cause your website account to use more resources than needed and might even slow it down. 

We recommend following relevant news for a few weeks to ensure that a re-patch is not needed again. We already had new vulnerabilities patched for Log4j (CVE-2021-45046) after the initial bug (CVE-2021-44228) was found. As there is so much global focus on this Log4j library now, new ways to exploit it are being continuously identified.

We can reminisce and learn from serious vulnerabilities such as Shellshock (Bash vulnerability) and Heartbleed (TLS vulnerability), which happened a few years ago when several re-patches were needed to secure the systems fully.

How can we all contribute? The Apache Software Foundation

We, Hostinger, are an open company, mainly built on open-source software. Times like these remind us that open-source software is created by enthusiasts who do it at no particular benefit to them. 

As this vulnerability hit the world over the weekend, developers gathered and worked for days and nights to fix the issue that affected the world. Therefore, they deserve so much respect and appreciation for their work and effort. 

Let’s use this as an opportunity to support these communities and foundations. So, hit that sponsor button and send some good karma. From Hostinger’s side, we have contributed by donating to the Apache Software Foundation.

Additionally, if you are a developer who needs hosting for a project or you are struggling with getting it online, let us know at support@hostinger.com. All of us at Hostinger are ready to help.

Stay safe everyone,

Balys
CTO @ Hostinger

Further reading:
https://blog.talosintelligence.com/2021/12/apache-log4j-rce-vulnerability.html 

https://blog.cloudflare.com/inside-the-log4j2-vulnerability-cve-2021-44228/

ASF Donation page: https://www.apache.org/foundation/contributing.html

Validate the affected software here: https://github.com/cisagov/log4j-affected-db

Each time, more and more people attend informal meet-ups dedicated to topics ranging from coding to project management. On 25 November, KIT Club, in collaboration with Hostinger, invited the community to join three outstanding speakers in a discussion on Cyber Security. 

A Diverse View of Cyber Security

This time, Cyber Security experts shared their knowledge and insights on the following topics:

• Egidijus Navardauskas, the Head of Cyber Security at Hostinger, introduced OSINT tools and demonstrated how attackers could easily find vulnerable targets via publicly available information.

• Justinas Radzevičius, the Information Technology Security Analyst at Devbridge, introduced phishing attack simulations, overlooked Devbridge’s approach on testing employees’ awareness levels, and discussed the tools to avoid phishing as the most common social engineering attack these days. 

• Mike Robson, the Head of Quality Assurance at TransUnion, led us through the complex journey to make web applications secure. 

Join the KIT Club Facebook community and stay tuned to upcoming events!

Hostinger makes every step of building a website intuitive for beginners and straightforward for web professionals by offering a full package for hosting WordPress sites.

Let’s have a look at the recent WordPress hosting updates that help improve the customer experience.

WordPress Migrations Automated

We offer an in-house developed and fully automated way to migrate websites – users just have to provide their WordPress admin panel’s URL, login credentials, and the login information of their previous hosting account. Once it’s verified, Hostinger will migrate their WordPress websites in just one click.

LiteSpeed Cache Plugin

After boosting LiteSpeed initiatives, we’re thrilled to highlight the results that benefit our customers! Performed tests show users’ websites loading four times faster for WordPress with LiteSpeed Enterprise Web Server supported by Hostinger’s servers. This makes the most out of WordPress when combined with the LiteSpeed Cache plugin for WordPress – one of the best cache plugins for WordPress to improve performance and reduce resource usage.

Upgrade Options

Upgrade Recommendation

We understand that clients may not check the resource analytics of their hosting service often. As a result, they might not notice when their websites start getting more traffic and using more server resources. For this reason, we’ve implemented the Upgrade Recommendation feature.

When the plan resources limits are reached, we point them out and identify how long they lasted in the Order Usage section in Hostinger dashboard. We suggest customers upgrade to the next plan on a ladder based on the hit limit. We don’t recommend upgrading if there is a minimum threshold and limits were hit for a short time.

This element is affected by the LiteSpeed Cache feature – we strongly recommend installing the LSCache plugin first to reduce load and improve response time. We also send email notifications each day after the limit was reached (no more than once a month).

There are two options to upgrade:

1. Upgrade without paying additional fees – by reducing the renewal date.

2. Usual upgrade flow by paying and extending the expiration date.

New File Manager

Our new File Manager gives you direct access to website files and allows users to edit, delete, extract, move within folders, or import files directly to the server. Also, it calculates directory sizes and finds out which ones are using the most space.

Based on users’ feedback and requests, recent File Manager updates increased file upload size and introduced a Trash folder, inodes and size indicators for files and folders. Additionally, it improved Files/Folders Download functionality so that users can select required download types.

Self-Transfer (Data Center Change)

As Hostinger has data centers in many regions worldwide, clients often ask our Customer Success agents to change the Data Center location. It is no longer needed – a new self-transfer service is introduced so that clients can initiate the transfer independently at a convenient time. It’s completely automatic and free.

This feature is most efficiently used with Access Logs (see the detailed description below) by checking where most of your visitors are coming from and transferring your hosting plan to the nearest data center location by yourself. 

Soon, we will automatically analyze website visitors’ traffic and recommend transfer to the nearest location to benefit from this and always have the fastest response time due to the short distance to the data center. 

Website Access Logs 

Access Logs is a convenient tool that shows all important information related to your website visits: which countries your websites get the most views from, which devices your visitors use, and many more. An updated feature allows users to take a closer look at the type/number of the requests your websites are getting, including the data on an hourly, daily, or weekly basis. 

It can also detect unwanted traffic and help mitigate security issues by identifying if users’ websites are under DDoS attack.

Hosting Activity Logs / Changes History

The activity log is a useful feature if you wish to see every action that you make on your account in one place. 

Behind the Scenes

“Pursuing the eCommerce project and aiming to scale it uplifted the idea to develop a new service. It’s a good fit for wide-ranging e-shops with more than 1,000 items on sale, direct product stock, and price updates from suppliers which require system customization.” 

Merkys Maliukevičius, Hostinger System Engineer @ VPS Team

CyberPanel is a VPS hosting panel developed for large-scale eCommerce websites aiming to maximize profit.

Examples of such e-shop projects include PrestaShop, WooCommerce, Magento, and others. Different from shared hosting, CyberPanel VPS hosting ensures full root access to customize the server in any way you want.

Distinguishing CyberPanel

In an era where web hosting has become more accessible and competitive as a product, CyberPanel has managed to stand out from the competition in various ways. Firstly, there is the features lineup that makes the panel rise above its counterparts. Additionally, Hostinger is officially listed as an official CyberPanel partner, ensuring the most recent updates and features are available to our customers. 

OpenLiteSpeed / LiteSpeed

Enjoy a faster website and automatic website optimization with OpenLiteSpeed/LiteSpeed embedded into the core offering. It also stands as bulletproof to common PHP and HTTP threats, meaning more effective security protection.

LSCache

LiteSpeed Cache offers a built-in module with plugins for dynamic content building and optimizing sites to work on peak performance. Speed up your WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, MediaWiki, Magento, and more.

Intuitive Interface

From installation to website management, the CyberPanel VPS interface is considered to be one of its most robust features against the competition. Installation is a matter of a single command, and navigating the panel is just as effortless due to its minimal, clean design. Thus, it enables an easy and intuitive multisite network.

GIT Deployment

Connect your GitHub and GitLab repos and deploy code in a few clicks via GIT webhooks.

Multi-object Caching Support

Object caching integration made simple. With CyberPanel, you can integrate objects such as Redis, Memcached, or LiteSpeed Memcached (LSMCD).

Easy Backup and Restore

You can backup and/or restore from Google Drive, AWS S3, remote SFTP, or a local machine with one click.

HTTP/3 & QUIC Support

The latest HTTP protocol ensures better performance for fetching multiple objects simultaneously, fast connections, retransmission of lost packets, and the lowest latency.

WordPress Staging

Avoid unnecessary risks associated with testing on your live site. Experiment, test, and change things on staging before pushing it live.

Web-Based Terminal & Command Line Interface

CyberPanel affords you the luxury of a command-line interface for those who like to work in a terminal. That allows you to replicate the work you do in the control panel via CLI. With Web-Based Terminal, you can access your VPS SSH server and efficiently perform tasks from your browser.

Docker Manager

Docker manager simplifies Docker Container and image management. Search and pull images from Docker Hub or create Containers from available or pulled images in a few clicks.

Hostinger invites you to be attuned to these projections and changes even if you already work in the market.

How the Projections Are Made

When we talk about the future professions, we should pay attention to the fact that they’re projections, not predictions. It is not about a “guessing game” – instead, it is about a practice based on data research and studies. Cognizant’s Center for the Future of Work is an example of an institution that undertakes such research projects. The researchers analyze a series of variables in the present, aiming to comprehend how they will pose themselves in the future.

The only “crystal ball” used by futurologists are statistics and numbers, a thorough analysis of the current social and political arrangements, and a careful look towards the world’s tech tendencies. It means that creating future projections involves lots of reading about what is happening around us and building a mind map of various elements regarding technologies and societies.

It is then possible to affirm that generating projections about future professions requires a lot of research, interviews, statistics calculation, and comparative exercises. This is relevant and important work because it allows people to prepare for the occupations of the future.

20 Professions For 2030 According to Futurologists

Mobile technologies and cloud computing are significant elements at the moment. Therefore, most futurologists point out that the future of work will be significantly connected to them. All professions listed require knowledge and skills in technology and online tools. Let’s dive right in.

1. Big Data Analyst

As the trends indicate the amount of data and information flowing daily in our lives will continue to grow, a Big Data Analyst is the typical future professional many companies will request. In this case, the professional will be tasked with collecting and analyzing all types of data. Their goal is to analyze data and information that circulate online, improving the company’s projects and growth. By having someone suitable to explore the massive amount of data on the internet, a company can evaluate new opportunities and establish its business strategies. 

2. Cyber Attack Agent

Nowadays, many daily activities are executed online. People sell and buy goods and services through the internet, pay their bills, manage their bank accounts, and many other things.

That’s why it is fundamental to ensure the internet is a safe environment to do business. Thus, a Cyber Attack Agent will be one of the most wanted professionals in the future. They must have the knowledge to protect online systems and identify hackers.

