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About Hostney

Two decades of hosting experience

Over 20 years in web hosting, from building Hungary's second-largest domain registrar to creating a platform that does things the right way. Hostney is the result of everything I've learned.

14 days free. No credit card. No commitment.

Since 2003

In hosting, not adjacent to it

Same price

On renewal, every year

99.99%

Uptime, last 12 mo

Daily

Backups kept up to 30 days

E

190+

Tasks Ellie handles

The founder

A passion that started in 2003

Hostney was founded by Gabor Leszlauer - someone who's been living and breathing web hosting for over two decades.

I started my first web hosting company in 2003 in Europe. What began as a curiosity about Linux servers and web design quickly became a career. By 2012, that company had grown into Hungary's second-largest domain registrar. We served over 70,000 customers and managed everything from shared hosting to clustered high-availability systems.

After the company was acquired by an investor group, I relocated to the United States, where I currently serve as Director of Quality Control at Sequentur, a managed service provider. That role gives me a broad view of enterprise infrastructure, security, and what it takes to keep systems running reliably at scale.

But hosting never left me. I kept thinking about what a modern hosting platform should look like if you started with a blank page and made every decision based on what's actually best for the customer. Not what's cheapest to license, not what's easiest to resell - what's genuinely better.

That's how Hostney was born in 2019. Every account is isolated in its own Podman container, hardened so a process inside it cannot gain privileges or execute anything it uploaded. Behavioral bot detection scores every visitor across 20+ signals. There's an AI assistant that proposes the change you asked for and applies it once you confirm. And the pricing is honest - no fake “unlimited” plans where inodes quietly limit you, no hidden renewal fees, no bait-and-switch.

Hosting is not just my job. It's been my craft for over 20 years, and Hostney is the best version of everything I've learned along the way.

- Gabor Leszlauer, Founder

What we believe

Our values

Not statements on a wall. Each of these is a decision that costs us something.

  • Security is the baseline

    Container isolation, behavioural bot protection, real-time malware scanning and daily backups. Not a premium tier - the same on the cheapest plan as the most expensive, because a tiered security product means selling somebody a knowingly weaker one.

  • Honesty over marketing

    No "unlimited" plans that are quietly limited by inodes, no stock-photo testimonials, and no renewal price hidden in the small print. We would rather lose a sale than win one that ends in a complaint.

  • Simplicity through engineering

    Making something simple to use is expensive to build. That cost belongs with us rather than with a customer spending an evening learning how hosting works.

  • Your feedback shapes it

    Every feature request is read and every bug report is investigated by the people who wrote the thing. Several items on the roadmap below started as a ticket.

Roadmap

Shipped, and what is next

Kept honest in both directions - the things that landed are marked, and the things that have not are not dressed up.

Next up: bring your own server

A free server manager - point Hostney at a server you already own and run the whole stack on it: the panel, the containers, the bot protection, Ellie. Your hardware, our platform, no licence. It is the largest thing on this list and it is not built yet.

WordPress staging

Shipped

One-click staging for WordPress. Test changes on a copy, then push what worked back to live.

SSR applications

Shipped

Node.js, Next.js, Nuxt, Python and Ruby apps deployed from Git into containers. The foundation is done; more frameworks and controls are still coming.

Advanced security

Shipped

Expanded WAF rules, threat intelligence feeding the scoring, datacenter and AI-crawler controls, and per-site rate limiting.

Ellie improvements

In progress

Wider task coverage, better context, faster replies. Continuous rather than a release.

Free server manager

Planned

Add a server you already own and let Hostney run it - the panel, containers, bot protection and Ellie on your hardware, at no licence cost.

Granular access control

Planned

Delegate access is all-or-nothing per hosting account today. Read-only and scoped permissions are the next step.

Open API

Planned

A public REST API for accounts, domains and settings, so the platform is scriptable from outside the panel.

WordPress AI assistant

Planned

Ellie inside WordPress itself, for content and site management without leaving wp-admin.

Malware quarantine explorer

Planned

Browse, inspect and restore quarantined files from the dashboard instead of asking us.

n8n integration

Planned

One-click workflow automation running in a container of your own.

Try us for free

Start your free trial

14 days free. No credit card required. Container isolation, bot protection, daily backups and Ellie in every plan.

Questions

Frequently asked questions

Where are your servers located?
Our servers are located in the United States, running on enterprise-grade hardware with NVMe storage. We use Rocky Linux as our operating system with SELinux in enforcing mode.
How big is the Hostney team?
We're a small, focused team. We believe in building great technology rather than building a large organization. Every team member touches the product directly.
Do you offer email hosting?
No. We focus exclusively on web hosting and do it exceptionally well. For email, we recommend Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace - purpose-built email platforms that do a better job than any hosting company's bundled email ever could.
Do you offer domain registration?
Domain registration is coming soon. For now, you can register domains with any registrar (Cloudflare, Namecheap, GoDaddy) and point them to your Hostney account.