AI has made it easier than ever to build a website, launch a product, or even create a software business without writing a line of code. But while the technology is advancing at breakneck speed, people's willingness to adopt it is lagging behind.
For Lithuanian tech company Hostinger, which is transforming from a traditional web-hosting provider into an AI-first platform for building and running online businesses, closing that gap is critical.
I spoke with CEO Giedrius Zakaitis to learn all about it.
From web hosting to helping people run businesses
Hostinger started as a web-hosting company, as its name suggests. Zakaitis recalls how installing WordPress once required users to upload files, create a database, and configure everything themselves. Managed hosting subsequently turned that into a one-click process.
According to Zakaitis, the company eventually understood that its role was really about making complicated technical things available to non-technical people.
“Today, hosting itself is almost an abstraction. You don't really talk about hosting anymore; you simply expect things to run.
Ten years ago, if you had an idea, the question was: can you build it? You needed to be a developer, hire one, or have the budget to pay someone.
Now building isn't really the question anymore. It's becoming incredibly easy to build something. The question is shifting towards: can you actually run the business?"
That's where Hostinger is increasingly focused: helping people get started, and then helping them run what they've created with AI.
Beyond websites, technologies such as virtual private servers (VPS) are becoming increasingly relevant to AI agents. Rather than running an agent on a personal computer or buying a separate machine, customers can run it on a virtual server with full access.
Zakaitis also sees growing opportunities in tools people build for themselves.
“I spoke to a customer recently who had been injured and was given a recovery plan. They built themselves a really nice interface that simply asks: did you do your stretches? Did you do this exercise? It gives them a way to track the recovery plan and keep themselves accountable.”
The company is also seeing small businesses build their own internal tools rather than adopting generic software. These range from managing bookings and processing incoming emails to calculating customer quotes and handling parts of an ecommerce business.
“And we're seeing people building SaaS businesses. That's quite new for us,” notes Zakaitis.
Traditionally, Hostinger customers built websites or ecommerce stores.
Creating custom software generally meant hiring a developer and deploying it somewhere. Now people are building marketplaces and software products themselves, a use case that has grown rapidly.
Zakaitis admits that he has little idea exactly what AI will look like five years from now, but is confident that demand for simple ways to start and run a business will remain.
“That's why we're moving beyond ‘can I build and publish this?’ towards ‘can I run my business?’
That could mean giving you an overnight report telling you what you should do next or analysing your competition. We're moving far beyond the traditional idea of simply giving someone a web presence.”
When anyone can build software, who keeps it secure?
However, enabling people without technical backgrounds to build and deploy software also introduces risks, particularly when they may not understand the vulnerabilities they are creating.
Zakaitis points to OpenClaw as an example of how Hostinger balances customer demand for emerging technologies with the need to address security risks.
“We saw huge demand from existing customers who wanted to try OpenClaw, but getting started was quite difficult, so we made it much easier to install.
However, that also meant addressing the security implications. OpenClaw was originally intended for personal use, and some of its default settings weren't secure enough for how customers were actually using it.”
For example, he explained that authorisation wasn't initially enabled by default. Hostinger changed the configuration, introduced token-based authorisation, and implemented additional security measures.
“As a company, we can identify potential attack vectors and put guardrails in place rather than simply handing customers a VPS and leaving them to figure everything out themselves.
We know our customers will use these tools, but they don't necessarily have the resources or expertise to understand everything happening under the hood.
That's why we need dedicated teams monitoring the security landscape, identifying emerging threats, and responding to new vulnerabilities."
How bootstrapping shaped Hostinger's global ambitions
Zakaitis argues that some of Lithuania's historical constraints have actually helped its technology sector develop.
“Historically, Lithuania didn't have access to very much capital. If you compare that with somewhere like San Francisco, it's the opposite end of the spectrum. So a lot of Lithuanian companies were bootstrapped because we couldn't easily raise money.
That meant we had to become much smarter about how we used our resources.”
Hostinger itself has grown without raising external capital to fund its operations, instead reinvesting revenue into the business.
“Hostinger has grown entirely through its own revenue and reinvestment. We have never raised external capital to fund the business,” Zakaitis explained.
However, the company's ownership has changed over time, something he distinguishes from external fundraising.
“Our shareholder base has changed over the years: Tesonet became a shareholder in 2018, and ConHostinger in 2021. Both were share purchases from existing shareholders, not funding rounds."
As is standard for private share transactions, the terms are confidential.
Zakaitis describes how early on Hostinger's customers effectively provided a source of financing through longer-term subscriptions.
“They would buy four-year plans, which gave us the cash flow to invest in the product, infrastructure, servers, and marketing for the next customers.”
He also cites Lithuania's small domestic market as an advantage in encouraging international ambition from the outset.