3. Customer Success Specialist

The main goal of this professional is to provide comprehensive support for customers regarding a particular product or service that has been or is being purchased. A Customer Success Agent is responsible for ensuring clear communication between the business and the customer. The advantages of having these professionals in a company are clear – they ensure qualified customer service, promoting the client’s satisfaction and loyalty towards the brand. Even today, with loads of online stores using diverse communication channels, this professional’s role is vital.

4. Voice UX Designer

As voice devices increasingly dominate the web technology world, the services of Voice UX Designers become very relevant. For this technology to scale, a Voice UX professional must use their knowledge on user experience to develop and improve tech devices based on human voices. This professional must understand how the communication between the system and the user works, adopting the best practices to facilitate interaction.

5. Walker-Talker

Walker-talkers are professionals that work autonomously, interacting with elderly customers through online platforms. Basically, Walker-talkers work as someone who offers support to people who live alone and away from their families.

6. Information Security Analyst 

This professional aims to ensure that a business’ online and digital information is safe, preventing them from being stolen or manipulated. While online technologies develop, we must also pay attention to individuals that might act upon the chance of getting certain advantages by invading and attacking systems to steal data. It is worth mentioning that an Information Security Analyst is responsible for keeping the data safe as well as finding and developing new solutions that might help the company. 

7. Augmented Reality Manager

Unlike virtual reality, augmented reality (AR) keeps the user in the real world and provides the ability to interact with virtual elements. AR is not only used for creating games, but it also has a place in a more general business context. For instance, businesses such as furniture stores and interior decoration companies can showcase their products with the help of augmented reality technologies. Therefore, it is highly likely that professionals who understand and excel at this kind of technology will gain a lot of space in the job market.

8. Innovation Manager

An Innovation Manager evaluates all strategies of a business. Since innovation is essential to achieving an enterprise’s success and it will be even more in the future, this career will become more and more popular. Due to the ever-growing international competition among companies, the responsibilities of an Innovation Manager include establishing new strategies for a brand so that it can remain relevant. 

9. eCommerce Specialist

Online stores are not a tendency anymore, they are a reality. Each day, millions of people make online transactions and purchases. For that reason, the future is promising for eCommerce specialists. These workers determine the best strategies and most efficient technologies to increase sales and improve an online store’s business experience.

10. Mental Health Professional 

Taking care of your mental health is becoming one of the top priorities of every person living in this rushed day-to-day life. Pressure from work, our personal life, and excess of information usually result in a lot of stress. Consequently, the work of mental health professionals will become more and more necessary in our society. Psychologists and psychiatrists have a fundamental role in our community, and many now also offer their services online.

11. Talent Manager

Managing talents is an indispensable activity for a company’s success strategy, as it helps to keep great collaborators in the team and avoid high employee turnover. Efficient talent management identifies people’s strengths and weaknesses, helping to empower them into becoming even more qualified professionals. Besides all of that, a Talent Manager also recruits new employees. 

12. Internal Sales Representative

It is an occupation that will have more and more space in the market, mainly because customers are demanding more each day. A sales rep is responsible for making the sales process more efficient, which is fundamental towards guaranteeing a high-quality service for clients.

13. Machine Risk Officer

In our current technological environment, where companies use a wide range of machinery, a Machine Risk Office works to decrease or completely eliminate the risks affecting employees interacting with machinery.

14. Data Detective

This new profession is getting more space within corporations by the minute, and it will be a very sought-after job in the near future. The reason is evident: a data detective analyses many types of online data to increase a company’s revenue. The Data Detective investigates and analyses data, which allows them to cross-compare, share, and interpret the available information on social media platforms, websites, databases, and even registration forms.

By examining this data, the professional can detect frauds or failures that could compromise the company. Their work is also fundamental in improving applications installed in software – for example, Siri, and optimizing product sales processes. This future profession requires a great deal of knowledge in informatics, computer science, and areas such as financial mathematics and internet law.

15. IT Facilitator

IT has been long consolidated as a business cornerstone. Its relevance is even more evident in the digital era, meaning that IT Facilitators will be essential for a company’s success in the future. Apart from their core activities, an IT Facilitator helps other employees use workplace technologies and install software and security systems.

16. Ethical Sourcing Officer

This future profession refers to a person who has the objective to investigate, monitor, manage and promote deals for products and services supplies. An Ethical Sourcing Officer ensures that all provisions of a contract or agreement are met, taking into account the moral issues associated with it.

17. Artificial Intelligence Assisted Health Technician 

AI is already part of our daily lives in many ways. Facial recognition is just one of many existing examples. But AI also brings many advantages for the health sector. Those who already work in this area should start getting familiarized with tools based on AI, which help professionals examine and monitor patients remotely.

18. Cybercities Analyst

Nowadays, it is common to hear about the internet of things, which enables an online connection between many objects, creating a network of connected devices inside a household or in an urban scenario. It is in this context that a profession like Cybercity Analyst comes into play. This professional ensures the smooth movement of cars and people by managing data flows in a system. Such a profession of the future requires knowledge in digital engineering and AI.

19. Financial Coach

Coach is a catchy word at the moment. We have sports coaches, relationship coaches, and the one who tries to help a business achieve its goals – the Financial Coach. Companies search for this professional to improve their financial health, make them competitive, and maintain a positive and stable payments balance.

20. Chief Trust Officer

Such specialists work side by side with PR, communication teams, and financial managers. The Chief Trust Officer is fundamental for the company’s negotiation processes and management of cryptocurrencies. It is essential to have a professional with all the knowledge regarding digital currencies as the trends show that they will conquer more and more space in the market. 

Major Changes for the Future Professions

Cloud computing resources, streaming services, and artificial intelligence have been the reason behind the creation of new professions in the last decade. At the beginning of 2020, however, many professionals were caught by surprise by the Coronavirus pandemic. One evidence is the remote work regime adopted by many companies, allowing employees to work from home. Remote work turned out to be a great way to support social distancing, keep companies running, and retain employees. 

Besides that, current circumstances have already facilitated the integration of certain professions of the future into our 2020 job market. Computer Science is definitely a fundamental study and research subject for becoming a future professional.

Discover the Required Skills and Get Ready

For all the professions listed in this article, tech knowledge is a must but not enough. So, it is vital to also improve the following skills:

Complex problem-solving. Problems inside companies are becoming increasingly more complex, involving algorithms, data analysis, and control over specific tools. That is why one of the essential characteristics of a future specialist is mastering this skill.

Decision-making. The professional of the future must be ready to make tough decisions in a fast and forward-thinking way. Businesses typically handle a high volume of data and information, so speed is crucial.

Emotional intelligence. All the professions of the future require professionals who have self-knowledge and can manage their emotions. This ability is called emotional intelligence, an essential skill for making fast and tough decisions. An employee with high emotional intelligence thinks and acts in a well-balanced way without negatively affecting ongoing processes and their overall relationship with other professionals.

Critical thinking. The professional of the future acts with critical thinking, analyzing alternatives, testing hypotheses, and prioritizing issues to solve.

Professions of the Future are Technology-Based

The future is right around the corner. Thus, with technologies such as cloud computing and the internet of things, many new occupations are emerging. Therefore, whoever wants to enter the job market, must be aware of the new professions and the skills required. Stay alert and get ready with our tips!

Forget what you knew about Hostinger programmers, Customer Success specialists, operation managers, and innovation experts. Trick your minds and treat yourselves to an October-mist fantasy of how the websites of vampires, witches, and other mythical creatures would look like if they were our real-life clients.

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#2 Feel and look as new

Do you often feel like you have two left feet? Have you recently made decisions that costed you an arm and a leg? It’s time to stick your neck out and trust our clinic – my assistant and I will piece you together into the best version of yourself. You will never be the same.

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You don’t have to be the Wolf of Wall Street to look good. Sometimes it’s enough to be a wolf. A wolf aware of its appearance. Aware wolf. A werewolf. Grooming, cutting, trimming & styling – we do it all.  Open every day, except on Moondays.

#5 Don’t let your emotions tangle you

All wrapped up in your problems? Unable to deal with your mummy issues? Let’s discuss it layer by layer. Register today and have the first three sessions charge-free. No strings attached.

#6 Your hands were made for this

Imagine the perfect world. You’re smart. You’re confident. You’re fast. So fast. The wind is in your hair. It’s wild. Powerful. YOU are the wind. No one will ever call you slow again. Just put your hands on the handlebars and go…

Did these websites lift your spirits? Hostinger teams have put a monstrous amount of effort to add enough (pumpkin) spice, spooky & nice. We’re dying to hear what you think – don’t be shy to scribble a comment or two.

P.S. Halloween will be great – we can feel it in our bones.

We are thrilled to be recognized by HostingAdvice.com as the best web hosting provider for beginners and be listed as one of their top recommendations for the best VPS, WordPress, and most affordable web hosting services.

Best Host for Web Beginners

HostingAdvice.com has recently published an in-depth review of our services and rated Hostinger as the best host for those just starting their journey online. The core contributing factors include the uptime guarantee, resource-rich features, affordable pricing, and responsive customer support. 

“A champion of affordable hosting, Hostinger is a popular pick for site owners looking for beginner-friendly shared servers. More than 1.2 million customers call Hostinger home as they scale websites through site builder, VPS, and WordPress hosting plans. When searching for a new plan, Hostinger is among the best at balancing high quality with low prices.”

Laura Bernheim, Hosting Expert at HostingAdvice.com

Features

Hostinger’s ultra-affordable domain registrations, intuitive first-rate hosting account control panel, and comprehensive but straightforward email tools are highlighted as distinguishing features, making customers’ online experience fast, intuitive, and smooth. Knowledgeable resources, including accessible and extensive how-to guides, 24/7 global live chat support, and an online ticketing system, are noticed as valuable and helpful additions to take advantage of and improve at no additional cost. 

Ease of Use

Even if cPanel is considered the typical gold standard, HostingAdvice.com does not miss it while testing Hostinger’s services and commends Hostinger dashboard, our custom-created control panel. The web experts name it their favorite management interface since it puts all necessary hosting services in an accessible and intuitive package. 

Pricing

A solid balance on price versus performance is a remarkable victory for each company. HostingAdvice.com emphasizes Hostinger’s VPS pricing coming in about 5$/month less than its competitors. They recommend it as an appealing solution to experienced and budget-aware website owners who could benefit from the all-SSD infrastructure for scalability, speed, and reliability. 

