This Christmas period, we brought the festive spirit into our offices and teams by meeting our clients. From board games to puppy yoga and wine tasting, these experiences struck the perfect balance between celebrating and getting to know our clients. 

Join us as we share these memorable experiences and our clients’ success stories. 

From Friends to Company Parties

First, we had a board game party hosted by Offline Game Club. Besides having fun, playing board games also strengthens skills like reaction, strategic thinking, communication, and even bluffing.

The founders of Offline Game Club have been passionate about board games for over two decades. They’ve explored numerous games, attended international exhibitions, and grown their personal game collections. What began as a hobby and casual game nights for friends evolved into an actual job. 

“We now organize team-building events featuring various board games for both small gatherings and large festivals. Our unique collection of exclusive games ensures there’s something for everyone to enjoy,” shares Andrius Pilypaitis, one of the company’s founders. 

Website Is a Must for Scaling 

Starting this business was challenging due to the various misconceptions surrounding it. This is where their website played a crucial role. Through images and videos, they could effectively convey the excitement and diversity of their games. Additionally, customer testimonials on their website have been instrumental in finding new clients.

“We chose Hostinger for its reliability and good customer service. We got what we expected – a very easy-to-set-up and manage website. The era of needing a friend-of-a-friend to build your website is over. Nowadays, website creation and editing are so user-friendly that most people can do it themselves,” he highlights. 

Introducing the New Way of Yoga

One of our clients, Woof Yoga, combines relaxation with playful puppies. It is an excellent team-building exercise, allowing colleagues to connect in a fun and adorable setting. 

The creators of Woof Yoga, David Erenburg, Dovydas Daščioras, and Gabrielė Zdanavičiūtė, come from different fields – logistics, construction, and marketing. United by their love for animals and sports, they decided to introduce pet yoga to Lithuania.

“Initially, it wasn’t about business. We started by making calls and collecting people through social networks. Seeing the joy and repeated attendance of participants, we decided to move further,” David explains. 

Quality Comes First

The Woof Yoga team prioritizes high-quality classes by limiting participant numbers and varying the puppy breeds. They’ve found that their sessions appeal to a diverse range of people, offering various benefits from emotional to physical wellness. Starting with just five sessions per month, the business now hosts multiple sessions per day.

“As soon as we came up with the idea, we knew we wanted a website here and now. It’s been pivotal in simplifying session bookings and management, freeing up our time for other important aspects, like communicating with the kennels, advertising, and improving yoga. The website maintenance is convenient and easy, and the support team’s work is exceptional!” – shares David.

Pursuing the Dream

Just before Christmas, our team was inspired by another client who drastically changed her career to pursue her dream. Ieva Elvyra Kazakevičiūtė and her wine-tasting event business, Gliu Gliu, offered a delightful blend of education and enjoyment, perfect for spending quality time and learning.

Ieva’s journey is diverse, from children’s radio hosting to creating internationally renowned albums and magazines, writing for prime-time TV, and working in fintech. She says she finally found her passion – wine-tasting events, which are getting popular on various occasions, from birthdays to corporate celebrations. 

“I began studying to be a sommelier to learn something new and have fun after work. I always look to simplify things and convey them in a way that’s relatable to my audience. That’s what I felt was missing in the local wine scene. It felt like many people around me would be able to appreciate wine a lot more if it was presented to them in a simple way,“ she says. 

As Ieva Elvyra Kazakevičiūtė highlights, her goal is to create a safe space for her audience, with no concept of stupid questions. During her events, she tries to teach people a quick checklist about wine – how do you taste it? What do you look for in it? What questions do you ask to find a wine for the occasion? 

Embracing a Website as a Key Business Tool

Ieva initially hesitated to create a website, thinking it was a big deal she still had to grow into. However, a friend’s suggested viewing it as an online business card and recommended Hostinger – she ended up creating a website in a day. To her, it’s a vital platform for promoting natural winemaking and attracting new clients. 

