Hostinger Horizons is your all-in-one AI-powered partner that transforms your ideas into fully functional websites and web apps—no coding or delays required. Just describe what you want, and launch instantly with secure hosting, a custom domain, and 24/7 expert support, all in one seamless platform.
In this episode, we interview Dainius Kavoliunas, Head of Product at Hostinger. We discuss Hostinger’s evolution from a hosting provider to a comprehensive platform for digital creation, emphasizing their mission to make online presence accessible to all skill levels. The conversation highlights Hostinger’s latest product, Hostinger Horizons, an AI-powered website and web app builder. Dainius explains the company’s approach to AI trends, the development of Horizons, and the innovative culture at Hostinger that enables rapid product development. They also explore the concept of “vibe coding,” where natural language prompts are used to create complex software, and discuss the future of AI in the industry. The episode concludes with insights into Hostinger’s customer-centric values and upcoming innovations.
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Show Notes
Takeaways
- Hostinger aims to make online presence accessible for everyone.
- The company has evolved from a hosting provider to a full-fledged digital creation platform.
- AI tools are integrated into all Hostinger products to simplify user experience.
- Hostinger Horizons was developed in just three months.
- Customer obsession drives product development at Hostinger.
- Vibe coding allows users to create software using natural language prompts.
- Hostinger’s 20 years of experience gives it a competitive edge.
- The company targets small to medium businesses and solopreneurs.
- Upcoming features will enhance user experience in Horizons.
- AI is expected to handle more tasks autonomously in the future.
Chapters
00:00 – Introduction to Hostinger and Its Mission
03:03 – Evolution of Hostinger’s Product Offerings
05:53 – Target Audience and Market Positioning
09:01 – The Role of AI in Hostinger’s Strategy
11:40 – Launch of Hostinger Horizons
14:43 – Development Process and Timeline
18:02 – Core Values Driving Product Development
20:49 – Capabilities of Hostinger Horizons
23:58 – Understanding Vibe Coding and Its Significance
26:40 – The Evolution of Programming Languages
28:59 – AI and Natural Language Coding
33:03 – The Future of Programming and AI
37:47 – Hostinger’s Competitive Edge in AI Hosting
41:07 – Innovations on the Horizon
Transcript
Beau Hamilton (00:00.856)
Hello everyone. And welcome to the SourceForge Podcast. Thank you for joining us today. I’m your host, Beau Hamilton, senior editor and multimedia producer here at source forage, the world’s most visited software comparison site where B2B software buyers compare and find business software solutions. Today we’re joined by Dainius Kavoliunas head of product at Hostinger, company that’s made a name for itself by helping millions of users around the world build fast, reliable and affordable websites. They’ve actually grown from a simple hosting provider into a full fledged platform for digital creation with a focus on the user, but as well as a commitment to making the web more accessible. And this year, they’ve launched Hostinger Horizons, their biggest product debut to date. It’s an AI-powered website and web app builder designed to help anyone, regardless of their technical background, bring their online vision to life and just build really cool stuff.
So I got some questions to ask Danis about that, about Horizons. We’ll get into vibe coding, what that actually means how Horizon stands out in the sea of AI builders out there, and then what’s coming next from the team. With that said, let me bring in Danis. Danis, welcome to the podcast. Glad you could join us.
Dainius Kavoliunas (01:06.625)
Thanks.
Dainius Kavoliunas (01:10.198)
Yeah, happy, happy to be here, Beau. I’m really happy. Yeah, let’s dig in.
Beau Hamilton (01:14.978)
Yes. OK, so I want to start with your mission statement. know, hosting or after doing some research, you’ve always been trying to make the online presence more accessible for everyone, for people of all different skill levels. That’s been your North Star from the beginning. How has that mission evolved over the years as digital tools and user expectations have changed, especially in the age of AI?
Dainius Kavoliunas (01:42.274)
Yeah, great question. So we’re in the business for more than 20 years, and so it’s a long, long track record. And as you can imagine, technology shifted, changed over time. But our mission has not changed, actually. It’s always been to make people successful online, being found online. And initially, it was with certain tools, as you mentioned, with hosting. And then additionally, over time, we just added more and more tools.
You know from WordPress hosting, managed WordPress hosting, drag-and-drop builders, know domain management, course emails, all these kind of services. And then of course then the shift changed and people tried to start to use drag-and-drop builders. They have those and now once know AI came into the picture, you have AI tools that help you to be successful online. And that’s what you know the product I’m representing, Costing Horizons is about. But in general, it’s always the same, you know making people online presence easy and affordable and yeah that’s I guess not gonna change for quite some time even in the future.