Reliability

HostingAdvice.com underlines Hostinger’s heavy investments in above-average hardware, which significantly improves the reliability and stability of web hosting services. Our fast infrastructure, including virtual servers and quality maintenance, ensures prime availability and always-on websites. Also, easy access to SSL certificates and daily backups is a must for the highest standard security measurements.  

We were thrilled to have him as our webinar speaker sharing expertise on how to make money blogging. Explaining the whole concept in detail, Neil Patel discussed the hands-on proficiency and knowledge acquired over his career and provided helpful tips on starting your own online business. Every participant, from a beginner without a website to a professional eCommerce business owner, had a chance to learn something new during the event.

We are excited to share our post-webinar key takeaways with you:

Choosing a blog post topic. First and foremost, pick something you are passionate about. Secondly, make sure that it is trending upwards, meaning more and more people are getting interested in the topic. Don’t worry about the saturation of a specific topic. Simply because a keyword is mentioned often, it doesn’t mean it is adequately covered. 

Content creation and publication. Whether you’re an expert from the get-go or become one along the way, the only way for your content to be successful is making it informative and jam-packed with valuable and actionable information. Thanks to search engines algorithms, posting fake news and inaccuracies will significantly hurt your domain authority. 

Neil Patel states that three times a week is a good starting point regarding publishing frequency. However, in an ideal world, you should be writing and posting once a day. Word count should be enough to get the message across, so don’t focus on the quantity of words but on the quality of your content. 

Ways to make money and the monetization of traffic. Before thinking of monetization, you need to build a steady audience. Once you do that, start with adding a lead magnet to gather emails so you can begin promoting the content you will charge for. It might sound like an elementary method, but it does work. If people find your content valuable, they will be willing to buy from you. Another way of doing it is through affiliate products, AdSense, and banner apps. Test and see which ones work better for you and your niche. 

When it comes to growing your traffic, Neil Patel mentions a few ways to get more people to see the content:

• Inform followers about the new content on social media platforms.
• Send an email blast.
• Reach out to other publications with backlinks to competitors and offer them to add yours.
• Add internal links between the content pieces to make people stay within the content ecosystem. 

How to tell if your blog post is successful. As far as “going viral”, Neil Panel notices that there is no secret sauce. Asking people is the most honest and direct way of finding out what they think of your content. Tools like SurveyMonkey can quickly help you with feedback forms and surveys. It’s all a matter of timing, audience reaction, and chance. What is shared amongst all viral content pieces is the quality of content, so all you have to do is keep producing, and your moment will come. 

Can you make money from YouTube? Yes. While the most popular belief about YouTube monetization is that it works only through views and ads, Neil Patel suggests using YouTube content to send viewers to a landing page or an event. He even alluded to famous YouTube star Logan Paul who turned his YouTube followers into paying customers for his most recent fight with boxing royalty, Floyd Mayweather. 

Is using algorithms and artificial intelligence to create content penalized by search engines? Using these tools to create content won’t necessarily penalize you, but it will affect the quality of content designed as they are far from perfect. These tools help speed up the process, but it does take a hit on the quality of your content. 

What is better ‒ Facebook Ads or Google Ads? Both channels are good, and the way to decipher which one is better for you is by testing them out. The goal of using them is to make money online, and different channels work better for different niches and types of content. Test, adjust, and modify your approach accordingly. 

Three best plugins for WordPress. Neil Patel suggests Yoast or RankMath for SEO, Polylang for translations, and Akismet for spamming. 

Even though it is a very brief recap of what transpired on the webinar, there are a lot more questions and answers by Neil Patel himself. These are real jewels that can help you get discovered by search engines fast.

About CoinGate

CoinGate is a Lithuanian fintech company developing solutions for companies seeking to accept Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as payment methods. Over seven years, more than 1.5 million orders have already been executed in the settlement system using various tools – eCommerce plugins, flexible APIs, email billing, and more. All of them provide the opportunity to get paid in crypto and receive fiat payouts to a bank account. 

Broadening Crypto Payment Opportunities for Customers

Hostinger is constantly developing and improving customer payment services according to the changing market needs. We plan to use the full range of cryptocurrencies supported by CoinGate and aim not to limit our customers’ choices. We are ready to give them the freedom to choose a currency based on their personal preferences. Additionally, the option to pay with cryptocurrencies will be available for all Hostinger locales, including .com, .es, .br, and others. 

“CoinGate has everything we expect from a crypto payment provider. It has a vast selection of cryptocurrencies and an easy payment flow with all the necessary details for customers to complete transactions seamlessly. All these elements are packed into a brilliant UI. As cryptocurrency payments are becoming more and more popular, we believe it is important to offer them to our customers. While the crypto world might be complicated, choosing the right partner is necessary. That’s why we’ve chosen CoinGate. Not only will this give us the option to offer different types of cryptocurrencies for payments, but we will also be able to control the volatility risk by converting crypto to fiat instantly, which is one of CoinGate’s features we enjoy the most,” says Gediminas Griška, Hostinger’s Head of Payments.

Risk Management and Ensuring Quality

Payment partners are vital to the success of any business, and Hostinger is not an exception. In order to give our customers more freedom when paying for services in cryptocurrencies, we have chosen a payment provider who takes regulatory risks very seriously. By applying the highest quality and security standards for our services, we will stop any illegal abuse attempts quickly and efficiently, regardless of the type of payment.

We are delighted to be announced as Neil Patel’s top pick for best overall web hosting services, VPS hosting plans, and WordPress hosting. 

#1 Web Hosting Services

Having a reliable web host is a must in today’s world. Therefore, to find the best web hosting provider, Neil Patel focuses on the quality of services and checks uptime reliability, loading speed, and customer service excellence. 

He shares recommendations for the best web hosting services in 2021 and lists Hostinger as the first choice for customers searching for reliable hosting services. Affordable prices, instant loading speed, and daily website backups are major contributing factors. Also, expert 24/7/365 Hostinger customer support is listed as a massive perk for enterprises with a small or no IT staff. 

#1 WordPress Hosting

Neil Patel has been using WordPress blogs as a principal part of his business for many years. His substantial hands-on experience allows him to thoroughly evaluate multiple web hosting options. Shared vs Managed WordPress hosting, traffic volume, speed, uptime, and technical support were considered in his quest to find the best website hosting for WordPress. 

Hostinger is awarded as the best WordPress website host. Inexpensive pricing, essential features and resources necessary to create, design, and manage a WordPress site, and the ease of use even for first-time creators are key characteristics leading to success. Supporting factors include a free email account, domain name, CDN, and SSL certificate to ensure a smooth, fast, and secure online journey. 

Hostinger has optimized the WordPress experience for customers – LiteSpeed cache accelerates website performance and works well with most popular plugins. Additionally, helpful tools to get websites looking professional are provided at no cost.

#1 VPS Hosting Plans

VPS allows customers to get a dedicated amount of server resources, which means choosing a VPS hosting plan could drastically improve site performance. Neil Patel emphasizes Hostinger’s capacity of resources, distinction between total control vs shared responsibility, and timely and tech-savvy support as the primary reasons for his choice.   

According to him, the best VPS hosting services are offered by Hostinger. Attractive prices and an approachable interface make this service exceptionally fitting for first-time users. Even if it is a semi-managed plan offering a great mix of support and freedom to scale, Hostinger’s customer support agents are available, and additional helpful content is always provided. Also, a solid range of OS choices, including CentOS, Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, or Suse, are included with a one-click install feature. 

Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact on the Local Community 

The school facility is located in Wali Ate, Southwest Sumba, East Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia. Sumba is one of over 550 islands of Nusa Tenggara Timur and is considered one of Indonesia’s most impoverished and underdeveloped areas. Most households have no electricity, running water, or adequate sanitation. As a result, children lack the opportunity to access proper education. 

Therefore, choosing Indonesia was not accidental. Furthermore, Hostinger and our subsidiary Niagahoster are fortunate to build a school in a country where we have our offices. We recognize it as an opportunity to be close to the local community and see the direct impact on the learning environment. 

Collaboration With Happy Hearts Indonesia

With the help of implementing partner Happy Hearts Indonesia, children in Sumba, Indonesia, will receive education in a safe, earthquake-resilient school building. To achieve this goal, many renovations were carried out, from rebuilding classrooms, sanitation, and toilets, to providing books and stationery for teaching and learning purposes. After reconstruction, Happy Hearts Indonesia will conduct WASH (Water, Sanitation & Hygiene) as well as disaster readiness training to educate students, teachers, and communities. Additionally, teacher and school management programs, together with literacy courses for students, will be run for five years to guide each school toward self-sustainability.

The spirit of #BuildSuccessOnline and unlocking the power of the Internet is the incentive of Hostinger and Niagahoster to develop products and share their technology and benefits with millions of people worldwide by giving them tools and facilities to learn, create, and grow.

We hope this great initiative is only the beginning of our future endeavors! 