“The user experience on Hostinger Website Builder made me feel like a world-class web creator. It’s all about arranging elements, playing with some colors, and voilà! Learning to promote my site and increase traffic has been fascinating. While word-of-mouth advertising is crucial in my field, people often research before reaching out. With the website, I show my personality and vibe fairly accurately for people to decide,” she explains. 

All the clients we’ve met agree that having a website is a pivotal part of growing a business. These websites serve as platforms for booking and raising your brand awareness to attract more clients. These stories show that a well-crafted website is necessary for connecting with audiences and achieving success. 

Part of Hostinger’s Communications Team, Kotryna is responsible for building and maintaining relationships with media outlets and ensuring that the organization’s achievements and initiatives receive public recognition. In her free time, Kotryna likes to explore new places and take photos.

In the past year, Hostinger has achieved impressive growth, reaching a milestone of over two million customers globally.

And we’re not stopping anytime soon. On a mission to deliver better services and reach even higher levels of customer satisfaction, we have released a number of tools designed to streamline your online journey. 

Whether you’re a complete beginner, a business owner, or a web developer, these exciting releases will bring you closer to your goals.

10 New Features for Your Success

Without further ado, let’s recap our top product releases and feature updates in 2023.

1. AI Website Builder 2.0

New year, new AI engine. The latest update of Hostinger AI Website Builder comes with more powerful machine learning algorithms, making it easier to create a stand-out website. 

The site creation process remains the same – enter your brand name, choose a website type, describe your business, and watch as AI does its magic. 

What’s different now is the output. Instead of similar web designs, every website generated by our AI builder will have a distinct look. 

Plus, given its drag-and-drop interface, customizing the initial design to your liking is easy. This will make your site even more unique, separating it from others in your niche.

2. Content Delivery Network

Slow load times frustrate visitors, no matter what kind of website you’re running. This can lead to a decline in traffic, conversions, and, ultimately, sales.

Hostinger CDN helps you deliver a flawless browsing experience. After running over 42,000 tests across more than 10,000 websites, we can confidently say that our CDN improves website performance by up to 40%.

This is possible because our data centers are spread across four continents – Asia, Europe, North America, and South America.

When someone visits your website for the first time, a CDN server closest to their location will retrieve and store the site data. This ensures faster content delivery and keeps your website running even if the origin server is down.

You can try our in-house CDN by purchasing a Business, WordPress Business, WordPress Pro, or Cloud hosting plan.

3. Client Management Tools

To make lives easier for web developers and designers, we’ve integrated time-saving client management tools into hPanel.

Dino Valdez, the Co-Founder of RSNL Creative, finds the interface remarkably easy to navigate. “I really like the UI, it’s very intuitive. I can set up a client project and take it off the ground in 30 minutes,” he explained.

This feature lets you manage multiple clients, websites, domains, and email accounts under one platform. And the most exciting part? You will get a recurring commission for every new user you bring on board.

To get started, simply purchase a web hosting plan for your clients, and our system will automatically send them the invoices. Once the payment is made, access their hosting accounts to perform these tasks:

• Create websites using WordPress or Hostinger Website Builder.

• Update the core WordPress version of multiple sites in one go.

• Get an instant notification when a client’s site is experiencing issues.

• Track your earned commissions from client purchases.

4. Object Cache

Make your WordPress site perform even better by enabling LiteSpeed Object Cache directly in hPanel. Object caching eliminates repeated database queries by storing the cached version of your site data on a server.

To put it into perspective, when users land on a frequently visited page, the server will collect the cached data instead of re-accessing the database. Since the query retrieving process is cut down, our server can deliver your website content to visitors up to three times faster.

This powerful feature is available in our Business, WordPress Business, WordPress Pro, and all Cloud hosting plans.

5. WordPress Enhanced Automatic Updates

As the most popular content management system (CMS), WordPress is a common target for cyber attackers. In most cases, they exploit outdated plugins and themes to gain unauthorized access to websites.

