Brent Weaver: My name is Brent Weaver and I am so excited to welcome you all to this event for online businesses, SMBs, agencies, and the e-commerce community, our valued customers all over the world. Our goal is to help you prepare for the upcoming holiday season and beyond with three jam-packed days talking about website optimization, revenue and growth, AI and innovation. We’ve got some amazing speakers, topics, and panels, and I’m just checking out chat, I’m seeing lots of positive energy, so let’s keep that going. We’re going to be hanging out with you all in chat over the next few days, so bring those questions, bring those comments, connect with one another.

Before we get into our first session, I want to make sure everybody has a brief overview of our platform features. The first thing is our booth. If you want to connect with Cloudways or UGURUS or some of our partner brands, check out our booths, we’re going to be offering giveaways like free credits and resources that are only available if you stop into those booths. If you need any event-related assistance, there’s a feature called room, so drop into the room and our team can help. We also have a networking feature so you can connect with other online business owners just like you, so make sure your profile is up to date. And then of course there’s the schedule tab, check out the schedule of upcoming speakers, make sure you subscribe for notifications so you don’t miss any of the live sessions. We’re also going to be running a few surveys during the event, this is our fourth Prepathon, and every year the team at Cloudways takes it up another notch, so your feedback is invaluable to us.

We’re going to be running a few activities, I’m going to be hosting a few of these, and the Cloudways team has done a fantastic job creating some fun and engaging contests to win things like Cloudways swag, hosting credits, and gift cards. And of course there’s a leaderboard contest, as you earn points for participation, engaging, asking questions, you’re going to earn a bunch of prizes at the very end of this Prepathon. I’m going to be announcing our winners of that contest, and the winner announcement last year was the first time we did it, it was a lot of fun to reward some of the amazing participation. I’m seeing lots of emojis, y’all know me from the live streams, I’m a big fan of those emoji reactions, so when you see one of our speakers dropping major value, just shower them with those emojis, it makes the speaker feel nice and warm inside and tells them they’re doing a good job.

So you’ve probably heard enough from me to kick things off. I will be back co-hosting several of our sessions over the next three days, but it is my absolute pleasure to welcome the General Manager of Cloudways, Suhaib Zaheer, to the stage. He’s going to be opening with some remarks about the Cloudways vision and how to empower SMBs online. Welcome to the program.

Suhaib Zaheer: Thank you so much, Brent, thanks for kicking us off and for that amazing intro, I love your energy, you always get us started the best way possible. Let me quickly pull up, let me know if you can see that. All right, so thanks again Brent, and a huge thank you to everyone here joining us as we kick off our annual Prepathon event.

First things first, I wanted to talk a little bit about how Cloudways is empowering small businesses to scale and succeed in today’s digital landscape. In a world where technology is advancing at breakneck speed, customer expectations are higher than ever, and SMBs across the globe are facing unique challenges in keeping pace. Limited resources, technical complexities, and the constant pressure to innovate can make growth feel like an uphill battle, especially for small businesses who are finding it harder and harder to compete with larger competitors. But at Cloudways, we believe that every small business deserves access to the tools and capabilities that can level the playing field. That’s why we’ve made it our mission to provide reliable, scalable, and easy-to-use cloud hosting solutions that enable SMBs to punch above their weight. Our goal is to unlock the limitless potential that small businesses have through democratizing cloud technology for everyone.

So how exactly does Cloudways empower SMBs? It starts with our deep understanding of the pain points and aspirations of smaller organizations. At Cloudways we talk to tens of thousands of small businesses every single month, and we know that many of you wear lots of hats and are constantly juggling competing priorities, and the last thing you need is to get bogged down in the technical weeds of infrastructure management. That’s the reason we built our platform from the ground up to abstract away those complexities and let you focus on what matters, your business. With Cloudways, you don’t need to be a cloud expert to harness its power, the intuitive interface and automated tools make it simple to deploy, manage, and scale your applications, whether you’re a startup just finding your footing or an established business looking to take things to the next level.

