Does Every Hosting Company Want to Be a Website Builder? We Asked Leaders in Web Hosting What They Think

For those who remember the ’90s and early ’00s, building your own website was not that common — it usually marveled responses like, “Wow, how’d you do that?” and all they would be referring to was a GeoCities plain-paged webpage with some text and a poorly designed graphic pasted on it.

It took another decade or so until the true era of do-it-yourself became the standard. It was more properly done, with the website creator just a bit deeper into the knowledge stack: People had a domain registrar, a hosting provider, email tools setup, maybe even a web builder that combined other handy tools like eCommerce handling and customization tools.

The manual labor behind a website is long gone, and it has been for well over a year. The biggest names in web hosting are now combining every manual aspect of what used to mean building a website and offering it all in one place. And people love it.

So, what does that mean for the providers who built their business on selling one piece of the stack? And for the small business owners still trying to make different tools communicate with each other?

HostingAdvice went went straight to the people building these platforms — from the industry’s biggest players to the AI-native upstarts rewriting the rules — to find out what’s actually happening, and where it’s all going.

What Are People Actually Looking For in a Provider?

We’re at the point in web hosting where hosts are understanding that small business owners and website owners — stack-free founders, prompt-preneuers? — are not praying for the day that they get to spend their evenings managing software integrations.

“They want to design, teach, build, or provide a service people care about. Very few consider the amount of time it’ll take to operate and manage their business as it scales,” said Jeremy Johnstone, a principal software engineer at Squarespace. “Over time, they often end up having to use multiple systems to run each part of their business, creating an exponential amount of operational overhead.”

But for Narek Torosyan, the CEO of 10Web, it’s an even simpler origin story: He says customers never wanted hosting and a builder as separate products — the market just forced them to buy it that way (finally). And now that customers know what used to take weeks takes hours, they now expect nothing less.

GoDaddy’s director of growth and product marketing, Michael Roehricht agrees.

“Small business owners don’t want to stitch together hosting, design, marketing and payments,” he said. “Ultimately, all-in-one platforms win because they replace complexity with a single, intelligent system that saves time and delivers results.”

Makes sense. Everyone’s been dealing with tool sprawl for well over a decade now, and it’s pretty harmful, even in small doses.

According to SMB Group research, fragmented software environments cost small businesses around 30% revenue loss from data fragmentation. Things like duplicate entry, siloed information, and context switching between platforms.

Meanwhile, 58% of SMBs now use generative AI, up from 40% in 2024 and more than double the 23% reported in 2023. It’s kind of an odd finding when you consider how much time and money is spent bouncing between different tools, but it just proves much of the market’s happy to board the train.

Aviran Mordo, Wix’s VP of engineering, calls the hidden cost of handling fragmented tools “the integration tax.”

“The biggest advantage is what I’d call eliminating the integration tax,” Mordo said. “When you stitch together separate hosting, design, and marketing tools, you’re not just paying for each product, you’re paying a hidden cost in fragmented data, broken connections, and constant maintenance.“

Wix says 71-75% of websites built on its platform pass Google’s Core Web Vitals standards. Mordo argues that’s possible because Wix controls the hosting, infrastructure, builder, and all the rest of the underlying technology in one system.

Website Builders and Hosts Are Now Direct Competitors

Sure, combining hosting, design, marketing, and commerce into a single platform may feel new, but it’s solving a problem that customers have been complaining about for years.

It kind of messes with what hosting providers always sold themselves as though, right? They were different from website builders, serving different customers, different needs, different parts of the stack. No more is that the case.

Torosyan says they’re actively competing: “The line between ‘we host your site’ and ‘we build your site’ is gone, and pretending otherwise is how hosting companies lose the next decade.”

Let’s look to the numbers. Wix posted $541 million in revenue in Q1 2026, up 14% YoY, on the back of 32.6% annual growth. GoDaddy, coming from the opposite direction, reported $1.27 billion in Q1 2026 revenue, coming at a time when the company is aggressively pushing AI-powered products.

“Platforms like Wix and Squarespace are moving down-stack, while hosting providers like GoDaddy are moving up-stack,” said GoDaddy’s Roehricht. “They’re converging into direct competitors for most customers, just coming from different starting points.”

Rather than competing from opposite ends of the market, both “sides” are racing toward the same customers with very similar offerings, from site creation and eCommerce tools to marketing automation and AI-powered services.

Mordo is less diplomatic about what’s happening to traditional hosting providers in this environment.

“As all-in-one platforms have made hosting near-invisible and bundled it into a much larger product, that core value proposition has eroded. To stay relevant, they’re adding business layers on top of their infrastructure,” Mordo said. “The problem is they’re working backwards, and it shows.”

Maybe both Roehricht and Mordo are biased, but it doesn’t mean he’s wrong. Traditional hosting companies have built their business from the bottom up (infrastructure first, everything else bolted on later), and all-in-one platforms like Wix have built from the customer experience downward, with hosting just being one layer among many.

But maybe there’s a silver lining. Torosyan thinks traditional hosts still have cards to play. If they move fast, that is.

“Without an agentic layer, hosts become the cheap utility behind someone else’s product — and the margin moves to whoever owns the customer relationship,” he said.

Is It Time to Introduce the Agentic Layer?

There’s that word again — agentic. Everyone’s talking about it, but only a select few are actually doing something with it at this point. But it’s progressing fast, with the AI website builder market projected to grow at more than 20% CAGR over the next decade.

But agentic AI can be tougher for traditional hosts. Many still ask customers to connect website builders, marketing platforms, payment processors, and so on. The competitors are the ones who are offering those capabilities altogether:

Platforms like Wix and Squarespace aready have the tools that people use on a daily basis, whereas AI-native players like 10Web and GoDaddy built automation into the product from the start.

Actually, GoDaddy’s Airo AI Builder already more than $10 million in annualized bookings within weeks of its beta release. Wix made a similar choice when it acquired Base44 for $80 million, a platform that reached 300,000 users and $3.5 million in ARR within just six months.

“The most valuable AI experiences will likely feel practical and unintrusive. Business owners won’t have to become experts in every new AI tool or workflow,” said Johnstone from Squarespace. “The platform itself will help organize information, simplify decision-making, automate repetitive tasks, and reduce the amount of manual coordination required to run the business day to day.”

Torosyan argues that there are three things that will define who survives into the next era of the hosting market: “intent as the new interface, agents as the new admin panel, and the hosting layer as the persistent runtime, everything else lives on top of. Whoever owns all three controls how SMBs operate online.”

Mordo looks at it from an angle of accessibility, adding: “A small business owner shouldn’t need a development team to have enterprise-grade automation.”

He’s spot-on — the website builder is growing into something bigger than its name suggests, and simultaneously becoming the smallest part of the actual selling point. What these platforms are really pitching now is saving time.

GeoCities and Angelfire had to walk so today’s hosts could run. Without them, there’s no infrastructure for the dynamic, agentic, prompt-driven websites that define what a web presence means in 2026.

But the origin story doesn’t matter, whether you’re a mega-giant provider or a mid-market host. The ask is the same: Site owners want something closer to a business partner that never sleeps and never sends a separate invoice.