Beau Hamilton (02:48.92)
Very cool. Yeah. I know you obviously don’t, you know, develop all these different product offerings overnight and all these different features. It’s, it’s something you build up over time. And yeah, like you said, you you’ve been in a business hosting has been in business for the past couple of decades, 20 some years. Can you talk about that? Like talk about the, so you were a hosting provider. Now you’ve, you’ve grown into a full blown website builder. I think that’s really cool. Can you, and you did touch on this, but can you give us a brief overview of some of the core products and services you offer just to kind of help lay the groundwork and help us get maybe a better understanding of what it is that you do and what you offer.
Dainius Kavoliunas (03:30.092)
Yeah, for sure. So currently, offer more or less six core services. So of course, we have a website hosting, and you can create either with WordPress, it’s a content management system, or you can create with a drag and drop builder or whatever other technology you want, and just you’re going to do the hosting part. If you have some kind of online presence, you shop website, of course, you need to get domain. So we have domain service provisioning as well.
And as well, need to have professional email that does not end up at gmail.com or yahoo.com or anything like that. You want to have your own nice professional email. You as well have VPS, which is a virtual private server offering. And just basically, if you want to have a computer on the cloud, I guess now you’re talking online through computers, but you can have your own personal one online.
But the other one there, maybe do some processing, maybe do some hosting of some other services. And we introducing new products as I mentioned, Hosting Horizons. And we just launching, I think once this episode airs, we’re gonna have Hosting Reach, which is our AI powered email marketing service. So it’s just gonna be super, super cool. I believe that it’ll be quite for a few weeks once we air. So yeah, we’re expanding our authoring.
Beau Hamilton (04:55.502)
That’s exciting, OK, and then, yeah, what are some of the customers or industries that maybe would benefit most from hosting? I imagine you’re obviously working with a wide range of different industries. mean, any company nowadays should have an online presence. So I mean, don’t feel like you necessarily focus on any one particular client.
Maybe that maybe that’s not the case. Like, do you work with specific customers or specific like businesses? Do you have like a clear divide between like your B2C side of things and your B2B company as well?
Dainius Kavoliunas (05:36.514)
So in general, generally we don’t target any specific industry, like any industry, you know, from, I guess, health to, you know, housing, et cetera, et cetera. If you want to be online, be found online, successful online, know, Hostinger is, you know, provided for you. I guess also want to specify.
I guess a bit on what kind of users we target, like not the industries but user types. So majority of our users are small to medium businesses. So of course we don’t target enterprise clients. We have like tools for those. And we target also individuals and solopreneurs who just want to get started and be successful. So for these people, they’re important as good quality, but also good price and affordability. So this is, you know, then, key, key things once you’re starting online and be really focused on delivering this quality, but also being affordable.
Beau Hamilton (06:33.358)
Very cool. cool. Yeah. I, it’s very attractive. Some of the products you offer and services are attractive as someone who, you know, has just been like reviewing tech products and having a, kind of a, a hobby, like my, some of my hobbies are just producing content online, reviewing some of the shiny new gadgets I get. And so the idea of being able to easily help promote myself, build a website for myself without a lot of the technical expertise in that area is super attractive.
And I really am curious about this, new AI offering you have, right? Cause there’s obviously been a massive shift in how people build and manage their online presence, you know, from AI tools that speed up design and content creation to like low code and no code platforms that like help almost anyone launch a site without any sort of line of code just with, you know, natural language processing. so yeah, I’m just curious, like first of all, how is hosting or approaching these, these AI trends, that we’re seeing and what, what role do you see AI and like the ease of use playing in the future of your platform?
Dainius Kavoliunas (07:46.993)
So generally AI is helping to simplify things. Some things that are impossible before now are just hard. Some things that are hard before now are easy. So same with hosting and in general online presence. Maybe before we need to hire a developer to do some custom things or learn to code. But now with AI, it’s a capable to take these tasks and do the custom websites, projects, websites, even soft as a service tools for you. So it’s all about simplification and making things possible.
And that’s how we also apply AI technologies to our hosting. It’s not only about this new offering that they at Hosting Horizons. And I guess you’re going to go into that in detail in a second or a minute. But in general, all our products have high level, like high degree of integrations with AI from helping to create content for your websites to automating some security maintenance tasks. AI works in the background, checks how things are going, and just does the automation. just when AI started to catch up, when we identified that, this is a technology that’s a game changer, from the early days, it started to integrate in our products.
And as it gets more mature, it gets better. You just identify new opportunities where you can apply it and we just go and apply it. We don’t talk about it. We just go, implement, see how it works, see how customer problems are solved. And that’s what makes us going.
