Cloudways

Use Cases

• Managed WordPress & CMS Hosting: Agencies, bloggers and SaaS companies use Cloudways to run high‑performance WordPress, WooCommerce and other PHP‑based CMS sites on top‑tier cloud providers with built‑in caching, SSL, backups and staging environments.

• Ecommerce & Online Stores: Magento, WooCommerce and custom ecommerce platforms rely on Cloudways’ optimized stack (Nginx, Apache, Varnish, Redis, PHP‑FPM) and CDN integrations to keep storefronts fast, scalable and resilient during traffic spikes such as seasonal sales or product launches.

• Digital Agencies & Freelancers: Web and marketing agencies centralize client sites on Cloudways to standardize deployments, streamline collaboration and offload server patching, monitoring and incident response while maintaining control over application‑level configuration.

• Global SMB Web Presence: Small and midsize businesses host corporate websites, blogs and landing pages on Cloudways, choosing among 65+ data‑center locations and multiple cloud vendors to minimize latency for their primary audiences while benefiting from 24/7 support.

• Multi‑Cloud Hosting & Migrations: Teams that want to avoid lock‑in use Cloudways as a single management layer to migrate or run workloads across DigitalOcean, AWS, Google Cloud, Vultr and Linode, changing providers or regions through the console without rebuilding their stack from scratch.

Customers & Markets

Cloudways targets individuals, SMBs, digital agencies, freelancers and ecommerce retailers that need reliable, performant hosting without building in‑house infrastructure teams. The company serves a global customer base spanning more than 60 countries, with a concentration in North America, Europe, South Asia and the Middle East. As of 2023–2024, Cloudways reported more than 65,000 active customers and over 570,000 hosted websites, with overall customer count estimated in the 100,000+ range as adoption continues to grow.

Its acquisition by DigitalOcean expanded the combined company’s serviceable SMB market, with Cloudways and DigitalOcean together serving over 124,000 customers paying more than 50 dollars per month and representing roughly 84 percent of the pro forma company’s revenue. Cloudways is particularly strong among WordPress‑centric agencies, boutique ecommerce brands, and SaaS or content businesses that value performance and support but prefer a simpler, more opinionated platform than hyperscaler consoles or raw VPS offerings.

Research, Partnerships & Innovations

Cloudways focuses its innovation on managed orchestration over multi‑cloud infrastructure, performance and reliability for PHP/WordPress stacks, and operational simplicity for non‑expert users. The platform’s “ThunderStack” architecture—combining Nginx, Apache, Varnish, Memcached/Redis, PHP‑FPM and SSD‑backed storage—is continuously tuned to improve page‑load times and resource efficiency across supported cloud providers. Core R&D efforts center on automation of provisioning, monitoring, scaling and recovery so that SMBs and agencies can treat hosting as a utility rather than a complex engineering discipline.

Strategically, Cloudways maintains deep partnerships with DigitalOcean, AWS, Google Cloud, Linode and Vultr, allowing customers to select their preferred infrastructure while interacting solely with the Cloudways control panel and support team. Collaboration with Google Cloud, for example, has enabled Cloudways to offer 65+ global server locations, stronger SLAs and improved economics for customers running on Google infrastructure. Cloudways has also integrated services such as Cloudflare CDN and security features (including WAF and DDoS mitigation) to further harden customer workloads without requiring separate vendor contracts or advanced network tuning. Since joining DigitalOcean, Cloudways has leveraged its parent company’s product roadmap and global footprint to refine pricing tiers, improve onboarding flows and deepen its focus on agencies and SMBs building on WordPress, Magento and other PHP‑based applications.

Key People

• Aaqib Gadit – Co‑Founder & Chief Executive Officer: Electronics engineering graduate from NED University in Karachi, Gadit co‑founded Cloudways in 2012 after running a digital agency and experiencing first‑hand the pain of unreliable hosting, lost backups and midnight outages. As CEO, he has led Cloudways from a bootstrapped multi‑cloud managed hosting startup to a global platform acquired by DigitalOcean for 350 million dollars, while maintaining a strong presence in both Malta and Pakistan.

• Pere Hospital – Co‑Founder: Co‑founded Cloudways alongside Gadit, helping design the original multi‑cloud managed hosting model and SaaS automation layer that sits atop providers like DigitalOcean, AWS and Google Cloud.

• DigitalOcean Leadership (Parent Company): Since the 2022 acquisition, Cloudways operates as a DigitalOcean company, aligning its go‑to‑market with DigitalOcean’s leadership team—including the broader SMB and developer strategy—while continuing to run day‑to‑day operations under Cloudways’ existing management.