Cloudways: Helping small and medium businesses innovate and grow with Google Cloud
About Cloudways
Multicloud-managed application hosting platform Cloudways enables SMBs to turbocharge their digital experience without worrying about application management and hosting hassles, from initial launch through to performance, security, monitoring, workflows, 24/7 support, and more.
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Contact usCloudways helps SMBs leverage cloud technology, finding a price-performance balance with virtual machines on Compute Engine and automating internal processes with Google Kubernetes Engine.
Google Cloud results
- Offers unmatched price-performance ratio and flexible options for SMBs worldwide
- Increases cost-efficiency and productivity, while decreasing operational overheads, resulting in savings and peace of mind for its customers
- Supports a wide range of workloads, including databases, development and testing environments, and web applications, on Compute Engine
- Improves team motivation and retention with a flexible infrastructure that enables faster innovation
Automates and simplifies infrastructure management
While every company increasingly uses technology with its customers, employees, processes, and partners, not every company is a technology company. That’s why it is the mission of managed-hosting provider Cloudways to make cloud hosting as simple and effective as possible, so that small to medium businesses (SMBs), such as digital agencies, freelancers, bloggers, and ecommerce retailers, can make the most of the latest advancements in technology without straying away from their core business purpose. “Cloudways takes care of the end-to-end running of services, from server orchestration, provisioning, and monitoring, to security and workflows, so our customers can focus on growing their own businesses instead of trying to become IT experts to debug server problems,” says Aaqib Gadit, CEO and co-founder of Cloudways.
Before his current role, Gadit co-founded a digital agency and faced a fair share of IT horror stories. He explains, “In my early career, I saw countless backups lost, websites going down in the middle of the night, and entire weekends spent trying to fix infrastructure and server problems that very few people within the company understood.” The vision for Cloudways, founded in 2012, comes from his desire to solve this problem for others and, as a result, to empower people to move their dreams forward with the innovation and simplicity that technology has to offer.
“When reaching out to Google Cloud, we were looking for cost-efficiency, high performance, a vast global network, and a great infrastructure, but we found more than that: we now have a partner who really understands our business and our direction and helps us build our story.”
—Aaqib Gadit, CEO and co-founder, CloudwaysTo that end, Cloudways offers 65+ global server locations and multiple IaaS choices for its customers, who can host their WordPress, Magento, and other PHP-based frameworks or websites easily by configuring everything through Cloudways Platform to fit their digital experience requirements and workflows, whenever and wherever they want. In 2015, when looking for a secure and customizable compute service to support its offerings, Cloudways reached out to Google Cloud.
“Most vendors nowadays call themselves a partner, but few understand the real essence of what being a partner means,” says Gadit. “When reaching out to Google Cloud, we were looking for cost-efficiency, high performance, a vast global network, and a great infrastructure, but we found more than that: Google Cloud really understands our business and our direction and helps us build our story.”
“Containers on Google Cloud, managed using Google Kubernetes Engine, have greatly simplified a lot of administrative, work life cycle management, site reliability engineering, and security for us.”
—Aaqib Gadit, CEO and co-founder, CloudwaysFinding the balance of price to performance for a variety of workloads
Today, with more than 65,000 active customers, Cloudways is a platform that sits on top of best-of-breed cloud providers, helping customers to set up their digital services and applications while proactively detecting any issues that might arise for them in the process. When a customer wants to, say, launch a particular application on a specific cloud provider in any given part of the world, this request is made on the Cloudways software. Via APIs, Cloudways then sets up a regional infrastructure for that customer and a virtual machine (VM) to fulfill that request. In the meantime, Cloudways uses its orchestration system to reach those servers through its own platform and adds a complete suite of self-service features to deploy, manage, and scale applications.
Customers, in turn, can manage their up-and-running servers on a centralized and user-friendly dashboard—Cloudways’ SaaS automation layer on top of the managed infrastructure. With just a few clicks, customers can scale a server or change its settings, perform backups, restart services, optimize application features, and more, bring colleagues along, assigning them granular rights and map several collaboration and billing workflows for improved productivity. And, if additional support is needed, the Cloudways team is always on hand.
But with “great product and service at a great price” as the DNA of the organization, it was crucial for Cloudways to offer its customers the possibility of working with reliable infrastructure providers who can address their business needs without extrapolating their budgets. “Not every SMB has the budget to invest in best-of-breed technologies, but they all want the best possible performance from their investments,” says Gadit. “To fulfill their needs, we needed to add solutions to our portfolio that enable greater flexibility for customization, offer a good balance of price and performance, and are suitable for a wide variety of common workloads, including databases, development and testing environments, and web applications. That’s what we’ve found in Compute Engine.”
Using Compute Engine to create and run VMs on Google’s infrastructure, Cloudways enables its customers to customize their compute services. “With Compute Engine, we can confidently tell our customers: ‘your platform, your rules,’ because we give them the flexibility to customize, make changes, and have control over their own infrastructures since there are no shared rules with other customers. And, we define what the best price-to-performance ratio looks like for their particular business,” Gadit explains.
Focusing on innovation instead of maintenance
Internally, Cloudways uses Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) to manage and automate operations and increase productivity with the same number of people in the team.
“Containers on Google Cloud, managed using Google Kubernetes Engine, have greatly simplified a lot of administrative, work life cycle management, site reliability engineering, and security for us,” Gadit explains. “With GKE, both our operational expenses and the amount of manual work we need to do are decreasing. Even as our traffic spikes, we don’t need to worry about scaling our servers manually to support that, which means we’re more resource-efficient and, therefore, more cost-efficient.”
“GKE gives us a more resilient infrastructure with high availability and flexibility so we can innovate faster,” he adds. “It helps in improving our team’s motivation and retention because they enjoy working with this server, which I see both as a by-product of, and as a testament to, the other qualities of GKE.”
“Google Cloud is instrumental in helping us to devise the right structure, architecture, and economics to drive growth both for our business and for our customers.”
—Aaqib Gadit, CEO and co-founder, CloudwaysTurbocharging business growth with a reliable infrastructure
To continue to help customers leverage the public cloud without being bogged down by its complexities, Cloudways needs to have flexibility, resilience, and security itself.
“We need a solid underlying infrastructure foundation to offer the best performance possible, while ensuring security,” Gadit adds. “Customers would also need a lot of additional support, which is an indication that things are not working as they should. With Google Cloud, we’ve been able to reduce the amount of support we and our customers need, thanks to the infrastructure’s inherent reliability.”
“A lot of our customer’s peace of mind and productivity is tied to their use of Google Cloud with our support,” he adds. “Google Cloud is instrumental in helping us to devise the right structure, architecture, and economics to drive growth both for our business and for our customers. There are 500 million SMBs in the world who spend more than $1,000 on cloud technology. We’re a small part of that, which means there is infinite potential for us to grow, and we can turbocharge our growth by piggybacking on the innovations that Google is making.”
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Cloudways
Multicloud-managed application hosting platform Cloudways enables SMBs to turbocharge their digital experience without worrying about application management and hosting hassles, from initial launch through to performance, security, monitoring, workflows, 24/7 support, and more.