Beau Hamilton (09:27.534)
So let’s talk about Hostinger Horizons, your biggest product debut this year and one of the biggest products you’ve probably ever released. What inspired the creation of this AI powered website and web app builder? Like what made you decide to tackle this side of website hosting yourself instead of like maybe partner with an established website builder already in the market?
Dainius Kavoliunas (09:51.05)
OK, so that’s a few questions and a few topics to touch. Yeah. So generally, we saw that even though we have great tools to be present, have online presence, as I mentioned, can create A-shops, websites with WordPress or some other quantum management system, maybe with our website builder, which is even easier because it has this nice drag and drop functionality. But some people still struggle.
So in this case, we figured it out that actually with AI, if you talk with it as your friend, as your AI partner, who is your developer, designer, copywriter, it just does everything for you. It’s actually simpler in many, many, many cases. So this is one of the reasons how we identified and decided to go into this direction. And the second one is that we actually have not touched a significant market that we are now addressing.
Because for example, website builders or WordPress, you can just do so much before you need to hire a developer to either create the custom plugins functionality or just create something totally from scratch. And these people would just go to some kind of marketplaces, hire agencies, like 10,000s of dollars or euros to create quite simple but custom projects.
And we saw that, okay, now, yeah, it’s just getting smarter and smarter and being able to generate more and more discussed on projects. So why not to create a tool, which is going to be like 10 times even more, like a hundred times cheaper than hiring an agency for like a few thousand euros instead of that. can have a horizons or similar, similar plan for $20 a month and achieve the same results. And even you’re not going to need to figure it out. Okay. Which agency to approach?
How to negotiate price, are they giving you a good price? Then talking to their developers saying, oh, there’s a bug. Then you send an email, get email back. So they’re also touching this new market for us, actually. And these are the two main reasons that showed to us that, OK, let’s do this. of course, we have identified this opportunity. But the question was, the second part was, we build it ourselves or maybe partner with someone?
Hostinger is a very innovative company. They have very strong talent and technical people. I would say not even like Lithuanian, Baltics, Europe level, but world class people, both in the AI, technology, product, et cetera, et cetera. And they built everything, well, not everything, everything. We have our competitive advantages, but we built the core functionalities ourselves because we know how to do it and we can make it and either better or either more affordably or both. So that’s why we decided to do everything in-house. Yeah, so far going great. We have launched it. We have people using it, purchasing it, creating great projects. And yeah, it really just been a very exciting, exciting ride so far.
Beau Hamilton (13:06.318)
Yeah, it is exciting for sure. I was just curious. Yeah. So how long has this particular feature and product been in development? like, are you using an existing LLM? that’s probably the biggest, you know, like resource. It’s hard. You said you mentioned you build everything in-house as much as you can, but are you using any, you know, existing LLM as kind of like the structure for your service?
Dainius Kavoliunas (13:36.674)
Good question. So to touch on that, guess the first part was about how much time it took from the day to launch. it was even, remember, just before Christmas, like this December, when they’re like having coffee and be like, hey, do you think we should do this? Yeah, I think we should do this. OK. Then we checked some numbers. And then they’re like, yeah, let’s do this. Like, yeah. We got the buy-in from the team around.
Dainius Kavoliunas (14:02.946)
And there’s just a few people basically just sent into it, starting to work on it, and we launched it in three months. So basically we started January 1st around that, just after the New Year. You know, then we put our champagne glasses down after celebrating New Year. And then you’re like, OK, now build time. And then in three months, we launched the product publicly for everyone. The initial launch for hosting users was even before because the form value is that feedback, early feedback, and we don’t wait until the final product is created. So yeah, that’s how much time it took.
Beau Hamilton (14:41.614)
Wow. That’s an amazing turnaround time. I had no idea. I thought that maybe this was in development for a matter of years, but it’s literally a matter of months. That’s impressive.
Dainius Kavoliunas (14:53.984)
Yeah, yeah, Yeah, fun enough. Like when we meet our partners, like, you know, that we still like, you know, have partners for domain selling or hosting, et cetera, et cetera. And we show them our product. They’re like, it’s so crazy and nice. How many years have you worked? And we say like three months because like they also like, so cool product. Maybe we do something like that. And they say like we did in three months. We’re like, Jesus, for us, would take like five years. And they’re like not even going into this category, like into this direction. They’re like, we’re just going to do the good old classic stuff because this is too fast for us, but AI innovation, they just cannot catch up, right? So now kind of, all the ones in this hosting like industry going to that direction, besides the new startups with 20 somethings building from their garage and cooking AI web app builders.