That’s why keeping your WordPress core version, themes, and plugins up-to-date is a must. Apart from fixing common vulnerabilities, updates usually come with performance improvements.

Good news for busy WordPress users and developers out there. Our Automatic WordPress Updates feature will protect your site from security threats and keep it running smoothly, all without any manual effort on your part.

You just need to upgrade to a Business hosting plan or above, enable automatic updates from hPanel, and configure the settings for WordPress core, plugins, and themes:

• Don’t update. By selecting this option, the automatic updates will be disabled.

• Yes, but only security updates. This will activate minor updates for WordPress core and security updates for plugins and themes. 

• Yes, enable all updates. Your WordPress core will get both major and minor updates, while your installed plugins and themes will receive all available patches.

Each time a new version of WordPress core, theme, or plugin is available, our system automatically creates a backup before performing the update. In case something goes wrong, you can easily revert to the previous version.

6. AI Domain Name Generator

A memorable domain name can leave a lasting impression on the audience. After all, it’s the first element your visitors notice before landing on your site.

We understand how difficult it is to come up with a catchy web address that represents your brand. So, we decided to include AI Domain Name Generator on our Domain Search page.

Simply write a brief description of your project or brand, and let AI generate several domain name ideas to choose from. Don’t like the results? Repeat the same process until you find the perfect match.

If you prefer alternative extensions other than .com, select one of the AI-generated options and run a new domain search. Our tool will provide a list of available top-level domains (TLDs) you can grab.

7. WordPress AI Content Tools

Content marketing is one of the most effective strategies for attracting more organic traffic. The only downside is that producing high-quality content consistently takes a lot of time and effort.

This is where our WordPress AI content tools come into play. No more wasting time trying to write SEO-friendly pages and posts from scratch – Hostinger Blog Theme makes the whole process quick and easy. 

This lightweight theme is equipped with pre-built pages, including Home, About, Contact, and Blog. Plus, its integrated AI content generator lets you create six articles around your niche and get relevant featured images in one go.

Want to use another WordPress theme? We also have a separate WordPress AI Assistant plugin.

With this tool, you can generate keyword-optimized content for web pages, blog posts, product descriptions, and more. Customizing the content length and tone of voice is also straightforward.

Both Hostinger Blog Theme and WordPress AI Assistant are accessible during onboarding when you purchase a Business or higher-tier hosting plan.

8. WordPress AI Troubleshooter

Website errors and downtime can strike at any moment, causing a major disruption to your online operations.

Our WordPress AI Troubleshooter is here to make sure that doesn’t happen. Whenever an issue arises, the tool will detect the root cause and offer automatic solutions, keeping your WordPress site online at all times.

9. Hostinger Website Builder’s AI SEO Tools 

Besides handling content and visual elements, Hostinger Website Builder is also capable of boosting your website’s visibility on search engines.

When you create a website through the AI flow, our builder will automatically generate the sitemap, meta title, meta description, and relevant keywords based on your input.

Prefer to choose from 150 pre-made templates instead? The site editor comes with built-in SEO tools. You just need to enter your brand name and business details, select the matching keywords, and that’s it – your metadata is ready.

AI Writer is also present inside the builder, allowing you to produce SEO-friendly content for web pages, blog posts, image alt texts, and product descriptions.

10. Mobile Editor for Hostinger Website Builder

For travel bloggers and business owners who are constantly moving, having the ability to create and edit their sites on the go is vital.

Our mobile editor enables you to do just that. No need to install additional software – simply log in to your hPanel account via a smartphone, access Hostinger Website Builder, and make the necessary changes, just as you would on the desktop version.

Not only simplifying the site editing process, this tool also lets you adjust its look and feel to deliver a better experience for mobile users.

What’s Next?

Our journey doesn’t stop here. We will continue pushing the boundaries, reaching new milestones, and launching more powerful tools to help you find success online. Check out the Hostinger Roadmap for a complete list of every upcoming release.

Have you tried some of Hostinger’s 2023 updates? If yes, leave a comment below and tell us what you like and don’t like about each feature. We always look for ways to improve our products, and your feedback will be invaluable in achieving this goal.

