Challenge & Requirements: For years, ASIP paid for private, dedicated-IP hosting that cost more than it delivered. Since moving to hosting.com's shared hosting, Arnold Szmerling's self-managed site still scores 100/100 on speed and AI compatibility. The savings are freeing up budget at the perfect moment as his one-person portrait studio is deliberately narrowing its focus, trading volume for a small number of exclusive, invitation-only clients.
Website: asip.co
Industry: Fine art and legacy portrait photography
Headquarters: Dubai, UAE, also operates in Tel Aviv, Israel and Melbourne, Australia
Background:
Arnold Szmerling got his first camera at seven years old. Now just over 30 years into his professional career, he's still behind it, and still describes the work the same way: "It's not work; it's a passion that I have that I happen to get paid for."
His specialty is portraiture, though he estimates most of his career has actually been spent photographing weddings, work that draws on the same skill as a portrait sitting: reading people, putting them at ease, and knowing when to press the shutter.
The business has always run lean. Arnold's wife helped in the early years, and he's worked with subcontractors and always with a photography assistant, but he's never had a full-time employee, and prefers it that way. Growth came the slow way: written letters to prospective clients, a follow-up phone call, an invitation to the studio, and eventually a website. At first, it was a very simple site, then a rebuild in WordPress.
Three decades in, ASIP is choosing to get smaller, not bigger. Arnold is stepping back from weddings and volume work altogether, moving toward a short list of exclusive, invitation-only family portrait commissions abroad, alongside a small "Masterworks" collection of photographic art pieces priced from $5,000 USD, sold by inquiry only. That same instinct, doing less but better, shows in his hosting choices too.
Challenge & Requirements:
Paying for More Hosting Than a One-Person Studio Needed
For several years, Arnold ran ASIP's site on a private hosting plan with a dedicated IP address. As a solo operator with no in-house technical team, he'd taken the higher-tier plan, but as his own understanding of the site grew, the extra cost stopped making sense against the performance he was seeing., but as his own understanding of the site grew, the extra cost stopped making sense against the performance he was actually seeing.
Running a Highly Customised Site Without a Developer
Arnold taught himself WordPress, and later AI-assisted development, largely during the pandemic, when photography work stopped and he had time to go deep. He builds on WordPress and Elementor, with custom HTML and CSS now largely AI-generated, and manages all of it himself. He wasn't looking for more technical control from his host, just reliability he didn't have to think about, at a cost that matched a business of his size.
ASIP was looking for:
Hosting that matched a solo operation's actual needs, not a larger business's
Consistent site speed without paying for infrastructure it wasn't using to full effect
Support it could trust to resolve issues quickly, with a person available if the first line couldn't
The Solution:
ASIP has been a hosting.com customer, under its earlier A2 Hosting brand, for at least eight years, and today runs on cPanel Shared Hosting.
Roughly two years ago, Arnold moved back to shared hosting after several years on a private, dedicated-IP plan. Right-sizing his infrastructure spending matched the one-person business rather than the larger operation the higher-tier plan seemed built for.
He hasn't noticed any drop in performance since. When an AI-assisted support tool appeared to make an unrequested change to a file in his cPanel backend, he flagged it and it was fixed, with the option to speak to a person rather than stay stuck in an automated flow.
That right-sized infrastructure now sits underneath a site built almost entirely by Arnold himself, one increasingly optimized for "GEO", the AI-era answer to SEO, educating the AI systems he hopes will do more of the introducing on his behalf as he narrows his own client list.
Impact:
Top Site Performance on Shared Hosting
100/100 on speed, 100/100 on AI compatibility, and 95/100 on accessibility, on shared hosting, by Arnold's own testing.
Lower Cost, Matched to Business Size
Comparable performance to what ASIP saw on a private, dedicated-IP plan, without paying for infrastructure a solo studio wasn't using to full effect.
A Relationship of Eight Years or More
Long enough that his business, his site, and his whole approach to finding clients have changed underneath it.
Support He Doesn't Have to Chase
Confidence that when automation gets something wrong, a person is one conversation away, however small the business.
"I'm getting 100 on speed, 100 on AI compatibility. I think that's something you're doing well, your shared hosting is working."
-Arnold Szmerling, ASIP