Beau Hamilton (15:44.44)
Well, and I feel like it’s obviously an exciting time, you know, for everyone kind of in with a business trying to incorporate some of these AI features. But I think especially for you as a head of product at an AI company, like hosting or like being able to, you know, see all these different features or possibilities and incorporate them as kind of as fast as possible. And obviously I can gather the excitement just from talking with you here, you know.
That said, obviously there’s only like so much you there’s so much you want to do and incorporate, but only so many hours in a day. Right. but I think a lot of what you’re able to accomplish is because of the culture of, of hosting her. like, that’s what really drives the product development internally. Cause I mean, the fact that you’re able to create this AI builder product in a matter of a few months or so is obviously you, you have something special there. I’m.
I’m curious, like what is the day in the life, so to speak? How did the, how did the values of you and your team show up in the products you create?
Dainius Kavoliunas (16:47.618)
Great question. generally, we have 10 core principles that the whole company follows. And I’m just going to touch a few of those that are most important and value the most. And for the rest, if you’re interested, can always just go and Google hosting of principles. It’s public, out there, transparency for everyone to see and be aware of. So the top one for me, for my team, for the company is customer obsession.
I think there is even a saying that the truth is not in the office, but outside, outdoors, you need to go with the clients and figure out what their pinpoints, struggles, and really focus there. So we’re all about customer obsession and making and solving real people, real problems and how it manifests. So we really have this close ties with clients. For example, as an initiative, just after the launch.
We already had high traction for the product. And we decided, OK, instead of doing a few client interviews here and there that a usual, I guess, normal company would do, we did the challenge. We said, OK, let’s do 100 client interviews of Hosting Horizon users and figure out what they are, what their pinpoints, what they want to achieve. And we did that, and I guess, in a bit more than a month. Most of the company joined in, and we did those kind of client interviews and really help us to figure it out. So who are our target clients, what are their struggle, pain points and what we should focus on. And of course, this is just one big initiative, but we continue doing those in a smaller scale, on a product level, we creating something new, really make sure that we solving users problem. We do the validation interviews after the launch, of course check the metrics just to be aware that, okay, it’s not that you just cooking for cooking.
If you’re cooking for someone to enjoy, you have, you reap the benefits. And fun enough, it’s not only about this, no virtual communication. It’s much more deep than that. For example, if you have a team building and go with the team to some kind of a restaurant or maybe a vacation somewhere, we always try to go to our clients and be a client of our clients. Maybe it’s a restaurant, maybe some team building place to, I don’t know, play darts or whatever, right? So we go there of course, have a good time with the team and everything, but you also go and talk to the client. This relationship building a deal, understanding in their own place, maybe the restaurant where they create their project or website, how they’re doing, what are the struggle points, pain points, and this, know, even take back home the next day and just make improvements. So this customer obsession is really at the core.
But the second one, I think that really is important is bias towards action. I have worked in other companies, had some experiences where there are a lot of great ideas, but they are stuck in meetings and discussions. And I already mentioned that hosting your horizons, it was more or less like a kitchen chat and then checking some numbers and being like, yeah, that makes sense, let’s do it. And just vent into it instead of, maybe we need to have a C-level meeting, something, something.
Schedule it for next week. Next week we cannot because someone is on the holiday No, we just spent it and we decided and the next is biased over action. But here is also very interesting to Have these pretty simple send values that a little bit you might even think Contradicting each other because on one there’s custom obsession and maybe you want to really be customer obsessed and really figure it out what person really really wants right maybe do 100,000 interviews. But on the other hand, towards action. You need to take action and bring the value to the client as soon as possible. So all this client in terms of everything is very great, but if you don’t deliver value, you don’t end up as features and then as a value created to our clients. It’s fun, great fire, but kinda meaningless. So for me, these are the two principles that drive me at work and yeah, and just trying to balance some out.
Beau Hamilton (21:06.604)
Yeah. So there’s a lot of factors, obviously it sounds like that, that kind of converge into how you’re able to do what you’re doing. But, that’s interesting. Thanks for kind of sharing that behind the scenes look. I totally can, you know, imagine and, and like, you obviously read about, like you mentioned the meetings and how, like, there’s like that common sort of, not really trope because it’s, it’s a real thing that happens where it’s like in companies, you get these, managers, that feel like they have to have a meeting for every little little topic being discussed, every little feature. And that kind of just hinders the actual time required to build the product and execute on the vision.
So I think that’s just a funny little thing you mentioned. So I’m curious, I want to talk about how some of these values and the day in the life is translating to upcoming products. But before then, I want to just kind of continue to talk about some of the specifics
things you’re able to do and build with Horizons. So it’s my understanding that you don’t need to have a technical coding background to start building some really cool stuff, powerful websites or apps. I think that’s really amazing. How does it work and like, what can you build with Horizon? Can you give any maybe specific examples or use cases?