But the most important thing, simplicity doesn’t mean sacrificing capability, far from it. Cloudways gives you the flexibility to access the world’s leading cloud providers, DigitalOcean, AWS, Google Cloud, Vultr, and Linode, but the best part is you get that raw power and flexibility of those platforms with a layer of management and optimization that ensures you’re always getting the most bang for your buck. We’ve launched a variety of tools and workflows that help small businesses drive efficiency and growth, for example, if you’re running a digital web agency and you’re looking for things like staging environments, teams access to enable collaboration, or solutions that help with invoicing and billing your clients every month, we’ve got you covered. And this year we launched one of our new flagship products, Cloudways Autonomous, to take things even further. Autonomous is much more than just managed hosting, it’s a fully automated solution that continually optimizes your applications for performance, security, and cost efficiency. With Autonomous you can deploy and scale in minutes, automatically heal from failures, and ensure your applications are always running at peak performance, it’s like having a team of expert cloud engineers working around the clock for your business without the overhead. What I’d love to do right now is turn it over to Ayaz, one of our senior engineering leaders at Cloudways, and he’s going to give you a quick demo of how powerful this platform is.

Ayaz: Thank you, Suhaib, and welcome everyone. So because we’re talking about Autonomous, we built Autonomous from the ground up to cater to a number of important customer pain points, and one of the most important was the ability to autoscale workloads as traffic increases to their sites. That is the most important feature we have built in Autonomous. The best way to show you how autoscaling works is by showing you a recorded demo of how an application on Autonomous performs compared to an application running on a single-tier server on Cloudways when it’s put under load. So let me load that up. Here, on the left side you have an application deployed on a single-tier Cloudways server, and on the right side the same application deployed on Autonomous, and we have a load test that starts with a burst of 50 clients and then goes all the way up to 500, and it concurrently maintains the load as it goes along, and this is a 100-second test.

If you look at both charts, one of the things you’d see is that on the single-tier the average response time grows to a big number over time, it grows linearly. But when you look at Autonomous, the average response time is very gradual in the way it increases, and one of the things you’d notice is these small bumps in response time, these are the bumps where the actual autoscaling is kicking in and seamlessly scaling your workloads so they can withstand the traffic coming in. Because we optimized Autonomous to start with a very small set of resources, as traffic starts to get in it starts to scale up, so you’d see an initial jump, which means that as more concurrent requests come in it has behind the scenes started to scale the workloads, and then momentarily the response time goes back to standard acceptable, and it continues until it meets the second autoscaling event in the background, which bumps up the response time for just a mere instance and then goes back again. Ultimately, throughout the test, compared to a single-server instance, the Autonomous average response time is much more gradual, much more acceptable, and eventually much less compared to what a single 2GB server can achieve, and the amount of bandwidth sent back and forth on Autonomous is also higher. This is a very quick demo, but it showcases the way Autonomous autoscales behind the scenes. When you look at the other features that come with Autonomous, things like Cloudways Enterprise and object cache, and the beatable price it comes at, it makes for a very compelling alternative to any other platform if you’re looking for autoscaling. So if you haven’t tried this out, I’d recommend you go over to Cloudways and give it a whirl and see how well your application is able to withstand increasing workloads. Thank you, over to you, Suhaib.

Suhaib Zaheer: Awesome, thank you so much for doing that awesome demo. So I’d love to take a minute to do something I love to do the most, which is highlight one of our customers, and talk about how Autonomous is helping them out. Local Icon Company is a web development, design, and marketing agency based out of Cape Town, and like many other digital agencies, they deliver projects for a broad array of customers. One of their e-commerce clients is called Hydraulics, a high-profile athleisure fashion brand native to South Africa. When Hydraulics was with their previous vendor they were having a ton of issues with their online store, and often experienced up to 20% downtime during those peak sales periods. This is a problem that many e-commerce stores around the globe have, when traffic spikes you consume resources, and depending on the environment, sometimes that leads to suspensions and downtime, which is why we built this Autonomous product very directly for these specific use cases. So when their integration point with their retail system would hit, it would also slow down transactions, and sometimes their POS system would take more than four minutes to connect. For any of you who have run e-commerce sites or shop on them daily, you know what it feels like, one minute of something spinning can feel like an eternity, and it doesn’t leave a great brand impression, it can lead to bounce rates and loss of sales. So when they shifted their website over to Autonomous, what they saw was a drastic improvement, not only in their website’s performance, achieving 0% downtime with Autonomous due to that autoscaling functionality, but the connection to their POS system takes less than 10 seconds, a huge improvement over the previous four-plus minutes. And that’s just one example of how performance and ease of use is helping our customers in real time and solving very real challenges.

