Hostinkos offers web hosting and VPS servers located in a data center in Kosova. We had the pleasure to talk to the founder, Osman Dragusha.
If you want to learn more about what they have to offer, keep reading this interview.
Can you tell us more about the idea behind your company and how did everything start?
Thanks for giving me this opportunity, Stefanija. I’m the founder and CEO of
, a solid company located in Pristina-Kosova, with respectable roots and a loyal customer base, backed by the ability to provide the kind of customer care we would like to see ourselves.
Most certainly, one of my passions is information technology. I’ve always loved computers, and that’s the reason why I decided to study Computer Science and complete a Master’s program. Before founding my own company, about four years ago, my first job was as a Radio System Admin. This experience increased my enthusiasm to continue my career as an engineer.
It was always a dream of mine to start my own company, where customers can find a wide variety of solutions for their websites and definitely count on being in for the long haul. I started Hostinkos.com out of my house as a modest start-up business to serve a few customers, with the intent of providing an honest and reliable alternative to large hosting corporations.
Our company’s journey began when I was doing web design work for friends in my local area, and I decided to provide hosting accounts, so I started Hostinkos fortuitously. Hostinkos initially thrived on providing basic website and email hosting for local businesses, women entrepreneurs, marketing agencies, and start-ups. Most of the customers we initially had on board were unsatisfied with other hosting providers, and as new entrants into the hosting arena, we worked closely with them to ensure that our company perfectly met their needs.
Bit by bit, Hostinkos developed a positive reputation within the community in this highly saturated hosting industry. Since then, we have grown considerably from a small reseller that was barely known to one of the most well-known hosting providers in the region.
We are now a small team of people trying our best to help ambitious customers build their websites and create the best hosting experience available. As a CEO, I am involved in pretty much every aspect of our company’s day-to-day operation, from planning to directing the operations and negotiations with potential customers.
A lot of start-ups have challenges that need to be tackled. What were the challenges that you faced at the beginning?
Well, starting up a business is not an easy task – as in any business, being an underdog is hard at the beginning. The year I launched Hostinkos was the most difficult year for me. The biggest challenge I faced personally after I decided to start building my own company, was most definitely trying to learn all the information about the industry completely on my own.
Establishing our website was challenging, but also rewarding. Since we compete by offering greater value, I think one of the most challenging aspects of Hostinkos is being compared to others who are longer on the market – there’s always somebody who will do it cheaper. But we are assured that they cannot offer the same quality we offer for our customers.
Can you give us an overview of the main products and services you offer?
During our first few years, we focused primarily on delivering high quality shared hosting and web design services for individuals and small businesses. Since then, Hostinkos is a company that aims to be the “perfect fit” for small businesses. I think it will not come as a surprise if I say Shared Hosting is still the most popular service for us, as it is sufficient for most customers. Truth is, there are websites that launch every day and their needs are far from the capacities of a Virtual Private Server for instance.
At Hostinkos, we offer shared hosting services in three plans and our best-selling plan is called “Business Plus”. All three plans provide unlimited traffic, unlimited subdomains, email accounts, cPanel and MySQL/MariaDB databases with phpMyAdmin access. Plus, the freebies make them even better! We pride ourselves in fast and complete support for our customers. Ultimately, we got here by offering a personal, hands-on approach to support, and this places Hostinkos in a prime position to differentiate itself.
Apart from standard web hosting, we also offer services such as domain name registrations and virtual private servers located in a very secure data center in Kosovo. Of course, our pricing is listed clearly on our website and customers will not need to purchase five years of web hosting in order to secure a lower price.
As we can see, you also offer design and SEO optimization. What about these services?
With an extensive skill set, we are very involved with web design and maintenance. We are committed to developing clients’ projects on various technologies that can cover the entire process of change from website designing to SEO optimization and maintenance.
Our website solutions are based on a consulting process that helps us identify our client’s requirements and goals. We mainly concentrate the web design services on small companies and start-ups looking to develop an outstanding online presence for the first time.
