Co-founded in 2012 by Aaqib Gadit, CEO, and Pere Hospital, CSO, Cloudways is a cloud-agnostic managed hosting platform for WordPress and Magento delivering solutions to small to mid-sized companies, including nonprofits, agencies, and e-commerce businesses. Though it’s a technology company, Cloudways has a strategy rooted heavily in building relationships—both with their partners and their customers. “We don’t have 20 providers—we have five. We are very selective in picking the right ones,” said Aaqib Gadit, CEO at Cloudways.
The company’s relationship with Linode has, in many ways, helped contribute to its widespread success. “We’ve been able to scale our business through our work with Linode, and it’s helped us grow the company,” said Pere Hospital, CSO, at Cloudways.
Laying a foundation
Cloudways started working with just one cloud provider, but quickly found its customers requiring a greater variety of options. As the company grew, it needed to carefully consider additions that aligned with Cloudways’ values and customer values. Flexibility, cost-effectiveness, simplicity, and—above all—trust are at the top of that list. So when it came time to add more cloud providers, Cloudways focused on fulfilling these criteria.
“We asked our customers—and they immediately requested Linode,” said Hospital. “We kept getting requests on forums and social media, and eventually received official requests from our customers.” In total, Cloudways received more than 200 requests to bring on Linode. And when the Cloudways team officially launched Linode in 2017, they had 200+ customer servers running on it since every customer receives their own Linode instance.
Crafting a blueprint for success
Since the beginning of the partnership, Cloudways has looked to Linode for its reliability, consistency, and high-quality reputation. “If we have a problem at scale, it affects our business and reputation—not the provider’s,” said Gadit. “So, when we find a provider that’s good at cloud hosting, we partner with them. Linode is very good at relationships. They’re well-respected, and people matter to them.”
But to the Cloudways team, a partnership is just as much about the tougher moments and obstacles. As a global, 24/7 company with customers of all sizes, Cloudways requires a partner that can provide support and service to match—and navigate challenges side-by-side. “A good partnership isn’t defined by when things are good. It’s when things are bad, and you can count on each other,” said Gadit. “With Linode, there’s a bond from years of us working and growing together.”
Building for the future
With Linode, Cloudways has been able to expand its services and match the ever-evolving needs of its customers. “We might have a digital agency that works with a $1 million client and another that works with a $10,000 client. The end-users’ needs all look different—but Linode enables us to serve both,” said Gadit.
And the partnership has also served as the basis for Cloudways’ growth: When it was looking to build a customer support center, Cloudways turned to the Linode Support Team for some help. “We took a lot of inspiration from Linode’s support and training protocols. We were able to use them as a resource,” said Hospital. This ability to have a partner that goes the extra mile and offers guidance for business problems is invaluable to Cloudways.
For Cloudways, the partnership came at the right time and the right place—just as companies began the widespread shift from on-premise infrastructure to the cloud. Their team continues to look to what’s next. “As our customers grow, they’ll begin to reach the upper limits of their servers. All of our customers get their own servers—and we’re looking to Managed Kubernetes from Linode to expand what we can offer,” said Gadit. “It’s products like these that help us continue to broaden the horizon.”