]]> Wed, 11 Aug 2021 12:35:59 GMT 2024-09-06T09:22:22.000Z https://www.hostinger.com/blog/hostinger-is-partnering-with-fiverr/ https://www.hostinger.com/blog/hostinger-is-partnering-with-fiverr/ News We are very excited to announce that from now on, our hosting subscriptions will include two additional services – Fiverr’s Digital Marketing and Business Service . Found right within your Hostinger dashboard, these services will help streamline the workflow and communication within your organization, no matter the size of your business. As many companies propagate remote work, tools that help with communication and efficiency are in high demand. With these developments, the freelancing industry is seeing a significant rise as well. So whether you’re a one-man-band entrepreneur or running a large corporation, here’s how you can use the new integrated Fiverr tools to manage your business better. What’s in It for You? The Digital Marketing and Business Service options are designed to help you grow your business by providing easy access to some of the best professionals within the industry. They let you hire an extra set of hands without having to spend countless hours looking for them. You can get help from reliable industry experts right from your Hostinger dashboard. With their assistance, you will be able to build a professional online presence and attract more traffic to your website. In other words, you can take your business where it needs to be with less time and effort. If you’re ready to start meeting your business goals faster, these tools are ideal. How to Use Fiverr’s Digital Marketing Service to Find Reliable Freelancers Log into your Hostinger dashboard . Then, scroll down to the Website section and click on Digital Marketing . You will be taken to Fiverr’s landing page, where you can find freelancers working in a variety of industries, ranging from graphic design to translation services and video production. Simply enter the keywords that describe the kind of professional services you require into the search bar, and you will be presented with a vast choice of industry experts ready to be hired with the click of a button. How to Use Fiverr’s Business Service to Streamline Your Projects To access this tool, log into Hostinger dashboard . Scroll down to the Website section and click on Business Service . You will be taken to the Fiverr Business landing page, where you can create an account for your company. Fiverr Business is a project management platform designed for efficient collaboration between teams and departments. This digital workspace comes with tools for keeping track of the budget, assigning tasks, granting approvals, and other project management tasks. What’s more, Fiverr Business lets you outsource freelancers that were hand-picked as top-tier professionals for your industry. You can sift through the suggestions right from within the platform and, once the freelancer is hired, assign them to projects and tasks with ease. Here are the key features Fiverr Business comes with: Project management tools that help manage orders, organize team tasks and responsibilities, and track overall project progress. Administration tools for managing the financial project status and budget approvals. Communication tools for easy collaboration with in-house teams and outsourced freelancers. The ability to create a private list of the freelancers you like working with. Access to a personal assistant that can help you with the account setup and additional white glove services. Fiverr Business is completely free of charge for the first year. After that, the price for this platform will go up to $149/year . No credit card is required to register, which means you can try this platform out risk-free. Improving Our Services, One Step at a Time The partnership with Fiverr is another step towards helping our clients grow their businesses and build an online presence. Our aim is to provide an exceptional, affordable, and seamless hosting experience – everything you need to achieve success. We’re happy to share this massive step forward with our users, and we are already working on some more exciting plans. Stay posted, and you’ll hear from us soon. We are very excited to announce that from now on, our hosting subscriptions will include two additional services – Fiverr’s Digital Marketing and Business Service.

Found right within your Hostinger dashboard, these services will help streamline the workflow and communication within your organization, no matter the size of your business.

As many companies propagate remote work, tools that help with communication and efficiency are in high demand. With these developments, the freelancing industry is seeing a significant rise as well. 

So whether you’re a one-man-band entrepreneur or running a large corporation, here’s how you can use the new integrated Fiverr tools to manage your business better.

What’s in It for You?

The Digital Marketing and Business Service options are designed to help you grow your business by providing easy access to some of the best professionals within the industry. They let you hire an extra set of hands without having to spend countless hours looking for them.

You can get help from reliable industry experts right from your Hostinger dashboard. With their assistance, you will be able to build a professional online presence and attract more traffic to your website. 

In other words, you can take your business where it needs to be with less time and effort. If you’re ready to start meeting your business goals faster, these tools are ideal.

How to Use Fiverr’s Digital Marketing Service to Find Reliable Freelancers

Log into your Hostinger dashboard. Then, scroll down to the Website section and click on Digital Marketing.

You will be taken to Fiverr’s landing page, where you can find freelancers working in a variety of industries, ranging from graphic design to translation services and video production.

Simply enter the keywords that describe the kind of professional services you require into the search bar, and you will be presented with a vast choice of industry experts ready to be hired with the click of a button.

How to Use Fiverr’s Business Service to Streamline Your Projects

To access this tool, log into Hostinger dashboard. Scroll down to the Website section and click on Business Service.

You will be taken to the Fiverr Business landing page, where you can create an account for your company.

Fiverr Business is a project management platform designed for efficient collaboration between teams and departments. 

This digital workspace comes with tools for keeping track of the budget, assigning tasks, granting approvals, and other project management tasks.

What’s more, Fiverr Business lets you outsource freelancers that were hand-picked as top-tier professionals for your industry. You can sift through the suggestions right from within the platform and, once the freelancer is hired, assign them to projects and tasks with ease. 

Here are the key features Fiverr Business comes with:

• Project management tools that help manage orders, organize team tasks and responsibilities, and track overall project progress.
• Administration tools for managing the financial project status and budget approvals.
• Communication tools for easy collaboration with in-house teams and outsourced freelancers.
• The ability to create a private list of the freelancers you like working with.
• Access to a personal assistant that can help you with the account setup and additional white glove services.

Fiverr Business is completely free of charge for the first year. After that, the price for this platform will go up to $149/year. No credit card is required to register, which means you can try this platform out risk-free.

Improving Our Services, One Step at a Time

The partnership with Fiverr is another step towards helping our clients grow their businesses and build an online presence. Our aim is to provide an exceptional, affordable, and seamless hosting experience – everything you need to achieve success.

We’re happy to share this massive step forward with our users, and we are already working on some more exciting plans. Stay posted, and you’ll hear from us soon. 

WordPress is the best way to build your website. The fact that more than 40% of all websites are now powered by it just proves it even more.

That said, it’s important to stay vigilant – nearly every week new security issues are discovered in some of the popular WordPress themes or plugins.

95% of WordPress Security Vulnerabilities Originate From Plugins and Themes

When looking at the 2020 data of the Patchstack Database which lists all WordPress core, theme, and plugin vulnerabilities, we see that 95% of the security vulnerabilities originate from third-party plugins and themes.

It’s more important than ever to monitor the software versions on your website and immediately identify vulnerabilities in installed plugins and themes so you can react before the bad guys take advantage of them.

In many cases, security vulnerabilities of popular plugins and themes are targeted by hackers within hours once they become public. This means that most website owners can’t react in time when a critical vulnerability is discovered.

Prevention Is Always Cheaper Than Fixing a Hacked Website

Even by looking at the cost of a clean-up as compared to an annual website security license, it’s clear that the risk is just not worth it.

An average malware clean-up service costs around $200 while an annual website security license is about 35% cheaper. Yet this is just the tip of the iceberg.

When we look at this from a business perspective, the cost of damaged SEO, redirected traffic, reduced customer trust, and downtime is far more expensive.

Patchstack Detects WordPress Vulnerabilities First

To protect yourself from a threat, you need to be aware of it first. This is where Patchstack really stands out.

Patchstack has its own vulnerability database which is backed by a community of security researchers called the Red Team.

The Red Team works to find new vulnerabilities in popular plugins and themes before hackers can abuse them.

This makes the Patchstack vulnerability database the most frequently updated source of WordPress security vulnerabilities and allows it to be the first to provide protection.

Patchstack Applies Automated Fixes to WordPress Vulnerabilities

Once your website is connected to Patchstack and a vulnerable plugin is found on your WordPress site, a virtual patch is applied instantly to the website.

You can think of the virtual patch as a very specific firewall rule that blocks any third parties who might try to abuse the vulnerable functionality on the website.

Virtual patches are considered very accurate and in 99% of the scenarios produce no false positives, so your real website visitors will remain unaffected.

Free to Get Started for All Hostinger Customers

If you’re serious about your website and want to have the best security possible, navigate to Hostinger dashboard and click Install. It’s that simple!

All Hostinger users are eligible for free WordPress security vulnerability detection and automatic virtual patching for 200 blocked threats.

If you don’t want to take any chances, use hostinger50 at checkout to get 50% off the annual Patchstack plan.

Especially since remote work has become the norm, rather than the exception. This means that every bit to increase your productivity helps exponentially.

Productivity, collaboration, calendar, and email tools allow for brainstorming, easy scheduling, and streamlining project management.

We’re glad to announce our partnership with Google to offer Google Workspace to all of our customers.

What Is Google Workspace and Why Should You Use It?

Google Workspace is an all-in-one solution for businesses to get their work done efficiently and on time.

Previously known as G Suite, it includes a wide selection of Google applications, notably Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Meet, Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google Drive. 

We’re offering Google Workspace due to its seamless integration to any type of workflow, particularly when collaborating in a remote-work environment.

Here are more details about the specific products that Google Workspace offers.

Powerful Business Email

Gmail Business works like magic with other Google products, allowing users to perform a variety of tasks without having to use different applications.

Users can schedule a Google Meet and manage their Google Tasks in the same interface, as well as connect third-party apps such as Slack and Zoom to Gmail. 

Security-wise, it comes with an ad-free interface and advanced features to filter out and block spam, phishing, and malware.

This is coupled with the use of a custom email domain, so your company’s email address will look credible and professional.

Optimized for Face-to-Face Interactions

Since remote working is becoming the norm for some companies, Google Workspace features all the tools you need to accommodate your video meeting needs.

For instance, you can view your co-worker’s availability through shared calendars when scheduling meetings. Screen-sharing while video chatting with others is also possible, making presentations a breeze to set up. 

Real-Time Collaboration

Collaborating with your team has never been more efficient with Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides. With a built-in chat tool, you can communicate with colleagues while working on a document at the same time. 

With the use of comments, users can make suggestions or assign tasks. All the changes done to the document will be recorded, so you can see who made the edits. 

Cloud Storage

Depending on the plan, Google offers cloud storage starting from 30 GB per user. You can access your Google Drive via desktop, and mobile devices, allowing for on-the-go file management. 

Secure Data Management

We’re all about security here at Hostinger, and Google Workspace is no different. Administrators will have the option to manage member access and set up two-factor authentication for secure logins. 

Google will also notify when potential security threats come up so that admins can investigate the issues as soon as they arise.

How to Get Google Workspace at Hostinger

We will start including a Google Workspace account in our WordPress Business plan. It will also be available in other hosting packages and as a standalone purchase.

We believe this partnership will help everyone take their online business to the next level.

As such, we have decided to expand our list of domain extensions with a powerful and modern option – the .icu domain extension.

It was launched in May 2018 by ShortDot – a new, yet fast-growing domain name registry. Now, more than 6.2 million domains in more than 125 countries have this new extension variant.

.icu is short for I See You has been especially well-received by bloggers and cryptocurrency investors as well as designers and architects creating online portfolios.

ShortDot company works with registrars, hosting companies, and other retail outlets that sell domains to make it easy for them to get these domain extensions for their customers.

We believe that this new venture will help you express your ideas and grow your business like never before.

We have teamed up with Flock, a provider of business productivity apps. It is a proprietary messaging and collaboration tool, which is available for Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS. Flock empowers users with the opportunity to configure external apps and integrations from the Flock app store and receive notifications and updates directly in Flock. The partnership means that Hostinger customers will now be able to choose Flockmail for their email needs. 

“If you have the need for speed, then welcome aboard,” said Arnas Stuopelis, CEO of Hostinger International. “We are very excited that our clients will have access to the extremely fast, reliable and easy-to-use Flockmail service for their personal and business needs. Clients  appreciate when they are cared for, and this exciting partnership is another way for Hostinger to fulfill its value of helping customers to succeed by providing them with the best online tools to do so.”

