Web Hosting Interview - 10Web June 2026

NAREK TOROSYAN: 10Web is the only agentic AI website builder built natively for WordPress. It runs fully white-labeled, integrates in under two weeks.

I'm Narek Torosyan, the CEO. I've spent thirteen years in WordPress and web hosting, the last seven of them at 10Web. We launched managed WordPress hosting on Google Cloud in 2019, the first AI website builder in 2021, and the agentic version in 2025. We're backed by Sierra Ventures and AI Fund.

The mission is specific. Empower one billion entrepreneurs to build and scale online businesses, distributed through the partners who already serve them: hosting providers, MSPs, and agencies. We don't compete with our distribution. We power it.
For hosts, three things matter, and they don't exist together anywhere else.

The first is agentic generation. A team of AI agents builds a production-ready WordPress site of five to seven pages in under three minutes, from a prompt, a Figma file, a URL to clone, or an image.

The second is that the output is real WordPress, with WooCommerce, 60,000+ plugins, custom post types, 90+ PageSpeed scores, and 99.99% uptime.

The third is end-to-end white-label. The entire experience carries the host's brand. Customers sign up at the host's URL, generate inside the host's product, and the site lives on the host's hosting. We stay invisible underneath.

Each piece exists elsewhere. The combination doesn't, and that's our uniqueness.

NAREK TOROSYAN: WordPress hosting is being commoditized. That's the honest framing.
A massive wave of AI end-to-end platforms like Lovable, Bolt, and V0 have changed what customers expect from getting a website online. Users no longer want to buy hosting separately and then figure out how to build a site. They want to describe an outcome and have it exist. If a host doesn't offer an integrated AI website builder, they lose the new customer to a platform that does.

But framing this as just a new revenue opportunity understates what's actually happening. This is a window for category change. The hosting market is repositioning in real time, and the window is short.

Hosts who move now have something the AI-native platforms don't: an existing customer base, real brand trust, a working support and billing stack, and a go-to-market machine that already converts. That's the position from which a host can take the new category in their geography or their segment, with the infrastructure and the GTM machine they already have doing most of the work. Hosts who move late don't get a second window. The category gets defined by whoever lands first, and the late movers spend the next decade competing for the leftovers.

So the real choice isn't whether to add agentic to the hosting stack. It's whether to nail this transition with the machine you already have, or watch the category get taken by someone who showed up earlier.

NAREK TOROSYAN: There are two components, and that's the entire integration surface.
Component one is a WordPress license plugin. It installs on each WordPress site the host provisions. On first run, it auto-installs the agentic builder theme, editor, and required components, then self-deletes.

Component two is a gateway API at the workspace level. It gives the host site lifecycle control across the entire customer base: limits, usage, deletion, quotas.
Generation runs on 10Web's AI infrastructure. Sites run on the host's. Same SLAs, same CDN, same security posture as anything else the host runs. We don't change the runtime. We add the builder. Integration takes under two weeks.

The integration unlocks three revenue paths:

Bundled. The builder is built into every hosting plan as a competitive differentiator at plan selection. It lifts both signup conversion and ARPU across the entire base.

Add-On. The builder runs as an optional paid upgrade on existing plans, opt-in and paid incrementally. It generates new revenue from the customer base the host already has, with clean attribution.

New Product Line. The builder launches as a standalone product with its own landing page, pricing, and audience, separate from the core hosting brand. New revenue from a new audience entirely.

Additionally, for hosts who want a standalone product without a deep integration, typically the New Product Line path, there's also a Reseller Dashboard. It's a full SaaS workspace with AI generation, client workspaces, billing, and analytics, all under the host's brand. The sites generated through it are hosted on 10Web's managed WordPress infrastructure, so the partner can launch and operate a website-builder business without touching their core hosting stack.

Both paths land in the same outcome: a fully branded agentic builder, customers in the host's ecosystem, and revenue on the host's books.

Most partners we work with run more than one path at the same time. Pick one, validate it, expand from there. There's no business-model lock-in.

NAREK TOROSYAN: People conflate three different products because they all have "AI" and "website builder" in the description. They're not the same product, and the distinction matters.

Take Extendify. It fills WordPress templates with AI-generated text and gives the user a starter kit that gets them past the blank-WordPress-screen problem for their first session. It's template-based, not agentic.

Then take Nova by WebPros. Nova is agentic, but it ships on its own stack, not on WordPress. It's available to hosting providers as a whitelabel option, which is why it gets compared to us. The catch is the output isn't a real WordPress site, and there's no advanced visual builder underneath it. Once the customer wants to install a specific WordPress plugin, add a WooCommerce store, or hand the site off to a developer who knows WordPress, they're stuck. Hosts whose business is WordPress hosting end up shipping their customers a product that doesn't run on the platform they're already paying to host.

Then 10Web. Agentic on WordPress, end-to-end white-label, deployed under the host's brand. A team of AI agents designs each site against the specific brief: homepage, services, pricing, about page, contact page, image selection, copy, layout, and navigation. Five to seven pages of production-ready WordPress in under three minutes.

And the input isn't just a prompt. The customer can hand the agents a Figma file and they'll build the site from the design. They can paste any existing URL and the agents will clone it as WordPress. They can ask the agents to redesign their own site or a competitor's. The output isn't a template fill. It looks custom because it is custom.