Brian is a Content Writer who knows the ins and outs of digital marketing and eCommerce. Driven by passion and a dose of caffeine, he constantly looks for better ways to tell complex stories in a simple manner. Follow him on LinkedIn.

In the world of artificial intelligence, GPT definitely garners most of the attention. But there’s another innovative creation paving its own unique path: DALL-E. Developed by OpenAI, the same company that brings us ChatGPT, DALL-E is designed to generate visual content based on textual inputs. 

Of course, the technology behind it is far more complex than that. Today, we’re taking a closer look at DALL-E. We’ll explore how it ticks and see how it changes the game for graphic design, websites, and much more.

History of DALL-E: Transforming language into visual art

DALL-E, later succeeded by DALL-E 2 and DALL-E 3, represents OpenAI’s groundbreaking endeavor to bridge the realms of language and visuals using deep learning methodologies. With roots embedded in the transformative GPT series, these models have the uncanny ability to spawn digital images from textual cues or prompts.

We will get more in-depth regarding DALL-E’s inner workings momentarily. First, though, let’s explore how this technology became to be what it is today. Here is a brief overview of its inception and evolution:

• January 2021: OpenAI launched the maiden version, DALL-E, which was an adaptation of GPT-3 crafted to birth images.
• April 2022: DALL-E 2 was introduced, boasting superior realism in image production and exhibiting a penchant for melding concepts, attributes, and styles with finesse.
• September 2023: OpenAI unveiled DALL-E 3, the current model heralded for its unparalleled sophistication in discerning nuances and intricate details in prompts.

What Is DALL-E?

At its core, DALL-E is akin to GPT-3, both being transformer language models. However, while GPT-3 processes and produces textual data, DALL-E takes it a step further by interpreting and generating visual content from textual prompts. Yes, they’re one and the same, yet they’re immeasurably different, too. So, how does DALL-E work?

The artificial intelligence learns from a huge collection of pictures paired with descriptions. This lets it create objects and creatures that feel surprisingly human. It blends wild ideas in ways that seem totally real, has fun with words, and smartly changes up photos we’re familiar with.

DALL-E amalgamates text and image as a unified data stream of up to 1,280 tokens at once. For clarity, a token can be any symbol from a defined vocabulary. So here, DALL-E’s vocabulary accommodates both textual and visual concepts. 

The training enables DALL-E to create an image from scratch or modify specific parts of an existing image, whether it’s a photo-realistic image or a fashion design sketch, in line with the given text prompt.

What can DALL-E do: Interesting use cases and integrations

DALL-E’s primary strength lies in its ability to fabricate plausible images from words. But perhaps what makes DALL-E so formidable is its ability to understand the intricate structures of language. 

Indeed, it is proficient in varying attributes of objects and can manipulate the frequency of their appearance based on the provided descriptions. One of the most incredible things it can do is blend totally different ideas together, turning what you imagine with words into something you can see.

However, with DALL-E 3 now an integral part of ChatGPT (Pro plans only), plenty of interesting possibilities arise, mainly in terms of automated workflows. For instance, you can view documents in a React app, establish your tasks with them, upload them to ChatGPT’s Advanced Data Analysis tab, and then use DALL-E 3 to generate images. 

This can be great for blog posts, data visualization (the Wolfram plugin is still good for that), mockups for manual designs, and so much more. 

The research surrounding DALL-E

The success and prowess of DALL-E 3 are not merely fortuitous. It’s born from tireless exploration and innovation, both inside OpenAI’s walls and beyond. Compared to its predecessor, DALL-E 3 produces images of superior quality, attention to detail, and adherence to user-supplied descriptions.

This enhancement was realized by employing a state-of-the-art image captioner to generate enhanced textual descriptions, which, in turn, served as the training data for DALL-E 3.