Flock’s CEO and Co-Founder, Bhavin Turakhia, a veteran entrepreneur who has built four successful businesses over the last two decades, explained that his company aims to replace the current email experience with the significantly superior Flockmail client. It will give users the opportunity to upgrade to premium plans on the Flock cloud, which is underpinned by its state-of-the-art infrastructure, reliability and anti-spam measures. 

“The partnership between Flock and Hostinger is perfect for companies seeking a reliable business email service without costing them enormous amounts of money,” added Turakhia. “This partnership will be a strategic win for both parties to empower their customers.” 

We hope that this collaboration will help us provide even more opportunities for our clients to learn, create, and grow online.

If you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact us directly or simply post them in the comments section below.

We want to update you on what further steps are being taken to ensure the future security of Hostinger’s clients and services, along with what our teams have learned while revising the security vulnerability issues that caused the incident. This is just the beginning of our security improvement roadmap. Here is what we have done so far:

1. We have rewritten a considerable amount of our backend system code and removed a lot of dependencies on external libraries that had the potential to be vulnerable.
2. We have assembled a dedicated cybersecurity team. They are constantly monitoring our systems and are performing internal security tests to find any possible loopholes. This has dramatically raised the awareness of our staff to be more vigilant and cautious.
3. We are implementing auto-rotatable system passwords (Hashicorp Vault), so any system-critical login credentials are only valid for a period of up to 2-3 days.
4. We are rolling out a Two-Factor Authentication feature for our clients over the following two weeks. It will allow our users to set 2FA for their services, so it will be no longer sufficient to use your login credentials only.
5. We are moving out any client-sensitive data, such as emails, names, and surnames outside to a separate database, which can only be accessed through a strictly audited channel. Calls to this database will be minimized since 99% of actions on our platform do not require this information and can solely rely on the Client ID of our users.
6. We have removed a lot of deprecated code and logic, minimizing many attack vectors.
7. As mentioned previously, we have rotated all of the credentials on our systems, decreased access rights for our staff, so any user on the system can only access the necessary amount of resources.
8. We are implementing Bastion servers to reduce direct connections to servers and reducing the number of systems that have access to internal systems.

As you can see, some efforts are still ongoing since we are prioritizing sustainable and smooth implementation. We aim to finalize these changes before the start of 2020 while planning other security improvements for the future. We will make sure that all Hostinger clients will be informed on the latest changes on our blog so they can begin using these new features as soon as possible.

Finally, we would like to thank our entire community for the utmost patience, trust, help, and feedback provided during the incident. We would not be where we are now without all of you.

August 25th, 2019

We have reset all Hostinger Client passwords as a precautionary measure following a recent security incident. We are taking this extremely seriously and want to let everyone know what has happened and the immediate steps we have taken to protect our clients’ security.

During this incident, an unauthorized third party gained access to our internal system APIs. One of them had access to hashed passwords and other non-financial data about our customers.

We have restricted the vulnerable system, and such access is no longer available.

We are also in contact with the respective authorities.

What Happened?

On August 23rd, 2019 we received informational alerts that one of our servers had been accessed by an unauthorized third party. This server contained an authorization token, which was used to obtain further access and escalate privileges to our system RESTful API Server*. This API Server* is used to query the details about our clients and their accounts.
*[Latest Edit on 2019-08-25 17:43 UTC]

The API database, which includes our client usernames, emails, hashed passwords, first names, and IP addresses was accessed by an unauthorized third party. The respective database table that holds client data, has information about 14 million Hostinger users.

We Have Reset All Client Passwords as a Precautionary Security Measure

We use a cryptographic hash function to encrypt all our client passwords. It is a one-way mathematical function that converts your password to a seemingly random sequence of characters. However, as per standard and precautionary security practices, we have reset all Hostinger client login passwords. We have sent emails to all Hostinger clients with further information regarding the password reset.

Hostinger Client Financial Data Is Safe

Payments for Hostinger services are made through authorized and certified third-party payment providers. It means that we never store any payment card or other sensitive financial data on our servers and it has not been accessed or compromised.

Hostinger Client Websites and Data Are Not Affected

We completed a thorough internal investigation. Hostinger client accounts and data stored on them (websites, domains, hosted emails, etc.) remained untouched and unaffected.

What Steps We Have Taken So Far

Following the incident, we have identified the origin of the unauthorized access and have taken necessary measures to protect data about our clients. This includes a mandatory password reset for our clients and systems within all of our infrastructure.

Furthermore, we have assembled a team of internal and external forensics experts and data scientists to investigate the origin of the incident and increase the security measures of all Hostinger operations. As required by law, we are already in contact with the authorities.

The investigation is still in its early stages. All updates regarding this security incident will be posted in this blog, on our status page, and sent directly to our clients via email and across other channels.

What Our Clients Can Do to Further Secure Their Accounts

Following the password reset, we urge our clients to choose strong passwords that are not utilized elsewhere. Clients should be cautious of any unsolicited communications that ask for your login details, personal information, or refer you to a website asking for the above information. We also strongly suggest not clicking on the links or downloading attachments from suspicious emails.

We remind our clients not to use the same passwords on multiple service providers across the web and to generate strong unique passwords with password management tools.

If you have further questions regarding the security of your account, you may contact the Hostinger Help Center which is available 24/7.

We will be updating this blogpost regularly with important updates regarding this security incident.

If you have any further questions, please refer to Hostinger Help Center.

For media inquiries, please contact press@hostinger.com.

If you wish to delete your personal data from Hostinger, please contact gdpr@hostinger.com.

It was an honor to represent Hostinger in this gathering and learn about valuable insights, experiences, and strategies from people who work in Silicon Valley.

I can’t share all the discussions and emotions in this blog post, but I can give you a look at key ideas and takeaways from the conference.

A Culture Will Skyrocket Only if You Find Your Way Through Four Forces

Being culture champions is not easier than being a pilot. Only if lift overcomes weight and thrust defeats drag can a plane lift off and fly.

The same concept fits perfectly into the workplace environment. I loved this comparison shared by Robert Ellis, Founder and Executive Coach at Futurosity.

Here are the four forces you need to keep in mind:

1. Lift is everything that makes you excited to come to work (e.g., good relationships with your colleagues, the atmosphere of the workplace, etc.).
2. Weight is everything that makes you want to stay at home and in your bed (e.g., stress, tiredness, conflicts, etc.).
3. Thrust is everything that helps you get the work done (e.g., OKRs, the meaningful impact of your hard work, etc.).
4. Drag is everything that keeps you away from doing your best (e.g., meaningless work, etc.).

What became clear after this comparison is that many people, especially managers, think that orientation towards results is the only thing that matters. Lifting the cultural values of a workplace is often considered HR fluff. But if you take away lift and leave just thrust, your plane becomes a bus – heavy and way too close to the ground. You can go around the world, but how long will that take you? Unfortunately, you might get tired of trying to catch up with those who are ahead.

So if you want to have a great work culture, it is vital to have enough thrust without losing lift.

Recognition Is a Great Tool – Greater Than You Think

We all know the importance of feedback and how it can help people to improve and grow. Yet, sometimes we tend to forget to give positive feedback or comment on a job well done, focusing on correcting someone’s mistakes instead. Guess what – giving positive feedback is also an excellent tool for learning.

Alexa Powell from RewardGateway shared a presentation about recognition techniques as a tool to improve team dynamics and highlighted some important facts:

1. Recognition culture is all about creating a positive atmosphere and uplifting general morale. This method releases happiness hormones and boosts energy and motivation on a personal level.
2. Reaching your goal once and being recognized for it makes you try and repeat the same success in the future. So giving praise reinforces the desired behavior.
3. Recognition can work as an educational tool as well. When you’re publically recognized for your achievements, it serves as an example for other people to find their own success. It is important for an employee to identify what actions an organization considers successful.

Here are the three main steps on how to make recognition a powerful tool:
Other tips and tricks on how to give meaningful recognition:

• Feedback should be personalized, specific, honest, and authentic.
• It should be wrapped around a certain situation, indicate what someone is being recognized for, and show how a single person who made that extra step can make an impact on a larger scale.
• Always remember that one-time recognition means almost nothing. If you want to motivate someone, it should be repeated regularly and in a timely manner.
• If you want to show gratitude, always ask questions like “How did you do it?” or “Tell me about the challenges you’ve faced,” etc.
• Of course, results are the most important thing but don’t forget to focus on the efforts that gave these in the first place.

Here’s an example in practice:
After coming back from the Culture Summit, we’ve already begun to implement what we’ve learned. If you wonder how would it look like in practice, here is an excellent example of how to give meaningful recognition:

A Culture Can’t Thrive if It Is Not Built on Organizational Core Values

Why is it important to align with a company’s core values? Because defined values are where successful internal and external communication begins. Hiring, promoting, giving feedback, praising, or saying goodbye should always be based on core values.

This is how values are translated into day-to-day life:

1. A clearly defined, purposeful set of core values is one of the most useful tools in the hiring process. Evaluating the candidates with questions and situations based on core values is the best way to measure the organizational culture fit.
2. While evaluating performance results and giving feedback, values play a vital role as you can clearly show a person by what system they were assessed.
3. Core values are like guidelines for people on how to act and be successful in the organization.
4. If you illustrate how to embrace a core value with a story or an example, you create an internal learning tool on how to use it practically. Also, these stories can become a part of employer branding.

I hope this recap will help you bring more lift and thrust to your culture. Embracing core values and building a culture of recognition is something to consider for any company that wants to skyrocket.

Read more about Hostinger’s Culture

This year the conference had top-notch speakers from “Facebook,” “Netflix,” “Amazon,” “Mars,” “LinkedIn,” “Accenture,” etc., and had attendees from 45 countries.

We want to share our top insights from this conference while the experience is still fresh.

Key Takeaways

Two of our ten values here at Hostinger are “Learn and Be Curious” and “Hire and Develop the Best”.

Why is employer branding so important and what does it have to do with these values? Well, if you aim to actually hire the best people, you need to know how to attract the best candidates.

Because of it, we are constantly aiming to improve not only our products and marketing campaigns but also our teams, employee happiness, and of course employer branding strategies.

