01.06.2026
Decentralized means thinking together
On Tuesday 19 May, the brands that form the Presence segment of Your.Online gathered in Berlin for the second Presence.Connect. After two group wide Your.Connect gatherings, this was a day built specifically around the topics that matter most to brands operating in the web presence market: focused, open conversation that moves things forward.
The Presence segment operates where digital visibility and reachability form the baseline of doing business. Domains, hosting, email, websites: essential infrastructure for millions of small and mid-sized businesses. The expectations are straightforward. Speed, stability, trust. And the pressure on that infrastructure is growing fast from multiple directions at once.
Brands from across the segment made the trip to Berlin: Yourhosting, Gandi, Axarnet, hosting.nl, Inleed, o2switch, Heart Internet, UK2, Shellrent, Realtime Register, 1blu, and Pair Networks, joining from the United States. The agenda was full. The energy in the room matched it.
New faces and shared foundations
The morning opened with the formal introduction of three brands that recently joined the segment. UK2, operating under the management of Heart Internet, brings deep roots in the British hosting market and a reputation built over decades of serving UK entrepreneurs and SMEs. Shellrent, founded in Italy with a technical character carefully preserved since its earliest days, joins with a culture that reflects what the Presence segment values most: expertise, continuity, and genuine proximity to the customer. And hosting.nl, established as a standalone brand within three months, is a clear demonstration of how fast things can move when intent and execution are aligned. Each of these brands arrived with its own story. Each has chosen to remain the author of that story. That is the point of the model.
Two sides of the same coin
AI was a thread running through the entire day, and it surfaced in two very different ways.
On one side, opportunity. AI is beginning to reshape how web presence products work, how customers are served, and how teams operate. The potential for an intelligent layer that supports the SME journey is substantial: smarter onboarding, better retention tooling, website suggestions that actually convert, support interactions that resolve faster. Several brands in the segment are already running experiments that are delivering results. The direction is clear, and the window to move early is open.
On the other side, pressure. The same technology that creates opportunity is accelerating the threat landscape in ways that are already being felt. Security vulnerabilities that once took weeks to reach mass exploitation now arrive in hours. The number of high-severity CVEs is rising exponentially, and with it the organizational weight they carry. Support teams across the segment are increasingly asked to drop everything when a critical issue surfaces. The human cost of that pattern is real: the stress, the disruption, the fatigue that accumulates when teams operate in a near-permanent state of alert. This is one of the most urgent shared concerns across the segment right now, and it deserves more than individual responses. This is where decentral ownership and central expert capabilities collide.
What the market demands
The quality of recurring revenue is among the clearest indicators of business health, and it was a natural part of the conversation. Churn, pricing, upsell, cross-sell: these are the levers available to every brand in the segment, and there is real value in understanding how others are working with them.
The financial environment is tightening. The margin between brands that grow sustainably and those that plateau is increasingly determined by retention and expansion within the existing customer base. AI is reshaping the economics of new sales as well, with pressure on conversion costs and rising customer expectations on speed and relevance. The brands investing in the quality of their customer relationships now are building the kind of runway that will matter in the years ahead.
Shared intelligence and local application
The afternoon gave each brand the floor to share what they have been working on, what they have learned, and where they have surprised themselves with the results. The topics ranged across the full revenue picture, and the richness was in the detail.
Yourhosting shared their experience with churn prediction and what they have learned about winning customers back after they have left: which moments matter, which approaches work, and what the data reveals that intuition often misses. Gandi talked through how they restructured their sales funnel, creating a cleaner entry point that opens the door without cannibalizing what follows, and how a web builder now meets customers earlier in their journey. Inleed walked through their approach to elastic scaling: letting actual usage trigger upgrades automatically, while keeping customers in control of the final decision.
Realtime Register shared how their platform enables brands to move from idea to proof of concept without the usual friction. By acting as a gateway between vendors and providers, they make it possible to start partnerships and test new propositions quickly, without the minimum volume commitments that typically slow things down. For brands that want to experiment and validate before committing, that capability changes what is possible.
Beyond the agenda
Your.Online’s decentralized model means decision-making stays local, with the people closest to the customer, the market, and the product. Presence.Connect is what that model looks like in practice: brands that once competed now speaking openly about what works and what they are still figuring out. Knowledge that circulates without becoming mandate. Support that strengthens local execution rather than replacing it.
That dynamic extends beyond the formal agenda. Part of what makes Presence.Connect valuable is what happens around it: the informal conversations, the connections that form between people who share the same challenges but rarely have the chance to compare notes. The day closed with dinner at Classic (Car) Remise Berlin, a setting that matched the spirit of the gathering: substantive, unhurried, and grounded in the kind of trust that makes honest exchange possible.
A sincere thank you to everyone who made the trip to Berlin and contributed to a day that was worth every hour. We look forward to the next one!