# Cloudways

> Cloudways is a DigitalOcean-owned managed hosting platform for agencies, developers, online stores, and small businesses. It combines cloud-provider choice with deployment, backups, security, staging, and support; its range includes Flexible hosting, Autonomous WordPress autoscaling, Copilot diagnostics, Node.js hosting, and managed AI agent hosting.

- **Founded:** 2011
- **Headquarters:** St. Julian’s, Malta
- **Founders:** Aaqib Gadit (Co-founder; CEO at acquisition), Pere Hospital (Co-founder; historical CTO), Uzair Gadit (Co-founder), Umair Gadit (Co-founder)
- **Products:** Cloudways Flexible, Cloudways Autonomous, Cloudways Copilot, Lightning Stack, Cloudways Velocity
- **Notable:** Acquired by DigitalOcean for $350 million in September 2022., DigitalOcean forecast more than $52 million in Cloudways fiscal 2022 revenue and over 50% three-year revenue CAGR at announcement; these were forecasts, not current results., Official about page reports over 102,000 customers.

## Products & services

- **Cloudways Flexible** — Managed cloud hosting for WordPress, WooCommerce, Magento, Laravel and PHP with provider choice, staging, backups, Git access and vertical scaling.
- **Cloudways Autonomous** — Managed WordPress and WooCommerce hosting with Kubernetes-based autoscaling, load balancing and integrated Cloudflare Enterprise. General availability January 2024.
- **Cloudways Copilot** — AI diagnostics, recommendations and supported one-click SmartFix actions; proactive high-CPU suggestions added June 2026.
- **Lightning Stack** — NGINX and PHP-FPM architecture for Cloudways Flexible, made generally available in November 2025.
- **Cloudways Velocity** — Managed persistent Node.js hosting with Git deployments and framework presets; base plans advertised from $20/month.
- **Managed AI Agents** — Managed hosting for OpenClaw and Hermes, using customer-supplied model API keys; infrastructure advertised from $9.99/month, model usage billed separately.
- **Cloudflare Enterprise add-on** — CDN, edge caching, WAF and DDoS protection for Flexible; integrated in Autonomous.
- **SafeUpdates** — Automation for WordPress core, theme and plugin updates.
- **Client Billing & Reporting** — Tools for recurring client billing, payments, invoices and reporting.

## Achievements

- Acquired by DigitalOcean for $350 million in September 2022.
- DigitalOcean forecast more than $52 million in Cloudways fiscal 2022 revenue and over 50% three-year revenue CAGR at announcement; these were forecasts, not current results.
- Official about page reports over 102,000 customers.
- WebMaremma’s vendor-published case study reports over 30% server-cost savings after moving 100+ websites and 59% performance improvement for a particular tourism portal.
- Autonomous reached general availability in January 2024 after a 2023 beta.

## Latest updates

- **2026-07** — July 24 blog explains the three-day Autonomous free trial with no credit card required.
- **2026-06** — June 22 changelog adds proactive Copilot suggestions, beginning with high CPU utilization.
- **2026-06** — June 18 changelog adds self-service Cloudflare controls to Autonomous.
- **2025-11** — Lightning Stack generally available; Autonomous pricing announcement removes visit charges in favor of infrastructure usage.

## Links

- Website: https://www.cloudways.com/en/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/cloudways/
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/Cloudways
- GitHub: https://github.com/CloudwaysbyDO/
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Cloudways
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cloudways_official/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cloudways
- TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@cloudways_official

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/cloudways
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-10-02