Here are the main lessons we learned while attending the World Employer Branding Day conference.

Amir Moini – Global Employer Branding Lead at Netflix

Amir Moini is responsible for employer branding at Netflix. Here are the key points of his presentation.

1. Videos Tend to Be Overused, So Choose Your Tools and Channels Wisely

Technology is an amazing tool, that’s a given. However, when looking through most videos companies produce, you notice the same gimmicks – networking events, mingling, and if you’re lucky, you might see some funny bloopers at the end.

When choosing the tool for your communication, think about:

•  The problem you are planning to solve
• The best way to communicate it

If that’s a video – go for it! Just don’t forget that teams might restructure, people might leave, and your video will not be up to date anymore.

Keep it fresh and original.

2. Quality vs Quantity Content

Creating multiple social campaigns for the sake of quantity will do more harm than good. Make sure to find the channels that fit your niche the best and share content that reflects the message you want to convey.

For example, Netflix only uses a couple of main social media platforms, which are segmented for attracting new employees and clients.

What’s interesting, Netlfix created a podcast about their brand not only to attract new talent but also to help with the employee onboarding process.

Main employer branding sources @Netflix are LinkedIn, WeAreNetflix social campaigns on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, job sites, and the podcast campaign about Netflix insights.

3. Prioritize and Focus Your Campaigns

Planning out your campaigns and learning how to prioritize tasks is crucial. Once you have a plan, stick to it.

Stay focused on projects you find meaningful and make them count instead of becoming sidetracked.

Do what is best for your company but don’t forget the employees and stakeholders – share your ups and downs. This way, you’ll receive tons of ideas about possible communication campaigns.

Use the data to be an informed captain who is capable of steering the ship with confidence and competence.

Johan Driessens, CEO (Chief Enthusiasm Officer) & Founder at Branded.Careers

The CEO of Branded.Careers Johan Driessens puts a smile on his employees’ faces every Monday morning (and every other day of the week). Here are a few of the highlights of his presentation.

1. A Great Employee Experience Will Create the Strongest Brand Ambassadors

According to Johan Driessens, companies need to create such a working environment where employees can express themselves freely and stay motivated and happy. This will help them uncover their full potential and secret talents.

Thus – hire people, not profiles. Help them to grow and support their lifelong learning. Build relationships based on trust and friendships as this creates a workplace people can be proud of.

Empower them with flexibility and responsibility with a little bit of fun and your employees will do some of the employer branding themselves by sharing your company’s culture.

2. Use Company Culture and Values to Influence Involvement From Your Employees

Companies that allow employees to take action and make suggestions can and will solve problems faster. In addition to that, such freedom will not only foster higher happiness levels but will also attract valuable talent.

Brett Minchington – Chairman and CEO at Employer Brand International

Brett Minchington is a top-notch leader in the employer branding field and a consultant for leading agencies and companies including Siemens, Aon Hewitt, PwC, Origin, Accenture, SIBUR, Elsevier, and World Vision. Here’s what we want to share with you from his presentation.

1. Be Strategic While Creating Your Employer Branding Plan

An employer branding strategy cannot be based on recruiting, marketing, or communication functions only. It should be joined between departments in order to get a broader, strategic view.

2. Employer Branding Strategy Is About Agility, Sentimentality, and Integrity.

Having a well-designed website and aesthetically pleasing social media feeds won’t cut it if you don’t reply to emails fast enough or provide a clingy customer experience.

If you can’t provide a great employee experience, your brand might fail, no matter how great the metrics are.

You need to make sure that your communication is on point by showcasing integrity and empathy.

3. Make Everyone You Work With Your Brand Ambassadors 

The best marketing strategy is happy employees. Every individual working at your company can and should be sharing social media posts, pictures, videos, and various moments from their daily work life.

In addition to that, they should be the ones representing your brand in various events and conferences.

Nothing will illustrate your company and its culture better than the people living it.

What to Take Away From all of This?

To summarize it all, here are the main global trends you should be implementing in your employer branding campaign.

1. Clear Communication and Employee Engagement

You need to highlight the strengths of your company culture, take care of them, and empower them. This can be achieved with strong and clear communication only.

Without building trust and employee engagement, it’s hard to have loyal employees. Always remember that happy employees will not only work better but will be automatically attracting new talent to your company.

2. Create Connections With Brands Looking in the Same Direction

Find creative ways to interact with various audiences, e.g. your customers, potential employees, students, and experts of the market.

Build relationships with other brands. Show them how you operate and learn from other organizations. Knowledge exchange and strong connections are an absolute must.

3. Clear Focus and Prioritization of Your Campaign

There is no clear blueprint for an EB strategy, so you should create one precisely while focusing on your company’s strengths.

Once you have a plan, stick to it and measure the outcome and output it provides. Only change it if it’s necessary.

Why Do Customers Love Our Support?

Because we’re close to them and we speak their language!

• Hostinger has 4 Customer Success centers worldwide and remotely working colleagues from five countries that are all ready to help our customers.
• Our support comes in 20 different languages for people to feel comfortable and welcomed.
• In most countries, we’re accessible 24/7/365 to make our customers’ web mastering journey as smooth as possible.
• On average, we respond in less than 2 minutes so people don’t have to wait long.

People get the best possible solution combined with skyrocketed response times and extra tips brimming with compassion and positivity.

4 Components of Hostinger Customer Support

• Empathy
• Correct Approach
• Relevance
• Efficiency

We understand our customers’ mindset, dive deep into their problem, and support them with love and care.

What Helps Us Improve Our Customer Support?

• Feedback from clients. It drives us forward. It even pushed us toward Intercom Live Chats so that our clients could get the fastest response times possible.
• OKR (Objectives and Key Results) and Monthly meetings. We track our quarterly and weekly performance to adjust to our users’ growing needs.
• “360-degree reviews”. We’ve borrowed this peer-review concept from Montessori schools and it keeps each of us accountable, enabling higher quality customer service.
• Happiness score. The more amazing support, the higher is the happiness score! We promote friendly competition with each other, and our clients benefit from it the most.

To wrap everything up, exceptional customer support is a part of the Hostinger identity. Every single day we strive to exceed our clients’ expectations because receiving great support pleasantly surprises them and makes them feel happy and appreciated.

Website Planet is a team of experts specialized in web hosting and website building. Over the years, the site has reviewed thousands of web hosting providers. Name any – you will find it on their list.

This time, Website Planet honors Hostinger as the best of the very best, scoring 4.9/5.

A Great Achievement

Ranking number one on Website Planet’s list of 1097 web hosting providers is a great achievement to Hostinger. It means a lot for the Hostinger brand, proving that those sleepless nights of hard work and tinkering have definitely paid off.

We do not intend to slow down. Hostinger will continue to push forward at the highest speed possible, just like we’ve been doing from the very start.

We would like to dedicate this to our customers – Hostinger could never prosper without them.

Hostinger will keep striving to reach new heights and set new standards for the industry – whether it’s breaking the mold by forgoing industry-standard cPanel with our very own custom-developed Hostinger dashboard or the technological breakthroughs we work on each day to improve speed, security, and ease of use.

At the end of the day, we want Hostinger to be an easily accessible all-in-one platform that helps our customers succeed online. You can learn more about our vision in this Website Planet interview.

“We have positioned ourselves as the fastest hosting provider with data to back that up. We want to become the new industry standard for speed, so we’re always developing the best and newest technologies, such as our proprietary Hostinger dashboard.” – Balys Krikščiūnas, CEO at Hostinger.

A Remarkable Customer Experience

Hostinger is completely dedicated to its customers. We pledge absolute loyalty towards our users and we do everything to keep them happy with our services.

It is etched in our DNA – it’s the driving force of our organization. If you’ve not heard our story, we had a modest start in 2004. Tens of millions of users later, Hostinger is growing like never before, hosting all kinds of websites across the globe.

Our mighty Customer Success team has made the utmost contribution – huge props to them. Upon review, we knew that immediate support assistance is the top priority. Therefore, response time is key. The only sensible solution to achieve that was to go completely live and scrap the traditional ticket system. With customers’ needs in mind, we strive to help them in any way possible.

We switched to a live chat system and as a result, our response time went down from hours to minutes.

Additionally, we provide a comprehensive knowledge base. We have divided our guides into several categories so that it’s easier to look something up. We guarantee that everything will be novice-friendly, right from the start.

Hostinger’s library of tutorials serves as “the silent advisor” for our customers since everything is ready at their fingertips.

It is just a couple of examples of how we look for the best solution in Hostinger. Such standards can only be achieved through a customer-centric approach and by viewing our customers as individuals. You can read Hostinger’s customer success story in more detail here.

Hostinger will not stop evolving. We will do our best for you.

The Challenge

We have provided our customers with a variety of communication tools to use for seeking guidance and support. Originally, this included a traditional email ticket system, which meant lengthy responses and delayed resolution. The other option was to enter a live chat, which accelerated the response time, yet proved to be a drawback when a customer got disconnected and lost the progress of the conversation.

The Customer Success team was held back due to technical issues and was unable to ensure effective solutions were passed on to individual users.

“We have an amazing team of highly skilled specialists. We identified that the problem was tied to the limiting software rather than the team itself. That was the breaking point. We simply couldn’t offer customer service that is anything less than perfect,” says Darius Grigorjevas, Head of our Customer Success team.

The challenge was to enable our customers to seek help in a fast, easy, and user-friendly manner.

The Decision

Our team implemented swift and efficient changes to make support assistance a priority. The only sensible way to achieve that was to go completely live and scrap the ticket system. For that reason, we chose Intercom. It offered a messenger-style live chat option which allowed our customers to jump back to the conversation at any time without losing the chat history.

Our customer queries and questions came straight to members of the success team, which meant that all issues were being solved on the spot. And thus we got the chance to stay efficient while maintaining the quality of service.

“We no longer had to worry about juggling live chat and tickets. We no longer lost customers to disconnecting chats, thanks to the messenger-style chat system that Intercom offers. Even simple features like a GIF implementation were a contributing factor. It adds a healthier and more personal approach. Something both our customers and Customer Success specialists love,” says Darius.

Intercom offered a way to integrate the perfect practice by decreasing the waiting time and reducing queues to a minimum. After the update, the response time went from several hours down to minutes or mere seconds, whereas the quality of service skyrocketed due to the customers receiving individual attention to their needs.