So what else are we up to in 2024? We’ve touched on Autonomous, but I want to talk about a couple of other exciting things we’ve recently launched or are in the process of launching. The first is malware protection, our new partnership with Imunify360. Protecting your business and your customer data should always be a top priority, and staying ahead of evolving threats can feel like a full-time job, that’s why we were so thrilled to announce this integration with Imunify360. They’ve got this cutting-edge security firewall that we’ve integrated across all of our Cloudways flexible applications, providing an added layer of defense against malware, intrusion attempts, and other security threats without you having to lift a finger. And we’re not going to stop there, we’re also rolling out real-time malware detection and alerts across the platform, so you can identify and squash any issues before they snowball into bigger problems.

Now, as exciting as all this has been, what I’m really thrilled to talk about is what we are doing with AI. All of the product releases we’ve done are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to our long-term vision of using AI to truly revolutionize how small businesses operate and compete. Artificial intelligence is going to be a game changer, and it already is in so many ways. I know AI can feel like a buzzword or something only accessible to the biggest enterprises with the deepest pockets, but at Cloudways our goal is to democratize AI and make its power available to businesses of all sizes. We are envisioning a future where every small business can leverage AI to automate routine tasks, gain deep insights into their customers and operations, and make smarter, faster decisions that drive growth.

What does that look like in practice? Imagine a hosting environment that uses machine learning to continuously optimize itself and proactively scale for traffic spikes before they happen, or one that can automatically detect and patch vulnerabilities, keeping your application secure without any manual intervention. But the potential goes way beyond infrastructure management, we’re exploring ways of integrating AI capabilities directly into the tools that you use to build and run your business. Imagine being able to build intelligent chatbots that handle customer queries 24/7, or a recommendation engine that surfaces personalized upsell opportunities based on your customer’s behavior, with these AI building blocks these advanced use cases could become drag-and-drop simple in the future. And perhaps the most exciting potential for AI is to give SMBs unprecedented insight into their customers and markets, we’re working on tools that can analyze vast amounts of user data, from on-site behavior to social sentiment, and surface actionable insights to help you better understand and serve your audiences. This type of deep customer intelligence has traditionally been accessible only to giant corporations, and our goal is to enable small businesses to compete on an entirely new level.

Now of course, bringing this to life is not going to happen overnight, so as a first step, I’m extremely excited to announce that we’re working to launch the first product in our AI suite, which is called Cloudways Copilot. Here’s why: today customers come to us because they know we’re subject matter experts they can rely on, but we believe their focus should be on their business without being concerned about the underlying technology. The reality is, websites are becoming more complex, the traffic they’re getting is becoming more complex, and as a business grows the chances increase that they’ll run into issues with their applications or the underlying technology stack. Sometimes things can go wrong when we experiment with different website tools, and these issues can be complex, requiring deep troubleshooting to find the root causes, which requires deep technical knowledge, time, and patience, and that’s been a long-running cause of frustration for customers, they just want to know how to be guided to fix issues when they arrive. That’s where we believe Cloudways Copilot comes in. So I’m going to invite Ayaz back to do a very quick demo of what this initial product will be.

Ayaz: Thank you, Suhaib. I’m very excited to talk about what we’ve been building behind the scenes and how we’ve been leveraging AI. One of the ways we’ve been thinking about leveraging AI is what we can do to make the lives of our customers better and easier on the platform, and we’ve been doing a lot of brainstorming to come up with what exactly that means, because we’re not just going in and throwing AI to build a simple thing, we’re looking for something that really creates value for a customer. So Cloudways Copilot is a suite of a number of things that we will build and release over the coming months, and right now it tackles two broad categories of problems, and I’ll give you a very short demo of both.