Dainius Kavoliunas (22:24.77)
Okay, so people are building all kinds of sorts of things from just simple websites to full software as a service tools. saw just people, guess our board member, he was just, I guess, another example, about the website case, He was, his school, his kids. His kids school had this ugly website, like ugly, maybe not in his mind. And he said, OK, I can do better. And he went to Horizons himself and just chatted a little bit, created this new website, shared it with the authorities of the school. And he said, yeah, that’s much better. And then we just swapped it. And was super easy, some prompts, chatting, and about that. But we also have much different other end of the spectrum people who are creating those businesses.
We have people who, for example, have horizons to build custom tools for their own businesses by optimizing internal processes. So for example, instead of using Excel to manage your clients, can build and have cases people building custom client management systems, right? This kind of logic, know, and maybe instead of going to Salesforce or some other tool, you just build something entirely for your own, which is optimized for your company. You save a lot, but it also going to be faster because it’s just optimized for your use case. yeah, and everything in the middle. I mean, like we saw people creating custom tools to build, you know, resumes.
If you apply for a job and you want to create a critical material, I guess we call it here, or resume, you can enter your information and then it does all the stuff and just has some paid add-on features. Like integrating some LinkedIn integration, et cetera, et cetera, for making that job search easier. So we see people making money. It’s projects they create with Horizons. And we also see another case, which is, guess, I would say maybe most fun for me, people just creating passion projects and games.
So it’s very, very, very funny to see and just entertaining to see people creating games or some just fun projects, apps, and just share them online. We had, for example, a case where a person would build an app. They just click it, like the button, which says, find the nearest bar. And it just tells you what is the nearest bar, very, very smart from you. But also just some games like some kind of variations like Flappy Bird or et cetera, et cetera. So anything goes. It’s also kind of creativity, creative tools in a sense. Because maybe I some idea for a game, maybe some nice animation. And now we can just chat and it creates and visualize. And it’s also super easy to share. Of course, one button, publish. You have a link. Share with anyone. Yeah, a little empowering tool for many people.
Beau Hamilton (25:40.718)
Cool, yeah, there’s so many possibilities you can, different things you can create. That’s really cool. I would love to get you to maybe get a demo, a walkthrough one of these days to see what it’s like. Yeah, yeah, that’d be fun. I know this sort of AI building tool is part of kind of a broader sort of trend known as vibe coding where you’re able to use just natural language prompts to create pretty complex software really. Can you explain for listeners what vibe coding is and why it’s trending nowadays?
Dainius (26:19.958)
So I guess to talk about wipe coding, first you need to talk about coding and what’s in general is coding. So basically coding is that you give a set of instructions for a computer to execute to achieve some task. And it all started, you know, maybe like from punch cards and it’s like back in the day. But then, you know, basically we have computers, we have people programming in one and zeros. So you would need to know specific commands at one and zeros, how to tell something for computers to do.
But then the time people figure it out, but OK, I can be much, much more productive if I add additional abstraction layers. So instead of zeros and ones, new programming languages came into being. For example, assembly, which is one of the first programming languages where you program for a specific CPU, a computer programming unit. And even in my university, as a part of curriculum, I’m not that old. Maybe I’m not looked at old.
That’s part of the curriculum to actual write code and assembly. It is very, very basic programming language. But then you had newer programming languages, which are Python, Java, like very modern ones that I think even person who is not a developer, if he sees the programming code, he could kind of maybe in some parts understand what’s going on because it just uses, for example, normal words like function or, you know, or like object oriented programming has classes which says, for example, like use proper nouns, let’s say, bill, transaction, things like that. And you can kind of understand what’s going on. But what’s the ultimate programming language? That’s the question. do you think? Well, what do you think is the ultimate programming language?
Beau Hamilton (28:07.618)
Well, I mean, ultimate for, you know, reducing the barriers of entry and being more compatible for more people. would say just the language that everyone knows when they grow up, you know, the natural, their natural language. Right. Cause like at a certain point it’s like, that’s what kind of has kept me from really getting into the programming world is just all of the technical expertise and technical jargon and, and, everything required to like just code up something super basic. I feel like there’s a big learning curve.