The Road Ahead

The customer’s feedback is what motivated us to look for the best possible solution. Constantly rising standards could only be achieved with a customer-centric approach, through diligent research, and through viewing the user as an individual, rather than a group. Regardless, the goal is not to jump to new updates simply for the sake of change, but rather to tackle and challenge the existing ones in order to find better ways to reach the customer and make sure our improvements make a positive impact for the user in need first.

Providing better, more thoughtful ways of solving problems on the road ahead is something we won’t stop pursuing.

This proves that customers believe in Hostinger for powering their operations. Even media outlets vouch for our hosting services, with respected analytical platform FinancesOnline recently giving Hostinger a glowing recommendation and two prestigious industry awards.

Garnering an 8.8 overall score and a perfect 100% user satisfaction rating on FinancesOnline, Hostinger is seen as a gold standard among the top hosting services in the industry. FinancesOnline’s business software experts attribute this to affordable hosting price, exceptional services, and top-of-the-line technology.

According to FinancesOnline, Hostinger makes the lives of developers easy thanks to its “fast, stable and streamlined web hosting services.” The review platform also commended our Hostinger pricing plans for providing economical options that deliver “good value for money.”

In addition, Hostinger was awarded the 2018 Great User Experience and 2018 Rising Star awards. These industry accomplishments serve as a testament to Hostinger’s quality user experience and highly positive feedback from customers.

At Hostinger, anyone can find an affordable web hosting plan for their work requirements. Make sure to visit our website and get in touch to learn how much does it cost to host a website. We guarantee 99.9% uptime as well so you can enjoy smooth online sailing.

Shaping Education Worldwide

Hostinger is a company that encourages learning, curiosity, and advancement. We have been participating in the IT education sector since the company’s establishment back in 2004. Furthermore, with the launch of 000Webhost, the biggest free web hosting platform in the world, we gave free access for users all around the globe to host their websites together with more than enough space to test and improve their projects and skills. We are also working with the best universities in the region to build really competitive educational environment, which is in-line with the current business environment in the region. Recently, we have joined forces with Vilnius University and become business and educational partners in building new study disciplines.

We are happy to know that a significant portion of our customers used our services to learn web development and test out their projects. Here are some of the reviews that our users have left:

“This is the best platform to test your projects.”

“It definitely helped me learn and present my work by hosting my files online for easy access.”

“Great tool for learning.”

“It is a great place to learn and showcase our skills in a mere simple fashion.”

“I use it a lot for teaching website design to Elementary students. It’s kind of perfect.”

Since millions of users were using our hosting platform to experiment, test, and learn we wanted to provide them with even more tools to accelerate their learning process. That is why we are joining our forces with BitDegree and running this campaign. The goal we want to achieve with this partnership is to provide our users, who are naturally curious, with the best learning experience possible to help them to succeed online even faster!

BitDegree – the Future of Education

BitDegree is a leading online educational platform, offering courses on most digital subjects, such as:

• Web development
• e-Commerce
• Data science
• Digital marketing
• Programming languages
• Game development
• Graphic design

These courses are created by teachers, designers, developers, and writers. Their goal is to work together and form the highest-quality learning material.

Here at Hostinger, we believe that education should be the driving force of the business. So, we have always provided educational opportunities to our employees via seminars, conferences, and books. Moreover, we are actively using Peer-to-Peer reviews and applying the Montessori Methods. Our employees who are curious and constantly striving to become better are what made Hostinger the company it is today.

We also genuinely care about our customers and their projects. Our ultimate goal is to help every project that is hosted with us to grow and succeed. That is why we’re providing our customers with the unique set of tools to advance professionally and take their online projects to the next level.

So, What’s in It for YOU?

Take this opportunity to study for free and learn how to monetize your next blog. Or learn HTML, CSS, SQL, PHP, or Javascript to make your website look truly unique. If you have already mastered programming, take advantage of search engine optimization (SEO) courses to help rank your site on the first page of Google. We believe that no matter how successful you are there is always something that you could improve.

What is more, free courses are not the only good news for our customers. In the future, BitDegree will allow you to earn BitDegree Tokens while you will be studying on the platform and it is already possible to pay for Hostinger services with BitDegree Tokens!

We would like to thank everyone who chose Hostinger as their hosting provider. Let’s stay curious and innovative together. I kindly invite you to participate in our educational campaign and forge the future of digital space together with BitDegree! We wish that you would never stop learning and always find new ways to improve. Take some time and explore how we applied this concept here at Hostinger and get to know the 3 processes we use to achieve results quickly.

Have you already tried BitDegree courses? We are very interested in hearing your feedback – please do not hesitate to leave it in the comments below.

What Is the GDPR?

The GPDR is the set of rules created by the European Commission. It defines how the personal data of EU citizens has to be used, and obliges the person or organization that obtains such data to use it in accordance with the GDPR.

What Constitutes Personal Data?

According to the European Union directive, personal data includes a name, an email, a username, an address, a phone number, age, financial and behavioral data, and more.

Why Is Hostinger Taking GDPR So Seriously?

After having examined our internal processes, we can confirm that Hostinger is already fully compliant with GDPR regulations. However, some legal technicalities are currently taking place, meaning we will be able to clearly present how Hostinger handles user data, together with how and what measures can be taken by any of our customers should they wish to fill out any kind of GDPR requests.

Hostinger’s decision to move towards fully GDPR compliance was – in addition to it being mandatory for any company operating in the European Union – customer service and data-driven. In other words, it was also based on Hostinger customers asking how their data is being used by the company.

“GDPR compliance is a must for any company,” said Hostinger CEO, Arnas Stuopelis. “Hostinger is a company that makes its customers number one, and a company that places its customer’s data and security at the top of our priorities. Therefore, employing the best practices surrounding data usage and adhering to them are of the utmost importance to us.”

How GDPR Will Help Hostinger Customers Stay Informed and in Control of Their Data

Hostinger believes that the GDPR will benefit its customers, as it will give customers more power in controlling what and how companies use their data.

From May 25, the service provider will be legally obligated to explicitly notify any user who signs up for a free or paid service and provides their personal data on how their data will be used before they complete their registration.

Whether the data is used for marketing, profiling, or transferred to third-parties, it has to be explicitly stated in advance.

The GDPR states that users will now be able to say no to certain types of data usage and will have to give consent to the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy outlined by the provider.

GDPR Will Allow Customers to “Be Forgotten”

The GDPR will clarify Hostinger’s right to “be forgotten” policy. This means that Hostinger will be legally required to delete the customer’s data and never use it again should the customer wish. Be aware that Hostinger already complies with this option. However, the details of the right to be forgotten will soon become clearer.

After selecting the right to be forgotten, customer data may be used in special circumstances to comply with some legal obligations such as the requirement to keep a copy of all invoices to comply with financial and tax legislation.

Should you have any further questions regarding what the GDPR means for you as a Hostinger customer, please do not hesitate to get in touch with us in the comments down below.

Thanks for reading!

– Your Hostinger Team

Despite its modest population of just under three million people, Lithuania has slowly gained a reputation as an emerging European IT and fintech hub.

Lithuania as an I.T. and Fintech Hub of the Future

Since 2009, Barclays, Revolut, Swedbank, and Booking.com have joined the growing ranks of internationally-operating businesses from Lithuania thanks to the country’s young, tech-savvy population, favorable business climate, and strong transportation links between Western and Eastern Europe.

The Bank of Lithuania (BoL) is confident that this trajectory will continue in the forthcoming years. BoL board member told Business Insider that he “could not deny” that Lithuania is aiming to attract companies registered in the United Kingdom to set up EU-based subsidiaries if and when the UK leaves the EU in 2019.

Hostinger’s Position in the Lithuanian Business Ecosystem

Hostinger is also an example of Lithuania’s position as a developing business hub in the Baltic-Nordic region.

Founded in 2004, Hostinger has blossomed into an internationally-operating company with 1.2 million international customers, and over 250 members of staff in Europe, Asia, and the Americas. In recent years, it has emerged as one of the world’s most competitive web hosting providers, thanks to its customer-centric approach to business, an outstanding level of performance, and highly competitive prices.

Hostinger, BitDegree, and Vilnius University

As a homegrown Lithuanian success story, Hostinger and its subsidiary company, BitDegree, were chosen by Vilnius University to be business partners and co-creators of its new “Marketing Technology” Bachelor Programme.

Hostinger’s Head of Marketing, Daugirdas Jankus, headed to Vilnius University to discuss the “booming” I.T. industry and take questions from the Marketing Technology course auditors.

“It’s absolutely brilliant that Hostinger and BitDegree have been chosen as business and educational partners to Vilnius University,” he said.” This shows that Hostinger’s mission to help people succeed with their online projects is really working. Not only our customers are insanely happy and successful with our products, but our work has also been recognized by educational institutions and also in the Lithuanian employment market. We have shown that despite Lithuania’s relatively small population, a business can do great things with the right people, and together they can bring widely recognized changes to any area the business operates in.”

BitDegree’s Business Development Associate, Julija Sabaliauskaitė added: “BitDegree believes that every student should have access to current and relevant education. Every minute spent studying should correlate to an actual skill being developed. Our goal is to have universities update their curriculum to stay relevant in 2018, meaning that new areas of study need to be explored.”

Lithuania has been a European Union member state since 2004, and changed its long-term currency, Litas, for the Euro in January 2015.

“Searching for low-cost, reliable web hosting? Look no further than Hostinger”

Those aren’t our words, but the words from a recent Hostinger review written by Top 10 website hosting. The authors advised everybody to “look no further” than us if they are searching for low-cost, reliable web hosting. Moreover, the review covers our exceptionally customer-centric business approach and unique technical solutions we use to scale our infrastructure.

This isn’t the first time we have received positive feedback from an international hosting review site. In 2017, we received the highest level endorsement by HostingAdvice.com for our “around-the-clock live chat support and a 99.9% service uptime guarantee”. In the recent Top 10 Web Hostinger article, its author applauded our “unique approaches when it comes to customer care”, which is why are among the fastest growing web hosting providers on the planet.

How we do it?

Whilst we are proud to have over 250 employees working in 10+ countries, we still work on a much smaller level in comparison to some of our more established competitors. Hostinger’s Head of Marketing, Daugirdas Jankus, explained that high level of customer onboarding and retention is due to our “insanely customer-centric” approach, and because “we love our customers and we are ready to do literally anything to help them succeed online”.