The first category, those of you who have WordPress or WooCommerce or serious sites hosted on Cloudways understand that when something goes wrong with your server or application it is a big hassle, you have to first figure out that something has gone down, it could be your customers telling you your site is down. At Cloudways we have a full-fledged monitoring and alerting system in place that constantly monitors your servers and applications, and when it detects that something on your web stack has malfunctioned or gone down, let’s say your Apache server or your NGINX server has gone down, or there’s something wrong with the database, anything that would cause your website to go down, we have this monitoring system that automatically detects it and raises an alert that lands in your inbox. Now, today when you get an alert, the only problem is when you click on it and go inside, you don’t get a lot of details about what actually caused it, what the real problem was, why it happened, and what you can do about it. So with AI insights, we’re utilizing the power of AI to actually figure out what exactly caused that problem, why it happened, and what are some Cloudways-specific recommendations you can follow to fix it. For example, in this case you have an application where the web stack started to malfunction because there were a lot of unoptimized database queries running on the server, and as each query was taking a lot of time, they were piling up on the database, creating a cascading effect all the way up the stack, snowballing into a problem where all the web servers were starting to choke and requests were stuck in the pipeline, not able to serve content to your clients. This is a very common issue. Through the power of AI we’re able to figure out exactly what the problem is, which specific table is not optimized, and what’s causing it. In the email you have a button which takes you to a page we call the new incident response page on the server, and this opens up a widget that gives you all the details about what happened, what caused it, and what the recommendations are. This is just a start, and with AI-powered insights, for all of these issues we can figure out the root cause pretty quickly with AI and present it to you right away. We feel this is going to generate a lot of value for our customers, because figuring out the root cause for these issues and how to solve them takes a lot of time right now, so this is going to drastically cut that down.

The other broad category we’re tackling with Copilot is what we call automation of repetitive tasks. If you spend a lot of time on the Cloudways platform doing tasks that are redundant, for example stopping the server, restarting the server, clearing the Varnish cache, taking a backup, deleting a backup, doing a restore, there are a lot of things you could do, and if you have a lot of applications and servers, doing this across a bunch of those becomes really problematic, it’s not a good use of your time, and there’s always the element where you can accidentally perform an action on a server or application you did not want to. So the second part of Cloudways Copilot is a widget that’s always available to you, you can think of it as your personal AI assistant, and it understands natural human language, so you can give it specific commands in plain English and tell it to do anything on the platform on your behalf. In this case you’re asking it to clear Varnish cache across all the servers you have, and it’s intelligent enough to understand what you want, find out all the servers you have available, confirm that this is exactly what you want to do, and then start one by one performing that action across the servers it has taken permission from you to do. This is not restricted to clearing the Varnish cache, it could be used to do anything on the platform, taking a backup, deleting a backup, starting a server, stopping a server, enabling an add-on, and it’s not restricted to just doing it across all the servers, you can ask it to do it on one application, two applications, one server, three servers, or as many as you want. It leverages the power of generative AI, and the things we’ve come to love about ChatGPT, it understands human language and is able to figure out what exactly you want and go ahead and do it for you. We believe this kind of Copilot, or your AI assistant, is going to bring a lot of value if you use our platform daily to perform these tasks, it can help save a lot of your time or your teammates’ time. So these are two of the several things in the pipeline that we’ve been working on. Thank you, over to you, Suhaib.

Suhaib Zaheer: Amazing, thank you for that awesome demo, and I’m super excited for what’s to come and I hope you all are as well. As we close out today, I want to leave you with a very simple idea, with the right tools and the right partner, there’s really no limit to what your small business can achieve, and at Cloudways our role is to be that partner. We want to give you access to cutting-edge technology, expertise, and most importantly the support you need to move your dreams forward. With our unwavering commitment to small business success, the innovative solutions we’re going to continue deploying to simplify cloud management, and our very ambitious vision for an AI-powered future, we want to be the fuel for your growth journey. Whether you’re just getting off the ground or reaching new heights, we’re going to be there empowering you every step of the way. So dream big, move fast, embrace the power of technology to transform your business, and just know that with Cloudways in your corner, the sky is truly the limit. Thanks for your time, and now Ayaz and I are happy to answer any questions you might have. I’ll turn it over to Brent.