Dainius Kavoliunas (28:40.342)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. mean, like if you want just to do something basic or super advanced, you still need to learn the same syntax, like learning a new language. I don’t like if you don’t speak, I don’t know like Lithuanian, where I’m from, like Lithuania, Europe, yay, go Europe. So imagine like learning a completely new language just to do some simple, simple sentence, right? So the programming, like this learning curve is quite, quite, quite steep. And as I mentioned, like the ideal, ultimate programming language is just normal, normal language. You don’t need to learn Python, Java or anything. Now, due to AI, the improvements in the AI, which are not possible before, you can just simply interact with that official intelligence in normal human language, English, Greek, et cetera, et cetera. And AI does all the heavy lifting for you. It translates what you wanted from human natural language into the actual instructions that a computer can’t understand.
And this trend just came into being because up until very recently, it was not possible. Like you could chat with the current level of artificial intelligence and would just fail. You tell it to change a button. It does not know what is a button or whatever, know, these kind of cases. But nowadays, due to all the improvements in large language models, now it’s possible. And actually, this trend of IEIP coding, it’s not actually a technical term. It’s a term coined by one of OpenAI co-founders. And he basically describes it as, like he found it in this year, February, I believe. And he basically describes it that people nowadays can create this software and instructions for computers and etcetera, etcetera, just in plain language. You just talk with the AI, that’s all the heavy lifting.
And these people, don’t even know what’s happening behind the scenes. They don’t know the technical parts. Like maybe they don’t even know what’s a database algorithm. You don’t need to know anything like that. You just go full into that vibes and you just, yeah, vibes and feels. And you just tell to AI what do you want it to do? And if it doesn’t do it, you just make some jokes or statements like if you don’t do this you go to jail and that’s why I guess Another reason why it’s quite trending because it’s a lot also a lot of meme content because it’s a part of also, you know jokes, it’s a very powerful tool, but it also has a lot of you know jokes going around and As I mentioned, you know do this or go to jail or just people saying be nice to AI because then it’s gonna take over the world it’s going to remember that you are nice and it’s going to be okay with you.
Beau Hamilton (31:31.746)
Well, also like they found that if you are polite to AI, you can get better results because it’s trained off of data where you’re able to extract more insights based off of conversations that elicit, know, that are kind of friendly conversations because when you’re friendly, you’re able to like get more information out of people, right?
Dainius Kavoliunas (31:55.225)
It’s a nice idea. I have not heard about this, but actually going to take this back to Horizons and maybe even test it out and maybe even on the boarding flow where we teach people how to use Horizons. Be be polite. If you want to get good results, be polite with Horizons.
Beau Hamilton (32:10.102)
Yeah, yeah.
Try it and report back. I’m curious to see what your findings are. I think it just in general, it’s a fascinating development in the coding world because for years and years we’ve seen this push to get people and kids to learn how to code, right? Like take computer science courses and go to programming boot camps. But now it almost seems like overnight anyone can just use natural language prompts like English, Greek to like build really cool, powerful apps and websites.
Beau Hamilton (32:42.33)
I think that’s, you know, that’s obviously super valuable. but it, it just opens up a bunch of other questions of like, was, were we kind of wrong to suggest, you know, kids, for example, like push kids in the direction of programming? Is it still valuable in your experiences? It’s valuable to learn, programming at a very technical high, like expert expert level, or do you think we can get by with kind of the current sort of AI vibe coding prompt based engineering.
Dainius Kavoliunas (33:13.762)
It’s a difficult topic because on one hand you have developers who are developers and saying, yeah, you’re never going to replace us and this, this, and that. And then on the other hand, have a AI enthusiast that are looking at developers and be like, after two months, I don’t need you. And I guess that the truth is somewhere in the middle. So generally, about the future for developers, we’re always going to need them. Like these AI systems, other systems, we’re still going to depend on very smart engineers and programmers who manage to handle them, fine tune them, figure out the issues, why they are not working, or maybe just make them safe in general, add in guardrails, so it wouldn’t get, know, and do some crazy stuff. So we always gonna need very smart, technical people who are gonna solve like AT problems.
So if you have your kid in some kind of boot camp for coding, just don’t take it away right now, right yet. Just wait for it. It’s going to be a good time of investment. And in general, if you don’t code, like you don’t plan to be a professional programmer or coder, it’s generally a good idea to learn the basics, at least of coding, how things work, because it just changes your mindset, then it one hand just makes your thinking more structured because you think about, okay, how machines work, they are very structured and you just adapt your mindset to that structured way that is just generally useful in a daily life and solving problems because mostly program code writing is about problem solving. So it can take those skills and adapt in everyday situations. And I guess that’s also the difference between those boot camps where we only teach you a specific thing. We’re just going to teach you how to do websites. I think that’s a bad thing, because even with Horizons, other similar tools, you don’t need to do websites yourself. Like, yeah, I’m going to do that. I’m not going to have a job. But this general mindset, how to program, it’s going to be always relevant. And if you go and learn the basics, I think you’re going to be all right.