Here at Hostinger, we aim to serve our customers the best we can. Customer centricity is the main value of our company and all employees follow it. You can read more about Hostinger’s values here. We are sure – these are one of the secrets to our success.

In the meantime, we’d like to say a big thank you to Top 10 website hosting. We’d also like to hear about your experience of using Hostinger products. Drop us a review, and we will certainly take your recommendations into account!

With 000webhost experiencing such a high level of customer demand, 2017 was about meeting the challenge of scaling and supporting our platform in order to answer customers’ questions, and keep our web hosting product costless and ad-free.

The decision to scale allowed us to meet our customers’ level of requests. Throughout 2017, the 000webhost engineering team spent nine months developing an automated database management system. The system runs on heterogeneous MariaDB in LXC containers, which routes queries using HAProxy and ProxySQL. This has also allowed us to add more than 50 new servers, which automate load balancing between nodes as they become overloaded. Therefore, our users can be hosted on any server, meaning we are able to meet all of our customers’ needs at any time of day.

This innovative solution led to 000webhost being invited to the internationally recognized Percona Live Open Source Database Conference in October 2017. There, our Head of Engineering, Balys Kriksciunas, gave a presentation about the query routing logic in our new infrastructure in front of industry leaders from Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and others.

Yet with every success, sacrifices had to be made in order to keep 000webhost’s hosting free, and for us to maintain our level of top-notch customer service.  In order to ease the load on our employees and servers working with customers, we took the decision to take our websites offline for one hour, each day to ‘sleep’. Despite the concerning sounding ‘sleep’ mode, users can schedule when this happens, and they are still able to continue working on their project. However, their website will not appear publicly online for one hour, each day.

To conclude our most successful year so far, we were asked by HostingAdvice.com to reveal the challenges and secrets behind maintaining a free hosting platform. You can discover the ideas that make 000Webhost work, plus take a glimpse into our future by reading the interview here.

Moreover, we took a big step forward in terms of how we innovate. We bootstrapped the revolutionary BitDegree project, reached 100/100 on Google PageSpeed Insights, and moved even further towards full stack automation.

Finally, 2017 was the year in which Hostinger grew. And we grew tremendously. Compared to 2016, we doubled our revenue, the number of newly acquired users, and the total headcount at the company.

You may think that after such a record year we will be taking things easier in 2018. But we absolutely won’t be. We are working tirelessly to remain unbeaten at offering you the most affordable web hosting solutions in the world and are planning to improve even further on our record-breaking 2017.

How will we do that?

We can’t tell you everything. That said, below is a sneak peek of what to expect from Hostinger in 2018. We believe the key to our success will involve constant improvements to our products and our employees.

Improvements to Our Range of Products

• Improved infrastructure – we are planning a huge overhaul of all of our hardware and software. This will include the introduction of new features on all Hostinger products, meaning you will be able to succeed online even faster.
• Improved CMS compatibility – we are working towards improving the performance of Hostinger products with all major content management systems. WordPress will still remain our main focus.
• Improved VPS services – our virtual private servers will still be priced the lowest in the world. After listening to your feedback, we will focus on improving the performance of our hardware and making upgrades from shared web hosting plans to VPS as seamless as possible. Expect our VPS to run even more smoothly in 2018.

Improvements Amongst Our Employees

The biggest internal change we made in 2017 was the introduction of the Montessori education-based peer reviews. Instead of having time-consuming, chore-like face-to-face appraisals, all Hostinger employees now review each other as a way of self-improvement. In terms of customer support, this method of self-critique has led to us creating an ever-improving customer support team. Our employee productivity has improved, and the quality of our UP support is growing rapidly. We have no plans to stop this rate of development in 2018.

Improvements to Our Levels of Customer Support

Following a successful Black Friday in 2017, we noticed that we needed to improve our response time to customer requests. In 2018, we are aiming to make a breakthrough in our customer service department. We have already started this by implementing peer-to-peer feedback and recruiting Grade-A talent from around the world. We hope that this will dramatically raise our standards of customer service and we’ll see a major drop in our response times. After all, quicker responses mean happier, loyal customers!

Improvements to Be Even More Customer Friendly

• Our custom-built control panel will allow us to react quicker than ever to your – our customers’ – needs.
• We pledge to listen to what you want and will ask you to vote for the most needed features on all Hostinger services. We will then implement them based on their popularity.
• We will do as much as we possibly can to help you focus on bringing your online projects to life and making them shine. We want to spend more time helping you succeed and less time on fixing hosting provider-related problems.  

To keep you updated with how our plans are going, we will be writing a monthly round-up of our activities on this blog. Be sure to stay up-to-date with our journey because we’re sure it will be exciting. We want you to be part of it every step of the way!

In the meantime, do not hesitate to tell us what you enjoyed most about using Hostinger services in 2017. where you think we can improve this year, and what you would like to see us introduce. We’ll be sure to listen and take your feedback into account.

Grant or Request Access With Ease

Access Manager helps no matter what your needs are:

• Create or manage someone else’s website.
• Allow a developer to create or update your web project.
• Build a new project in cooperation with people sharing the same idea.

“Using Access Manager is super easy. It works two ways: you can request or grant account access. All you have to do is enter an email address and choose the access level. With two access levels, you can allow or deny making purchases on your behalf,” said Giedrius Zakaitis, Head of Product.

Super Simple Authentication Flow

We have made it easy for developers and website owners to work together. A developer can jump to an account they have access to. There is no need to log in and log out every time.

It also never gets confusing. A bright notification bar will appear when the developer accesses the client’s account. The bar will show the name of the client with the option to jump back to the developer’s account.

The account owner will always see a padlock if there is someone who has access to the account. Account managers can be removed in one click when their services are no longer needed.

Access Manager was one of the most requested features. “Since the soft launch, we have received a lot of positive feedback, which is the best inspiration and motivation to the product team. Our goal is to make Hostinger the best hosting platform on the planet. We will achieve this by listening carefully to what our clients have to say. This is only the beginning – we are not planning to stop anytime soon,” said Giedrius.

Access manager is available on all Hostinger accounts.

000Webhost at Percona Live Europe 2017

000Webhost is one of the biggest projects at Hostinger. It has more than 17 million unique users on almost a million databases. Our head of engineering, Balys Kriksciunas will be giving a talk on the difficulties met in the way. “We will show why we got rid of traditional web server-to-database server stack and started to use a more powerful and effective solution. In the presentation, we will show the roadmap of test and trial for various changes.” – says Balys when asked about major changes realized. He will also be talking about the outcome of our partnership with the creator of ProxySQL, René Cannaò, and will present our new architecture.

Balys has been working on 000Webhost since the beginning. Before his work at Hostinger, he was a data engineer at Rackspace.

Due to these new complex solutions implemented, 000Webhost is now able to scale much faster with better performance and serve much more users at once. Our automated solution will migrate users without any downtime between nodes that are running out of space or are overloaded.

Our vision here at Hostinger is to enable millions of people around the globe to unlock the power of the Internet and empower them to learn, create, and grow.

The positive feedback from our clients motivates us a lot. We believe that the happiness our customers spread around is the best evaluation of all the work we do to improve our services.

Work+Trust=MAGIC

The combination of hard work and client trust enabled us to achieve explosive growth during the past years. As a result, Hostinger attracted a lot of attention from leading tech experts.

HostingAdvice.com did an in-depth review of our services and rated them with a perfect 5/5 score! Here is the comment from Laura Stamey, Hosting Expert @ HostingAdvice.com:

“Even though 1.2 million people around the world trust Hostinger to provide reliable and high-performing services and support, the company doesn’t carry quite the same name recognition as other mainstream and US-based hosting providers. Nonetheless, the Lithuanian-headquartered host provides around-the-clock support, SSD-powered hosting, and cheap domain name registrations on par with the best in the business. Combined with the company’s truly stellar control panel, we wholeheartedly recommend Hostinger to prospective customers looking for a choice off the beaten path.” 

Read the full review HERE.

We Are Not Planning to Stop!

The perfect rating from industry experts is great proof that we are moving in the right direction. So we would like to thank all our customers for making this happen and promise to continue to improve!

Yours,
Team Hostinger

That’s why we’re excited to announce that we’re joining forces with Sift Science – a leading provider of real-time machine learning fraud detection. This should reduce the number of phishing attempts on our network by 95%. We believe it will make our service almost fraud-free.

This will mean higher search engine rankings for your website!

Fingerprint Technology

We take online fraud seriously – experts estimate that online fraud attempts have increased by as much as 30% in 2015. Since we want your website to rank as high as possible on search engines, we’re thrilled to join forces with a service that’s based on cutting-edge technology and protects companies like Twitter, Airbnb, and Uber.

“Sift Science uses innovative methods such as client device fingerprinting – it is unique data linked to a specific client which lets us know if the person has had any bad accounts in the past. This service shares the data to prevent abusers on other websites to abuse us. When we have an idea of which customers are legitimate, we can build better online experiences that our customers love” – Linas Mazonis, Business Development Manager at Hostinger, a global hosting provider with 18.6M users and 20M hosted websites, said.

Why Is Fraud Bad For Your Website?

Google and other search engines are serious about this issue.

“In some cases, when the spammers have pretty much taken over (…) a large fraction of the service, we may be forced to take more decisive steps to protect our users and remove the entire (…) service from our search results,” Google states.

Sift Science Saves More Than $1 Billion

It’s a common criticism that all too often banks and card companies do little to nothing to fight fraudsters, and in many cases seem happy to blame those who were scammed. This is where Sift Science comes – its customized cloud-hosted machine learning and behavior analytics platform scrutinizes hundreds of millions of fraud patterns in real-time each day, protecting hundreds of businesses and thousands of websites from online fraud.

Sift Science estimates that it helps customers deny over 9 million fraudulent charges each year, saving them more than $1 billion. Its list of clients includes Twitter, Airbnb, Yelp, Twilio, Jet.com, Indeed, Zillow, and Wayfair.

Facts

• The machine learning platform is powered by 16,000+ fraud signals updated in real-time from activities across a global network of 6,000+ websites (and growing).
• Payment security remains top of mind for both consumers and businesses, according to American Express which surveyed 1,021 U.S. consumers and 401 merchants. Nearly half (48%) of US consumers who shopped online in the past year have experienced payment fraud, representing nearly 80 million online consumers.