Cloudways — A managed cloud hosting platform for developers & designers

@hnshah Thanks alot for hunting Cloudways :) Cloudways offers super SIMPLE, High PERFORMANCE Managed Cloud hosting platform of Open Source apps (Wordpress, Magento, Drupal, PHP Stack) for developers, agencies and SMBs on top of Multiple well known Public Cloud providers (AWS, DigitalOcean, GCE etc) without need of having account with these providers. Generally with 'Managed Cloud hosting PaaS' you are either near to Control and Flexibility OR to Convenience and Simplicity. Cloudways meet the both ends. Completely bootstrapped, we have been getting lot of traction since the birth(2 years back). Customer loves the way we have used technology to consumerize managed Cloud hosting. Today we are launching our New console (in BETA) and Website (with new Logo and Blog) to give user much better experience, even more simplicity and open new horizon for many exciting features ahead. Change made us forward compatible when it comes to Experience, Speed, Connectivity, Security, Integrations and the pace at which we Innovate and deploy new features. We are THRILLED that Platform will be Open! enabling integrations with different 3rd partly tools and services. We are launching our API so our Customers, Agencies and partners can automate their work-flows, create their own solutions or do strategic integration on top of CW platform. They can tap into API economy to increase their efficiency and profitability. Though our old console (On Backbone.js) was easy and it offered customers very simple way to deploy apps, but as things grows very fast, we started thinking of better UI/UX to accommodate more features, and makes it even easier for users to find and use them. We have completely revamped both the Console front-end and its backend. Front-end, the Single-Page Application (SPA) using AngularJS, is developed using Google Material-design guidelines, and is responsive. We redo the backend in a way that it can be exposed as an API to Agencies and Partners in coming sprints. New console already brings better ways to Collaborate, Team feature is now much more granular and it allows fine grain controls for your team members. We introduced couple of other new features as well (Projects etc) We trust that this is not only the UI/UX change, but a huge jump forwards towards better Customer Success! We really hope that our family (customers) will like it, and this will further help them to have better focus on their core business leaving the rest to Cloudways. Thank you!!

@hnshah thx for the hunt! Just wanted to highlight one of the points that Aaqib discussed, SIMPLICITY. You mention that our platform is for technical or semi-technical people. Really we aim for a platform that my mom could use. Our new site and platform, deepen into this and try to hide all unneeded complexities from customers. While flexible enough for complex needs, bringing a Wordpress site to Cloudways with our own Migrator plugin is just a few clicks away. We are doing for cloud application deployment&management the same Digital Ocean has done for cloud infrastructure provisioning: simplify it to the bare bones.

@antonio_bustamante thanks for your feedback! > Signup Flow - So you mean inverting order, moving sign-up to last step right?. Interesting. Technically don't think trivial given how things are organized but will give it a thought. > Market Target - Here I assume we are talking pricing page. We have done a redesign, simplifying it a lot already but agree that we continue to talk "server resources" there. Web/design agencies, eCommerce SMBs, freelance devs, bloggers, these are our main personas. For some, current way of exposing resources will make sense for others not so much. Not something that we see a lot in customer contact channels as creating confusion, but then maybe confused people don't even bother to ask. Noted!

@antonio_bustamante thx for the feedback! As new Console is still in Beta, we will further improve onboarding and activation over next few days. We tried tutorialize.me for walk-through but tool was not behaving well, so have to redo with some other tool (Appcues may be). > Signup flow : Interesting idea!

@kvisner note my simplicity comment above. We are different to Heroku and Engine Yard the way Digital Ocean and Vultr are different to AWS and GCE for cloud infrastructure. We offer a simple to use platform to deploy&manage popular applications on top of the best cloud infrastructure (so we offer choice too) with a very good layer of support. This definitely resonates with a segment of the market.

@kvisner Engine Yard, yes their offering is similar in a sense that they do offer on top of AWS/Azure. But they are more geared for Developers/DevOps and Infrastructure level management. (They don't focus on Stack/App) Their support offering is tiered, where as CW support is democratic and included in the base package. Heroku is different in a sense that it does not offer a choice of IaaS and dedicated VM like EY and CW (this has his own pros and cons). They are undoubtedly leader in PaaS space. Product again is for technical audience. Features like Team are available in Enterprise package. CW offers choice of IaaS and dedicated VMs with a strong focus on App performance and hiding (supported) App/Stack deployment as well as Server management with Simplicity. Ideal for developers and businesses who don't want to deal with tech complexities and focus on their businesses. Along with this simplicity we offer very easy way for technical people (who can live without root credentials) to get hold of basic and advance configurations from our console, automate their deployment through git etc.

@aaqib_gadit But if the customer doesn't want to deal with the tech complexities, why do they really care who the provider is if you are only interacting with CW. ?

@aaqib_gadit Also, why would someone who doesn't want to be concerned about technical details be concerned if it was a dedicated VM or heroku "dynos"

@kvisner Sure for a blogger or basic businesses it does not matter, and its not just about provider, they want to stay away from deploying Multi-site WP or Magento themselves or play with techy CLI tools. And for choice of Provider, SMBs keep asking for Managed service on top of AWS (or DO etc) even when they are not very technical. Trust/Peace of mind is a factor in going with reliable provider than signing-up with a PaaS that may be in some home-grown DC. Also agencies based on the nature of their Apps/Clients want choice to select the provider based on their USPs (Economical, Performance)

@vladzima MEAN stack (or atleast Node.js) is in our 3-months roadmap. Python or Rails next depending on user feedback :)

@angel54689 well, plenty of changes in one day :) If you let me know what he was confused about I will do my best to fix it!

@phospital Can you tell me about your partner program please. Is there any reseller facility?

@angel54689 we don't have atm any white labeling plan. It is a popular requests but we haven't been able to yet consider http://feedback.cloudways.com/fo.... Once we fully deploy API, people will be able to build third party white label services based on our platform (don't know if that would be something interesting for you, but we are not there yet). Current partner program is more geared to web agencies that get some extra boons to bring their business. DM your email and I will link you to guy running the program. Guess you went already over this: http://www.cloudways.com/en/part....

@phospital I think you should concentrate about white label services, since there are only very few competition there, for example OnApp. But they are losing it. So many unsatisfied customer.

@angel54689 you can guess we are stretched in many directions. By now we want to get out a fully fledged API so people can build what they want/need. While labeling would definitely allow us to grow faster but we would be losing focus on core features that are also needed (and some that we have in road map that will be also unique in the market). No trivial decision making.

@gerbz Great! Hope you will like the new console too. Thx!

@scottmillerio thx. We are correcting it.