Beau Hamilton (35:29.26)
Yeah, I think that’s a, that’s some good advice. Like somewhere in the middle, obviously, you know, I think if you, if you understand, and know of a lot of the coding terms and jargon and concepts, I think you’re ultimately able to take that knowledge and apply it. Even if it’s in natural language prompts, you’re kind of still able to become more efficient with what you’re able to develop because you can kind of call out specific areas that need to be developed. Even if it’s just through natural, like English language, right? If that makes sense.
Dainius Kavoliunas (35:58.07)
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, for sure. For sure. For sure. And just to note, also AI is already great, and it’s improving rapidly. But currently, even with pipe coding, it’s still not perfect. course, now it’s as bad as it’s ever going to be, because for now it’s only going to be improving. But currently, if you really want to create some custom things, very custom, of course, already having the knowledge of how things work like having some basic web development or app development understanding really, really, really helps to point, for example, AI in the right direction. If in cases, AI just gets mixed in all the things happening.
Beau Hamilton (36:41.846)
Yeah, I love, I love that like line, that quote where it’s just like AI is the worst it’s ever going to be right now, which kind of like sends chills down my spine. Cause I’m like, it’s, it’s already really good, but they consider like, look at the, the Will Smith eating spaghetti example, which came out, hit the internet, you know, a couple of years ago, and it was just awful. It was all sorts of morphed and distorted, but now it’s, it’s like way more realistic, photorealistic. have sounds and this is only like, what a couple of years later, if that, so to see where we’re going to be in another couple of years is, is, it’s going to be pretty interesting to say the least. and I think, you know, no matter the industry, no matter the company, everyone’s racing to, to integrate AI as fast as possible in some way, or form.
And I know in regards to hosting or, and, you go into the industry you guys operated in, there’s already like a long list of AI companies and tools out there to help businesses build websites. So I’m curious, like what makes hosting a Horizon stand out from the competition? Is it like the underlying technology? Is it the speed at which it operates? Maybe like the UI or customization options? I’m just curious to hear your thoughts here.
Dainius Kavoliunas (38:02.018)
Okay, okay, okay. So I guess like in general comparison to other similar providers, so via that, let’s say them, as I mentioned, the most innovative and fast moving because we ship this fast and everyone we’re talking with in this similar industry, well, I just mind blown. So I guess I’m not even going to be comparing these guys, like they’re still doing great job and hosting and hosting and everything, but they wouldn’t expect innovations from this, you know, this kind of, you know, groups of people. Where innovation is coming is usually startups, companies that come to disrupt. And that’s the main competition we are currently getting. But where Hostinger stands out is that we constantly have been inventing ourselves. We have, as I mentioned, that innovative culture that we go and try these new things and tools and we launch them really fast. So we are not afraid of competition and disruptive technologies.
And we have a lot of advantages against these, as I mentioned, 20-something startups that just coming out like mushrooms after the rain. We have the same, same mushrooms after the rain. I’m not sure if it’s also proper known in other places. so it’s just like these startups are just popping out.
But what we don’t have, we don’t have this vast experience of working in a live presence space. We have like that 20 years experience. have more than 4 million paying users worldwide, like all around the globe. We have customer support that is live and can answer you in minutes. And I believe in five or even more languages that we support, like the customer support. So we have like all this, including all the products we have built around. So you don’t only create your project, you also need domain, you need the hosting, you need the email. So all of this you get with Hosting Gear. And besides that, yeah, it’s just as good as the next guy, if not better in creating the websites or the apps that’s AI.
Beau Hamilton (40:11.372)
Yeah, I like the fact that you’re an all-in-one platform, right? Because like, if as a customer looking for these services, I don’t want to have to like necessarily have every little aspect related to my online presence be fragmented with different companies. Like there’s pros and cons, of course. But I think generally speaking, it’s safe to say that like, if you have these features built into one platform, it’s just better for the end user, right? And I think, yeah, you’re like, the fact that you guys have been around for 20 plus years as opposed to maybe some of these startups with, you know, maybe only like a year or two of experience in the industry. I think that kind of naturally gives you the advantage that you, you you talked about. I’m curious at, another thing too is just, like your product. Like you have that sort of special sauce or like there’s something in the water over there where you guys were able to like really develop features and products super quickly.
So I’m curious, like what, what are you excited for that’s coming up next, I guess, in the industry? I guess there’s two parts of the question. First of all, where do you see the industry going? What are you excited for? That’s my first question.
Dainius Kavoliunas (41:22.37)
So I guess generally that AI will be able to do more and more with less and less user input. Currently all the Vibe coding tools, more or less a person sitting next to computer or a tool and he asks for something, gets the results, check if it works, not, gives feedback back, do something like that, write another command. So it’s like programming.
