Shared Hosting Tips in Lithuania

Every market is different, but also the experiences of different companies in the same market can be different. And learning those different experiences can be fundamental for the growth of your company, whether it’s shared hosting or another industry.

That’s why we’ve decided to take a look at the hosting market of Lithuania, the country where Site.pro is based, from the perspective of another hosting service, Hostens, a young hosting company providing shared hosting services and VPS to global markets. Currently, it’s one of the leading shared hosting companies in Lithuania, with 60%+ of .LT domain market. The interview below turned into a fun and insightful conversation about the specificities of the Lithuanian market.

Different Products for Different Audiences

Hostens is a part of a family of interconnected products offering services ranging from website builders to managing data centers. Instead of marketing all the products to the same audience, Valentinas says that they offer different products for different audiences. The company sells services in Russia, Europe, the United States, and elsewhere in the world. Hostens itself is a relatively new brand that provides shared hosting services, VPS, etc. to global markets. The main servers of the company are located in Lithuania, but there are also servers available in the USA and Singapore, and people can choose where they want their servers to be located.

Localisation and Market Specificities

In Lithuania, the local .lt domain is highly preferred. People want to have their websites registered in Lithuania, and showcase that it’s a Lithuanian websites. Customers prefer mainly Lithuanian support, as not everyone is proficient in English. But because being a global company, Hostens has support available both in English and Lithuanian. This is one of the main reasons why many bigger names don’t enter the Lithuanian market: most of them don’t offer support in Lithuanian, which makes it hard for people to manage their websites. Younger people who know English, on the other hand, start to look for other providers by comparing pricing and services, the location, the target, etc.

Another interesting thing is that Hostens doesn’t provide 24/7 support. 'Lithuanians don’t sit through the night working, so 24/7 support is not mandatory. What we’ve noticed is that 8:30-22:00 is the optimal time for support. Between there, there are maybe a couple of requests, but it’s rarely anything urgent. We do, however, have round-the-clock technical support to ensure that servers are working without any issues.'

Hostens: Getting Started

When the company entered the Lithuanian hosting market, it started by providing services at a very affordable price (around 4 Euros/year,) which, according to Čirba, contributed greatly to the success of the product. However, notwithstanding this affordability, the company doesn’t cut on quality.

Lithuania is #1 in the world with Internet speed, and people expect speed of service from their provider. 'In Lithuania, Lithuanian providers will beat foreigners when it comes to speed of the service,' Valentinas mentions.

Payment Gateways

In Lithuania, people are comfortable with paying online. Bank link through Paysera, a local payment gateway, is the most popular payment method, with credit cards being the second. Hostens has also started accepting Bitcoin payments, and some customers actually prefer to pay in Bitcoins instead of traditional money.

Website Builder Popularity

According to Valentinas, website builders are currently not very popular in Lithuania, although there is a certain trend for growth because of ease of use. 'Customers mainly use website builders as a temporary website, before they get a professional website built for their business. At the same time, Wix, Shopify, Site.pro, and other services are gaining a bigger share of web hosting, and maybe the preferred method in the future.'

Marketing and Promotion

Valentinas tells a story of a Halloween promotion when the company offered 50% off of all VPS services. 'We’ve had 400-500 coupons, and all of them were used in a couple of hours. In addition to that, we also use affiliate programs for all our brands. Our users can refer their friends, and get back money to their accounts. We even have customers, who have 50 servers, but don’t pay anything, instead “paying” through referred customers.' The company also offers reseller programs, where people can resell their services. 'We like to experiment a lot with our products to find the key point of offering great service at a fair price, and getting ourselves known.'

Wrapping Up

The growing IT market of Lithuania makes it a very interesting place for studying domain and hosting businesses. For us, it was very interesting to take a look at the Lithuanian market from a fresh perspective, and we absolutely enjoyed our chat with Hostens. If you are looking for new locations for your hosting business, Lithuania is a place ripe with opportunities and is a relatively easy market to enter.