Hostinger web hosting is one of the internet’s most popular platforms, and has been featured multiple times in our guide to the best web hosting services. Our most recent Hostinger review gave the company and service 4 out of 5, with a special commendation for its great price and powerful integrated website builder.
We caught up with Hostinger’s CMO, Daugirdas Jankus, for a look at some of the challenges faced and successes won by the company over the last year, from dealing with COVID-19 to thoughts on remote working and the future of hosting.
Can you give us a brief overview of the company and what it does?
At Hostinger, we specialize in providing the best web hosting services with no compromise on price and quality.
We’ve grown considerably since our beginnings in 2004—our team currently numbers over 900 employees from all over the globe, with offices in Lithuania, Indonesia, Brazil, Ukraine, and Cyprus.
What’s been your biggest success, and why?
There are quite a few, to be honest. One of the most recent ones is being named the fastest-growing web hosting company in the world. While we are really happy with this result, rapid growth was never our primary focus. I think we managed to achieve this, however, for three main reasons:
- We are laser-focused on our clients. We listen to their feedback and get to know them personally. It helps us to be much more efficient in delivering value to our customers.
- We have exceptionally high standards for both our product and our teams. A great team can make big challenges far easier.
- Our Hostinger Principles. We embed a set of principles that represent our core values in everything we do, from hiring the right people to giving constructive feedback to our peers. Applying the same principles when we make decisions results in the faster execution of our initiatives. And speed matters a lot in our business.
What have been the biggest challenges, and how did you tackle them?
The biggest challenge for us is effectively managing our growth. We have doubled in size every year since 2017. On the one hand, it is really exciting and rewarding. On the other, this kind of speed puts a lot of pressure on our operations.
Even basic tasks can become really difficult with the headcount of the company growing twice a year. The structure and clarity of the organization can become very complicated. Tasks such as information gathering before we proceed with a project can be a real challenge.
We tackled this by increasing the transparency of our organization. We’ve built an internal tool called the Hostinger Handbook, where we all document how we work and what we do. With it, we have started to document standard operating procedures within our teams. This makes our structure and ways of working clearer, and thus onboarding is faster for new people.
We’ve also started working in a more asynchronous manner, so that everyone can get involved in a project regardless of time zones or geographical locations. All of our meetings are open to everyone within our organization, and are recorded and published for all to access whenever and wherever they feel comfortable doing so.
Ultimately, we believe that if everyone has access to the same information and follows the same set of principles, they will make the same good decisions. In our case, these principles are in place already, so we’re working on making as much information accessible to everyone as we can.
What impacts – both positive and negative – has the pandemic had on your business?
I would say we were in a lucky position. Our service became even more relevant, and we’ve experienced a significant increase in demand. We managed to ride this wave of increased need for web hosting services quite efficiently, but it came with some serious challenges as well.
First of all, we had to handle a huge number of new users. That put pressure on almost all of our teams and departments. We had to expand our technical capabilities to serve the rapidly expanding userbase, hire, train, and onboard a slew of new people due to the increased need for customer support, and do all of this while adapting to a work-from-home setup. It was an extremely challenging task but we managed to succeed, and now we are stronger than ever.
There is one negative aspect that the pandemic introduced to our business, though. For almost a year, we couldn’t visit our new HQ office, which we opened in February—just before the pandemic hit.
What new market challenges and opportunities have you seen emerge?
We see the web hosting market as a commodity market. That means the challenges and opportunities are related to getting noticed and being trusted in a field with a lot of fragmentation and tough competition.
We see a lot of opportunities around innovations focused on lowering the complexity of web hosting for users, keeping service quality high, and making no compromises when it comes to competitive pricing.
Are you taking advantage of the new world of blended and remote working? If so, how?
I would say that we consider the “new world order” as an advantage. We had a good head-start on this way of working as, from day one, Hostinger already had a lot of people working from various parts of the world.
Now, we’ve moved to a remote-first asynchronous work mode, which allows for more flexibility and control over our time. That means fewer hours spent in traffic jams and more time for hobbies, family, etc.
We are keeping our offices, and we plan to use them as work hubs for those who wish to change their working environment and/or who cannot comfortably work from home.
What are your aims for the future?
We plan to keep our pace of growth and continue to scale.
How do you see the web hosting sector changing in the next five to 10 years?
We think the web hosting sector will continue to grow, despite already being an established and huge niche. The internet is increasingly relevant, and in turn, having an online presence is becoming more and more important.
We hope the sector will continue to evolve and provide even more seamless, easy-to-use solutions for clients—whether they’re looking for a simple “virtual business card” or powerful ecommerce solutions.
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