But you you program it through natural language. That’s why it’s web coding. But where everything is heading is that AI is to be able to do most of the work without the person’s intervention. So maybe just present your idea. And then the AI will just go and do the whole thing. Maybe before, course, clarify some requirements. Maybe you’re doing, as a given example, like Tinder for cats.
then it just asks you all the maybe relevant questions. What authentication methods you want, et cetera, cetera, the monetization. You just give it your project description and then it goes into development mode and does it for how long it takes because not only needs to develop it, it only needs to test it, deploy it somewhere. Maybe next step, even after project creation, so this is already very exciting where everything is heading.
And we’re also working in that direction. But what’s next, even, is that what if you can also automate marketing? So you present your idea, like this project idea, but you also tell, OK, what’s your marketing budget? What do you want to target? And it does marketing as well. Or maybe it suggests who you should target with this product and handles all these kind of things.
So they really go into this direction where it’s more and more autonomous and can handle more and more of a person’s load.
Beau Hamilton (43:16.494)
Right, yeah, the sort of agentic AI kind of feature is interesting for sure, where it’s doing a lot of the heavy lifting without you requiring any sort of major guidance. We’re starting to see forms of it with some of the research modes with OpenAI and ChatGPT, where it supposedly goes out and researches topics by extracting information from various sources and reporting back to you.
But yeah, I’m curious to see kind of where this is going with AI agents. And I imagine you have a long, long list of features you’re trying to incorporate in your platform, just with all the various products you offer. What are some of the upcoming, maybe innovations customers can look forward to, especially for Horizons and some of your AI powered tools?
Dainius Kavoliunas (44:07.17)
So we have been just recently mostly focusing on enabling people to create all sorts of projects because for more complex projects maybe you need some authentication, data storage, monetization. So we already have reached a point where you can kind of create everything, right, if you prompt good enough, but you’re working in a direction of enabling these everyday people to make these changes as easily as possible, because prompting still in some cases is requires some knowledge, right?
So working on features to make it easier. So for example, some operations, even though prompting is very nice and very easy, maybe some operations are not that easy to do it prompting. For example, changing text. So if you created a website or a web application, whatever, whatever, and you want to change text in a section, or maybe an image, or maybe some style designs, for you to prompt it, it’s actually, you need to tell it, OK, go in this section, update this text, and you copy paste the text. It’s not convenient, right? So we are now taking the best what we know from our previous days.
Let’s say, website builder, drag and drop functionality, and hosting a horizons, which is our AI web app and website creation tool, and combining them in a sense that users will be able to soon make edits not only through prompt, but also some of them through visual interface, which is what we call visual edits, such as text edits, images, designs. And this is going to be a game changer for people just to make it more more more more convenient. So this is the one that I’m really excited. And I think it’s going to be launched maybe around when this episode airs. Maybe it’s going to be launched. So people listening can also just go and check it out. So this is, guess, the hottest thing we’re working on right now. And I guess I’m going to hide in a secret a few other innovations we have in a short pipeline.
Beau Hamilton (46:11.916)
Well, that’s, that’s exciting. So for, for listeners interested in what you just talked about, and maybe they want to try horizons for the first time, where can they go to learn more or maybe request a demo?
Dainius Kavoliunas (46:29.034)
Yeah, so Hostinger Horizons is like free trial. Everyone could just go to the website and try it out. So you can go to hostinger.com slash horizons or just hostinger.com and you’re going to find Horizons there or just Google Hostinger Horizons. Click on the first link. Everyone just can just go there and enter the prompt and see what you’re going to get. And I believe we also going to share a link in the description, though, if that’s possible.
Beau Hamilton (46:55.22)
Yes, yeah. Yeah. If you’re listening and you’re curious, visit the link in the description to learn more. I know I’ll be, I’ll be visiting myself. I’m curious. I’m just excited to see everything that you guys come up with in the, in the months to come, given how fast you guys work and how fast this industry is changing. Right.
So I appreciate it. I appreciate all the information we talked about and all the insights you shared with us listeners. That’s a Danish Kavalunas head of product at Hostinger. It’s been fun chatting with you, Danish. Appreciate it all the time and insights.
Dainius Kavoliunas (47:29.186)
Pleasure was mine. Thank you for having me. It was a great time. See you around.
Beau Hamilton (47:34.136)
Thank you all for listening to the SourceForge Podcast. I’m your host, Beau Hamilton. And make sure to subscribe to stay up to date with all of our upcoming B2B software related podcasts. I will talk to you in the next one.