Challenges and limitations

As the adage goes, “With great power comes great responsibility.” Generative models like DALL-E are indeed powerful, opening doors to all kinds of possibilities. However, OpenAI is not blind to the challenges and potential pitfalls. 

Censorship

They’ve initiated robust safety mechanisms to tackle the risk of creating harmful imagery, be it violent, inappropriate, or brimming with hate. 

This approach is dual-faceted: not only are user prompts analyzed, but the ensuing imagery is as well, ensuring that inappropriate content never reaches the user. 

The contribution of early users and domain experts in refining this system can’t be understated. Their feedback has been pivotal in strengthening the safety measures in place.

Yes, although both Bing Image Creator and DALL-E have tightened their censorship for ethical reasons in recent weeks, it’s not the end of the world just because you can’t generate Jean-Luc Picard driving a Dodge Challenger.

Remember, all objects or scenes that aren’t copyrighted or vulgar can be created, which means the use cases are pretty much endless. You can generate batches of images for a personal grocery shopper app, spice up your blogs, or even visualize data. However, the limitations are still there, and it’s pointless to expect images that don’t require at least a little bit of editing.

We’re not quite there yet

Although the third iteration of this visually oriented AI certainly blew people’s minds, it’s not the one-size-fits-all solution everyone hoped for. 

“We tried everything from using DALL-E for promotional images to asking it to edit our existing visual content, now that ChatGPT Vision is integrated with the platform,” says Andrew Cuthbert, Head of Organic Marketing at unicorn software startup Weave. “It’s great for brainstorming, but we’re still far, far away from publishable images in a few seconds.” 

So, it would be best to treat DALL-E as the next step towards the ideal generative AI for visuals. We still can’t rely on it fully, as it has issues with lettering, racial bias, and much more. 

While technological advancements are at the forefront, OpenAI places immense value on the insights drawn from its vast user community. Their experiences, challenges, and feedback steer the course for refining and reshaping the models. 

The challenge of authenticity

In a time when AI-crafted visuals are everywhere, it’s vital to distinguish between what’s real and what’s AI-made. OpenAI is addressing this with the development of a provenance classifier. Basically, this tool can tell whether an image has DALL-E 3’s “fingerprints” on it.

Implications for designers

The emergence of DALL-E and its successors has been nothing short of revolutionary for the design realm. Just as the chisel was to a sculptor or the brush to a painter in bygone eras, this AI-driven tool is redefining the canvas of contemporary designers.

But like any tool, it carries with it both promises and challenges. Let’s explore what this means for designers today.

Enhanced productivity and efficiency

Designers are always on the lookout for ways to refine and expedite their processes. With DALL-E, rapid prototyping is now a reality. Imagine being in a brainstorming session and bringing a conceptual idea to visual life in mere moments. 

The iterative design process, often characterized by multiple rounds of feedback and tweaks, can now be streamlined. With AI assistance, designers can adjust and experiment with designs at an unprecedented pace.

Economic and personalized impacts

When it comes to money matters, AI can make design more accessible to everyone by making it cheaper. But there’s a real worry that it might take away jobs, especially ones that have a lot of repeat tasks.

In the online world, it’s all about making things personal. With AI crafting designs, we might get images that are just our style, making our time online even more enjoyable.

Designing for a sustainable future

Think about the green impact. AI can be utilized to craft designs with the least environmental footprint, from the things we use to where we live.

Design is always changing, and DALL-E is just the newest player in this story. For designers, the real task is using these tools wisely. We must innovate while still keeping true to what’s right, real, and the age-old basics of good design.

What’s next for visual AI?

For starters, DALL-E 3 has been engineered to decline requests mimicking the style of living artists, emphasizing respect for originality. Additionally, creators have the prerogative to exclude their images from being used in the training of subsequent image-generation models. 

With tools like DALL-E coming into the picture, we’re on the edge of a big change in graphic design and how websites look. Using AI in visuals means we might soon live in a world where what we imagine with words can instantly turn into images, opening up endless creative possibilities.

For more about generative AI, check out the breakdown from our own Undercover Geek.