With the focus only on web design, it’s not possible nowadays to have a successful website without applying SEO optimization. SEO is especially important for us; however, providing SEO is not easy. Since last year, we have been offering SEO optimization to help our customers get guaranteed inclusion into search engines like Google. We have proper checklists and processes for SEO optimization.
A company needs to be prepared for sudden spikes of traffic. How do you handle this part?
This is difficult to answer, as there is so much to keep in mind. These days, the choice of a good web host has a huge impact on website vitals, like SEO and page load speed. By using the latest generation hosting servers and software innovations to manage the finite resources within each shared environment, we are able to offer unmatchable server performances to satisfy workloads that can cater to sudden spikes of traffic.
At Hostinkos, we don’t overload our servers and don’t try to cram as many accounts as possible on shared servers. In general, overselling creates a logistical nightmare, and we take this very seriously. One thing that we at Hostinkos are especially proud of is our uptime being 99.99% in the last couple of years.
Many customers are worried about the speed and the backup when it comes to the website and the web hosting provider. So how do you handle that part?
Now, we have websites that are very complex, which often get slower. Unfortunately, sometimes customers are subjected to poorer performance due to ads. It is therefore of the highest importance to us at Hostinkos to provide ultimate server speed to our customers.
I think in the area of server administration, we have many achievements there. It’s helped make our speed, server reliability, and performance incredible. We have put in endless hours of study to test and optimize our server communications and software configurations to improve the performance. We made the decision to include caching technologies and to become one of, if not the very first, 100% SSD web host that goes into making the web host work as fast as possible.
Although every hosting provider works to make sure that there’s never a failure, failures can happen. This is why we do provide free regular backups for our shared customers. Alongside this, in the event that a catastrophic issue occurs with a server, we have all the data backed up and ready for customers to restore.
What are your main customers, and where are they coming from?
We have a growing global presence. We have non-Albanian customers too! Although we initially started off as a company with a presence in Kosova and Albania, we are now proud to say that our customers are all over the world.
Honestly, we don’t have a big customer base, but if I have to pick a specific group, I would say we offer excellent benefits for small businesses and organizations of all shapes and sizes. Most of our customers are NGOs & media directors, founders and entrepreneurs, product owners, and marketing agencies.
However, our goal is to provide outstanding service to a select group of clientele who appreciate a full-service professional hosting experience. We are decisive in letting go of customers that are not compatible with our company policies.
One thing I should mention is that our Trustpilot reviews show super-satisfied customers.
In your opinion, what are the essentials for on web hosting provider?
For me, there are a few general things that should not be neglected. In my view, the most important factor is the perfect combination of customer support and uptime of the server. Right after that comes other key factors, such as high performance and data security – Hostinkos performs well in all these and more.
Our focus at Hostinkos has always been on customer satisfaction and uptime. We do not just say “we care for our customers” and then let them down.
Where do you see the hosting industry heading in the next 5years? What about Hostinkos? Where do you see your company in the next five years?
The hosting industry is constantly evolving, and Hostinkos is aware of changes in the technology sector, as well as trends in the industry. Most probably, there will be a strong trend to address the increasing demands of customers by providing additional services or value-added services; eCommerce Support, Online Marketing, and SEO, for instance.
Not to our surprise, we’re constantly expanding and improving every aspect of our products and services. Shared hosting alone is barely a thing now, and we need to be aware of the ever-changing consumer profile. Adjusting to the customer needs and market trends, Hostinkos will continue to grow and offer a broad hosting product line at an affordable price. Managed hosting, services for developing a website, and SEO optimization are probably the three core things we will continue to focus on going forward.
Furthermore, Hostinkos will incorporate some of the next services within five years: mobile applications and e-learning. Beyond the technological developments, our plan is to grow our presence in the web hosting market by building a strong brand.
Any final thoughts for our readers?
Firstly, thank you so much for this interview; it has been an absolute privilege to take part. I would like to thank all Hostinkos customers and readers for their time. Secondly, I would recommend the hosting industry as a source of opportunity for young entrepreneurs. Thank you!