Brent Weaver: This is gamechanging stuff, guys. I was backstage jumping around as you were showing Copilot, so I know from personal experience, having to go in and update lots of servers one by one, Copilot is a massive lift for businesses managing a lot of activity on Cloudways. We did get quite a few questions on Copilot, so we’re going to hit that first. This came in from Amir Hamza, how does AI handle security concerns?

Ayaz: So we’re very mindful of that. One of the things people do is build a lot of guardrails and make sure that information specific to customers is not leaking out or being used elsewhere, so there are a lot of guardrails we’re putting in place, and we’re also looking at how we make sure that instead of leveraging third-party LLMs, we can and eventually will run our own LLMs hosted on our own infrastructure, so that none of your data is actually going out, eventually, in the longer term. That ensures your data is secure and you don’t have to worry about it being used by anybody else to train on. And of course the guardrails we put into Copilot ensure it’s not able to perform anything other than what we tell it to, in the most secure way, so you can’t go in and say, hey, go ahead and do something you cannot do right now on the platform, you’re only allowed to do what we support and whitelist. So security is top of mind, and with the power of generative AI there are a lot of possibilities that open up, and with those possibilities there is an avenue for bad things, so we’re very mindful of that and making sure a lot of these security guardrails and other limitations are put in place so that Copilot does what you need it to do to make your life better and not more difficult.

Brent Weaver: Another question, will we be able to schedule actions with Cloudways Copilot?

Ayaz: If you’re talking about the AI insights where we do a deep root cause analysis of issues, in the first iteration of the product we will not be rolling out the automatic fixing part, what we call performing actions to fix those problems, because we want to see how customers would want to use that feature. So we’re going to roll out with the first version, which will show you all the insights and make recommendations on what they can do themselves to fix the problem. If this is something really adopted by our customers, then the second iteration would involve slowly transitioning into a part where these actions can happen, and even when we do that, these actions won’t be performed by the AI but by our own systems, because we control them and know what specific fixes need to happen. The broader vision is that when you run something on Cloudways you should not have to worry about these problems, so in the first set you have these problems happening, you don’t have insights, you have to spend time to figure out what’s causing it, we’re cutting that time down, we’re also cutting the time to give recommendations, and the eventual goal is that these common issues shouldn’t happen in the first place, so you shouldn’t even need to know about them eventually, but that’s a future vision. As for the part of Copilot that does repetitive stuff, that is already performing actions on your servers and applications, but these are very limited actions that we whitelist and securely release, and these are actions that we control ourselves, so AI will help us identify what those servers and actions are, but the actual event that will perform is going to be Cloudways doing it, just the way you would go in and do it yourself.

Brent Weaver: This question is coming in from Maurice, will Copilot be part of the existing current service offering, or will it be an extra fee or an add-on to enable Copilot?

Suhaib Zaheer: This is something that we are discussing. Our goal is, initially we want to get some customers in this, so if you have any interest please reach out to us and let us know if you want to help us test and beta. We’re initially thinking of a model where there are some features you’re able to use for free, and then there’ll be a solution for more advanced capabilities that we potentially would charge for. We’re early in the process, right now the primary goal is the engineering, product, and design teams working around the clock to finish this and get that first product in beta by the end of the year. When you look at our price-to-performance, we’re going to stay very true to that, everything we do we consider that price-to-performance because we’re in the business of aiding SMBs and small businesses, and we realize that from a resource standpoint we’re competing with the big players in the world, so we will do our best to always make things very affordable and make sure that price-to-performance is always there.

Brent Weaver: Can you guys comment a little more on some of the other workflows and tasks? Some people asked about running mass backups, could I just go into my Copilot and say, hey, I want to run a backup now for all of my servers or all of my apps at once?

Ayaz: The idea is to do just that. How we go about doing it is, we don’t want to right away enable everything, we want to see how useful this is, how customers are interacting with it, is it creating value. But if it can take a backup for one application, it can take a backup for all the applications. There’s a question about scheduling as well, that is also something we plan on building, but that will come later once we see how the basic functionality is being used. A lot of that depends on the feedback we get from customers who test it out, and because the horizon is pretty big, you can literally do a lot of things with this as long as we allow it and properly secure it and put the right amount of guardrails.