“If you have any real ambition, you can't build only for Lithuania. Mathematically, it doesn't make sense. So global ambition was there from the beginning.”
Another advantage, he argues, is that relatively few Lithuanian technology companies compete directly with one another, making it easier to share knowledge.
“It's a small ecosystem. You go for lunch and bump into people and ask: what are you working on?"
"We learned a lot from being bootstrapped, and then we shared a lot of what we learned,” said Zakaitis.
He describes the freedom that comes with bootstrapping as a “huge luxury”, particularly compared with the pressures that can accompany venture capital.
“Funds have their own cycles and eventually need to generate returns, and that can create pressure on the startup to raise prices, move upmarket, do this or that.
I don't have that pressure.
Almost every public software company talks about going upmarket because customers there pay more and have a higher average value.
"But there are millions of people who want to start businesses. Individually they might not pay as much, but there are so many of them. We can build for those customers for the long term without somebody pushing us to move upmarket. That's a huge luxury.”
Why scaling globally takes more than translation
One lesson from Hostinger's international expansion that Zakaitis believes startups often underestimate is that localisation requires much more than translating a website. Companies need people on the ground who understand the local culture.
“Words can have different meanings, and even emojis can be interpreted differently.”
He recalls an incident in which Hostinger's customer-support ratings deteriorated in one market. The company investigated everything from the support team and product to the data centre before discovering an unexpected cultural explanation.
“Eventually we spoke to the local team and discovered that people simply weren't choosing the heart-eyes emoji for a positive rating because, culturally, it meant something closer to ‘I love you.’
They weren't going to tell customer support that they loved them.”
Pricing is another important consideration.
“You can't simply convert €20 into the equivalent number of rupees and call that localisation. You need to create packages and pricing appropriate to that market.
We've seen big brands enter markets, struggle to understand why people aren't buying, and the basic subscription turns out to represent something like 30 per cent of the average monthly income."
Clearly, localisation is much deeper than translation.
Why digital sovereignty matters beyond the AI debate
I was also curious to get Zakaitis' perspective on digital sovereignty, particularly amid the growing European debate about which parts of the technology stack the region needs to control. For Hostinger, he says, the issue extends beyond AI infrastructure to services that people rely on every day.
“One area where we've noticed this particularly strongly is email. There aren't actually that many European email providers, and we're seeing more people asking us specifically: where are my emails going to be stored?
That's some of your most personal data. So there are parts of the stack where people are becoming much more conscious about sovereignty and where their data actually sits.”
AI is moving faster than people's mindsets
AI has made it possible to build websites in minutes that might previously have taken months. Someone starting a business today may be more inclined to choose an AI-first approach, but those who have spent years working with WordPress may be less willing to switch.
Zakaitis admits that a much larger group of people than he anticipated still chooses WordPress because it's what they know. They have years of experience and established workflows around it. More broadly, two things have surprised him about AI: how quickly the technology has advanced and how slowly people have adopted it.
“If you'd asked me three years ago to describe where AI would be today, I probably would have underestimated the capabilities of the technology but massively overestimated how much people and companies would actually be using it.
People are creatures of habit.
We see it in our own user testing. We can give someone a tool and tell them that what they want to do will take less than an hour — often just minutes."
A month later, they haven't done it because they still have this idea in their head that it will take a week or that they'll need a developer.
“The technological frontier has moved, but people's mindset hasn't necessarily moved with it.”
From idea to startup in 21 days
Hostinger recently put its vision of making entrepreneurship more accessible to the test with its 21-Day Startup Challenge held in September. The challenge invited participants to turn an idea into a functioning online business in just three weeks, without coding experience or an existing startup. Participants had to launch a working product using four Hostinger tools: Hostinger Agent for research and planning, AI Builder to develop an MVP, Web Hosting to bring it online, and VPS for backend infrastructure. Hostinger provided free credits and hosting access to help participants get started. The three winning projects demonstrate the range of possibilities:
- BedLedger helps small landlords in India manage rent payments, reminders, and digital receipts.
- FixGuard AI identifies broken forms, links, accessibility issues, and other problems on AI-built websites.
- LectureLift transforms recorded university lectures into transcripts, flashcards, quizzes, and personalised study materials.
The winners received prizes of $2,000, $1,000, and $500, respectively.
For Zakaitis, the challenge highlights the gap between technological capabilities and public awareness.
“We're trying to show people what's actually possible. The technology is advancing extremely quickly, but adoption is much slower."
Often the biggest obstacle is simply mindset.
“People still think they need a developer. They still imagine something will take a week when it could actually take less than an hour.
The technology frontier has moved enormously. A lot of people just haven't realised yet how far it has moved.”