Daugirdas Jankus Interview – A Chat on WordPress Hosting With Hostinger’s Head of Marketing

But this month is about Daugirdas and his insights on the hosting market and WordPress, in general.

He is fully dedicated to his cause: making the world a better place for future generations. And he’s taking a huge leap in this direction by offering a simple and reliable hosting solution to those who need an online presence.

Daugirdas Jankus:

I think it would be fair to say that we started working with WordPress from the inception of Hostinger as a company. Ever since 2004, when the operations began, the team tested a variety of internet business ideas. The majority of those were built with WordPress. The early versions of our websites were WordPress – based.

Currently, the situation is slightly different – Hostinger is a fast-growing web hosting company, and we are working with WordPress (both as a technology and community) in many different ways. We are building our services to support WordPress; we invest a lot in the best WordPress experience for our clients. Our main goal is to develop everything with WordPress speed in mind.

One of the main notable improvements we did, was enabling LiteSpeed Web Servers for our infrastructure. Since 2019, we made many technical improvements, which allowed our clients to increase their WordPress websites’ speed and reliability.

Daugirdas Jankus:

I do it in a very boring way – each Monday, I plan my whole week. I use Google Calendar for this. The rule is simple – if a thing is not on my calendar, it’s not going to happen 🙂 I read in the book “High output management” by Andy Grove that batching similar tasks together throughout the week can increase your productivity as well. I started doing that, and it worked like a charm.

Also, sometimes unplanned stuff happens, so I simply plan for those as well. In this way, I have some time to deal with “unplanned” work without the need to re-plan the whole week.

Daugirdas Jankus:

I do not believe that “success” or “being successful” is something tangible and possible to achieve per se. For me, being successful means being happy. And I am taking the approach by Ray Dalio on this – in his book “Principles” he explains that happiness consists of meaningful work and meaningful relationships. I totally agree with this.

Daugirdas Jankus:

WordPress is so big, and there are quite many things going on. To speak in Matt Mullenweg’s words – opensource is the most powerful idea of our generation. Several people and companies are doing incredible things in the WordPress space. At Hostinger, we aim to support it by providing the fastest and the most robust web hosting solutions for websites built with WordPress.

Daugirdas Jankus:

That’s a tricky one, haha 😀 for me that one word could be “vibrant”. Every time I get the chance to engage with the WordPress community, I am overwhelmed by how many bright minds are cooperating and how this “machine” works. It is a true inspiration and we are always happy to contribute to it.

Daugirdas Jankus:

I think that would be the perception of WordPress being challenging to use. We still see many people who are fresh in the web hosting niche, thinking that starting a website with WordPress is hard. New users on Hostinger can launch their first WordPress websites within 7 minutes. WordPress is easy and super versatile.

Daugirdas Jankus:

In my opinion, I am not technical enough to evaluate that, to be honest. What can I say is that I genuinely believe that the internet needs an open and independent platform, such as WordPress. The internet is continuing to grow worldwide, and the share of WordPress-powered-websites is increasing as well. Isn’t that a perfect proof that WordPress’s evolution and the track of it are moving in the right direction?

Daugirdas Jankus:

In the first place, I wish more people knew about WordPress in general. Secondly, I would love to see more people get to know how easy WordPress is to start and how versatile it can get.

Daugirdas Jankus:

Honestly, we do not like to call our services “cheap”. We see that people nowadays want fast, reliable and easy-to-use service and want it for a competitive price. We decided to do it. And it works!

For our size, we are a very lean company, with the majority of people working directly with our customers in the Customer Success department. Our back office is rather small, and we always operate by putting our customers and their needs first. In this way, we can keep focus and deliver a lot of value.

However, that does not make it easy to build a sustainable business. Hostinger is a bootstrapped company, which means we have never received external investments, and we are growing solely by reinvesting our profits to drive further company development. The unique, custom-built, and open-source based technology stack, which is a result of years of continuous experimentation and development, allows us to optimize our costs without sacrificing service quality since we do not need to pay a lot of licensing fees for 3rd-party providers.

We also invest heavily in our people. We are a smart, young, and ambitious organization, so by being more productive and executing better than our competitors, we can provide better service for a better price.

Daugirdas Jankus:

Speed and stability are the first things that came to my mind. Then, if something happens, customers need to be able to get quality help fast. Finally, they want everything for a competitive price. If a service provider can score well on all of these dimensions, customers will come 🙂

Daugirdas Jankus:

Considering the active community surrounding WordPress, I think the most efficient way to market a WordPress hosting service is to delight customers by building a great product. It won’t take much for the buzz to spread within the active community.

Daugirdas Jankus:

Getting started is relatively easy, but to scale it and actually break the ice can be a lengthy and complicated process. It takes time to build great products, and to be successful in this niche you definitely need to have it.

Daugirdas Jankus:

I might be a little biased with my answer here, but I believe three main factors matter the most when picking any web hosting solution (including WordPress):

1. Speed – speed of websites hosted with the provider, speed of control panel, speed of customer support, etc. Nowadays, people do not waste their time waiting for websites to load. If you have a slow website, or need to wait a long time for somebody to assist you – you might be in trouble.
2. Reliability – downtimes happen for the best of us. But you really want to minimize those. Check the stability of your provider before picking one.
3. Quality Support – occasionally, everyone runs into troubles of some sort. Once something unplanned happens, you need to get quality help. Fast.

Daugirdas Jankus:

For me, quality hosting support is fast and professional. At Hostinger, we invest heavily in making our customer support operations quick and continuously train our staff to be fully prepared to assist our clients even with the most technical issues.

Daugirdas Jankus:

We target all of the people who want to use the internet to create and scale projects online.

Daugirdas Jankus:

I think there are pros and cons of working with each of those segments. We are not focused on large businesses and corporations, though. In our case, serving startups, SMBs, and casual users do the trick since we thrive on our customers’ feedback. And the more customers we get, the more feedback we receive and the more value we can create.

Daugirdas Jankus:

The Speeeeeed 🙂

Daugirdas Jankus:

I believe AI is one of the technologies that are already creating a lot of buzz worldwide, but it is making its move to the web hosting industry. We observe a lot of cases when the biggest roadblock for people creating their websites becomes the need for quality content. Creating it is hard; outsourcing it is expensive.

However, the latest movements in AI-powered language generation might solve this issue. Users might become able to generate lots of content of high quality fast. And adapting text is way easier than writing it from scratch. This might be the next interesting technological shift in this niche. Let’s see what the future will bring 🙂

Daugirdas Jankus:

I want to build a better world for future generations. At Hostinger, we are enabling millions of people worldwide to access the power of the Internet by building websites. We take their projects online and help them to achieve their goals. I find that really satisfying.