Brent Weaver: Do you envision that the Cloudways AI will integrate with existing platforms? That question’s coming in from Amir Hamza, maybe like whether it integrates directly with OpenAI or other AI APIs.

Ayaz: For a start it will be a closed system. Eventually we do want to make sure that the LLM we use is in our own control and we host it ourselves and fine-tune it, so that’s the eventual goal, OpenAI could be a transition we could use. It’s going to be a closed system in the sense that it comes back to security, we don’t want to make it too open and allow people to do whatever they want, we have to make sure the right amount of guardrails and security are in there. But as part of our broader focus on developer workflows, integrations with other systems is something we will consider later on, once we have this out of the box and running as we think it is.

Brent Weaver: This is coming from Stasha, is the AI Copilot like DIY support, we get the solution and can we also get it from a live person, and if we take the suggested action and aren’t successful, can we still talk to support?

Ayaz: Yes, we envision AI insights and Copilot as an assistant that helps not just you but the support engineers as well. There are a lot of issues that are just redundant, they take time to debug and have specific patterns that, if you follow, you can figure out the root cause and how to fix them, and we see that these are the areas where the AI Copilot is going to help cut down that time. That means support engineers can then focus their time on the more complex issues, so they can internally make use of the Copilot themselves as well. Customers will have this available, but the way we see it, it will work hand in hand, both for customers and our support engineers, to figure out quickly what’s causing the issue and get to a root cause and fix it. And as a customer you can still talk to support engineers around the clock, this is paramount to us, we’re very proud of our support function and the quality of support they provide, that would continue to stay as is, it’s just that their time would be better utilized giving quality support to you and not spent on redundant issues that can be automated away.

Brent Weaver: There’s a question about how does Cloudways integrate with popular CMS platforms like WordPress?

Suhaib Zaheer: Most of our customers today build on WordPress. The cool thing about the Cloudways platform that’s a little different from a lot of folks in the same market is the flexibility and choice we offer, not just with the cloud providers but also the type of application you want to build, a PHP app, Magento, WordPress, etc. That said, WordPress is the dominating player in the industry and powers over 42, 43% of the websites in the world, and most of our customers heavily lean toward WordPress, so you can definitely build your WordPress and WooCommerce applications on the Cloudways platform without issue.

Brent Weaver: Yeah, if you are building a WordPress site, when you create your account one of the first actions you’re going to do is create a server and application, you literally click a button and then you have a WordPress website, so it’s pretty slick. What performance optimization features are available to developers?

Ayaz: I’ll give you a general idea. In terms of developers, we have integrations with object cache, integrations with different add-ons, we have Cloudflare available, and there’s a list you can go in and check. We focus a lot on both performance and developers, these are two things top of our mind when building new features, and we talk to customers a lot to figure out what specific things they need. We talked about the Autonomous platform, which already tackles the performance issue, so if autoscaling is something you like, I’d recommend you go try it out.

Suhaib Zaheer: We’ve got a lot of development tools, Git integration for version control, staging environments, etc. From a performance standpoint we’ve integrated things like Cloudflare, and by the way the new integration with Imunify360 will also do wonders in terms of optimizing for speed and performance. So there’s a plethora of things you can do that are available for agencies and developers alike, definitely if you have questions you’re always welcome to reach out to our support and CS teams.

Brent Weaver: Awesome, guys, I think that was our last question we have time for on the opening keynote. If you all want to learn more about Cloudways, check out the website. Let’s give a round of virtual applause for Suhaib and Ayaz for dropping some major gold nuggets on the future of cloud and the future of SMBs online.

Suhaib Zaheer: Thanks, Brent, thanks for hosting the session, and I want to give a quick shout out to you, as we have a very fun and exciting SaaS MythBusters challenge coming up, hosted by Brent himself, who’s the founder of UGURUS, which has now become the agency coaching platform for Cloudways. So stay tuned, you guys are going to have a blast with Brent next.