With an agentic builder on WordPress, the ceiling is the WordPress ecosystem itself: 60,000+ plugins, full WooCommerce, the entire theme library, every custom post type. The customer stays. The conversion math reflects that too. Our builder runs at around 12% signup-to-live in the US market.

NAREK TOROSYAN: Because WordPress is the open standard. 43% of the web runs on it. The hosting companies reading this outlet have built real parts of their business on that fact. A proprietary platform would ask them to bet against the ecosystem they already monetize. That's not a partnership, it's a migration risk.

The deeper reason is portability. WordPress is open, with no lock-in. The customer owns their site and can move it tomorrow if they want. Proprietary agentic platforms, whether B2C builders or coding tools, lock customers into runtimes they don't own. That model works for a side project. It's wrong for a hosting customer who wants a site they actually own, and for a host that wants a customer they actually keep.

That's the reason 1,000+ B2B partners, including two of the largest hosting companies in the world, treat 10Web as long-term infrastructure rather than a vendor risk. We extend the ecosystem they already monetize. We don't ask them to migrate off it.

The reason proprietary agentic tools like Lovable, Bolt, and Nova ship on their own stacks instead of real WordPress is the React-to-WordPress bridge. Connecting a modern React frontend to a production WordPress backend, with full plugin compatibility, the entire theme ecosystem, and Core Web Vitals out of the box, is the hardest engineering problem in this category. It took 30 engineers a full year to build that bridge. Hosting partners inherit it in two weeks.

NAREK TOROSYAN: It's the right question, and we lose deals when the answer doesn't hold up. So I'll walk through the math the way a CTO will run it themselves.

Time to market. Integration with 10Web takes under two weeks. Building an agentic website builder from scratch, with multi-agent orchestration, the React-to-WordPress bridge, plugin compatibility, WooCommerce, performance optimization, and ongoing model evals, is 12 to 24 months of work with 30+ engineers. Your competitors will be live on 10Web before you ship v1.

Ongoing R&D cost. AI models change monthly. The agentic builder is never "done." There's orchestration logic, prompt engineering, model swaps, design templates, WordPress core compatibility, and performance regressions on customer sites. 10Web absorbs 100% of that on our side. The partner doesn't see the work. They just see the output keep getting better.

Opportunity cost. Every engineer building a website builder is an engineer not building on the host's actual moat: infrastructure, performance, security, reliability, the hosting product itself. That's the wrong place to spend headcount in 2026.

Quality risk. Building the world's best agentic builder is extremely hard. That's why agentic coding tools like Lovable and Bolt ship code prototypes on proprietary stacks instead of real WordPress, and why the WordPress AI plugins on the market produce template-tier output. Teams that try to build internally typically ship a mediocre product that damages their brand more than no product would have.

Competitive urgency.. Hosting companies are integrating 10Web now. Every month spent building internally is a month a competitor is live and converting.

When we hand a hosting partner an ROI calculator alongside the proposal, with the cost of an internal build (headcount times months times loaded cost, plus ongoing maintenance) set against revenue from Day 1 with 10Web, the build option doesn't pencil out for any hosting company we've talked to. The buy option ships in days and earns revenue while the build option is still in design review.

NAREK TOROSYAN: There's no tradeoff to balance, and that's the architectural answer.

The technical moat is the React-to-WordPress bridge. Connecting a modern React frontend to a production WordPress backend at scale, with full plugin compatibility, the entire theme ecosystem, and Core Web Vitals as a product property, took 30 engineers a full year to build. That bridge is what ships production-grade WordPress on every site the host's customers generate. 90+ PageSpeed scores, clean output that doesn't introduce plugin or theme conflicts. It's not a marketing claim, it's a property of the product.

The architecture follows from that. Generation and runtime operate at different layers of the stack. The host's infrastructure runs the site, with the host's SLAs, the host's CDN, and the host's security posture. We generate. The host runs.

The discipline behind it comes from running managed WordPress hosting ourselves since 2019, and from running our own D2C website-builder business on top of that. Every major release of the agentic builder ships to the 10Web D2C product first. It gets used by real customers. That's intentional, and it's exactly why we keep the D2C business. We don't sell product to partners. We sell market-proven, user-tested, GTM-confirmed product to partners. The 12% signup-to-live conversion rate in the US market is one piece of evidence for that. The 2M+ websites generated on the platform is another. The builder reflects all of that discipline when it ships sites onto someone else's infrastructure.

AI on top doesn't compromise reliability. It strengthens it. The same model layer that ships the site can also help surface and resolve common WordPress issues before they reach the host's support team. The reliability story gets stronger over time, not weaker.

NAREK TOROSYAN: One key takeaway.

End-to-end platforms have changed what customers expect from getting a website online, and that's the conversation hosting companies need to answer right now. The decision isn't whether to add agentic site creation. It's whether to ship it in weeks by partnering, or in years by building. The math heavily favors partnering, and we've yet to see it pencil out the other way.

The window is open. It will not stay open. Hosts who stay in the mindset of renting out space become utilities. The ones who evolve into full business platforms capture the value AI is creating. Worth deciding which side of that line you want to be on before your competitor decides for you.