Background
Joanna Ata has always had the entrepreneurial spirit, and she learned the hard way. As a student in Denmark, she started a dropshipping business with zero idea how to do it, built her first online store, and watched it fail. She recovered, found a great product, and built a store selling handmade candles. This time it took off, until the manufacturers didn't deliver and she had customers but nothing to sell. In her final year, she and two fellow students spent a year to a year and a half building a project management SaaS, until the money ran out and they had to find jobs. Pure failure, she says, and that was okay. Each one taught her something.
She took jobs, then freelanced on Upwork, taking whatever work existed and trying absolutely everything over two or three years: social media, email, every kind of business. Her education was in business, marketing, and ICT engineering, but this was where she learned how the world actually works. When she felt she'd seen enough, she started her agency.
A turning point came when she was hired as VP of digital marketing for a US company building digital vault tools for older adults. More than ten years ago, very few digital marketers understood or wanted to work in aging and age tech. She did, and recommendations followed. Her agency now focuses on strategic marketing for companies in healthcare, age tech, longevity, and aging: startups, nonprofits, event producers, and thought leaders. The end goal, she says, isn't so much revenue; it's making older adults' lives better, and working with people who have a purpose. What makes her happy is the founder who's stressed and ready to give up, reaching their first sale.
The team is four: a graphic designer, a video editor, a content creator, and an assistant. She keeps it small on purpose, takes fewer projects, and wants clients to feel the agency is part of their team rather than a monthly invoice. Alongside it, she's started a passion project, the European Care Longevity and Innovation Hub, a nonprofit to connect the fragmented longevity ecosystem across Europe's 100 million people over 50.
Challenge & Requirements:
Starting Out Alone, Before AI
When Joanna launched her first business, there was no ChatGPT or Claude to ask. There was Google, and Google wasn't helpful. She needed a host whose people would actually help a first-time founder figure things out.
Moving Sites and Big Files
Moving websites means uploading large files, and some hosts cap cPanel uploads at around 250MB.
A Preference for cPanel
Some hosts dedicated to WordPress don't offer cPanel. For people who like to work in it, that's a real disadvantage.
Deploying AI-Built Projects
Joanna now builds a lot with AI and vibe coding, working in VS Code. Connecting those coding tools to hosting and deploying projects is, she says, a little tricky, and she'd like an easier integration.
Joanna was looking for:
Support that would help a beginner, and keep being there years later
Generous resources and upload limits for moving and building sites
A proper cPanel
Fair pricing
The Solution:
Joanna chose A2 Hosting, now hosting.com, after a lot of research at the very start of her first business, when it wasn't the biggest name and there were plenty of competitors. The reason was the support. It's still the reason she chooses hosting.com year after year. Joanna's work runs on cPanel Shared Hosting.
What hosting.com provides for Joanna Ata:
Support that was there when nothing else was, helping her through her first business years before AI assistants existed, and which she singles out with a shout-out to the whole support team
Peace of mind, which is how she describes it now: she doesn't use support much, but knowing that if something happens there are nice, helpful people on the other end is why she stays
A full cPanel, which she values over hosts dedicated to WordPress that don't offer one
Generous upload limits through cPanel, which she contrasts with hosts that cap uploads at around 250MB, and which makes moving websites much easier
Resources she's never run short of, with no issues on storage or processing time
Pricing she considers good for what's offered
Joanna's loyalty is simple to explain. She started with hosting.com when Google was the only alternative, and found the support team really helpful. She doesn't use them much now, but values the peace of mind of knowing they're there. That, plus cPanel and generous upload limits, is why she keeps choosing hosting.com.
Her one request is forward-looking: an easier way to deploy AI-built projects from tools like VS Code straight to hosting. She's building more with AI, including for the nonprofit.
Impact:
A Customer Since Day One
hosting.com has hosted Joanna's work from her first failed business through to a four-person agency.
Support That Helped a Beginner and Still Reassures
Help when she needed it most, and reassurance now that she rarely does.
No Resource Constraints
Storage, processing, and upload limits have never been a problem.
"The guys at support were one of the main reasons I chose to work with hosting.com, and keep choosing, year by year. Shout-out to all the people in the support team. They were really nice."
- Joanna Ata, Liatto
