After WordCamp Europe, I had the opportunity to speak with one of the most strategic minds in cloud hosting today – Fatih Mehtap, Vice President of Marketing at Cloudways and DigitalOcean. With over two decades of experience at companies like Amazon, Oracle, Dell, and the fast-scaling influencer platform Vamp, Fatih brings a rare mix of corporate vision and startup agility to the table.
Cloudways, under his guidance, has positioned itself as a powerful alternative to traditional shared hosting – offering flexibility, scalability, and performance tailored specifically for developers, agencies, and SMBs. Their recent innovations around AI, infrastructure choice, and automation show they’re not just following trends – they’re actively shaping what modern hosting can become.
As someone who’s been observing this industry from the inside for years, I wanted to go beyond the press releases and hear directly from the source – what’s really happening behind the scenes, and where Cloudways is heading next.
In this exclusive interview, I asked Fatih about the company’s unique value proposition, their commitment to the WordPress community, how AI is redefining managed hosting, and what priorities are shaping their roadmap. After each of his answers, I’ve added my own short commentary – to connect the strategic dots and share my personal take on what it all means for our industry.
If you’re looking for a straight-talking, forward-looking conversation with substance – welcome.
How does Cloudways help agencies and developers avoid technical headaches while keeping performance high?
As a managed hosting provider, our developer audience likes the element of control we offer them, while also wanting us to take away the more mundane and repetitive tasks associated with website management. Whenever complex server issues arise, our customers have access to support teams to troubleshoot and resolve problems quickly. We’re well-known throughout the industry as offering one of the most highly rated technical support teams in the business.
For agency customers who join our Agency Partner Program, we offer dedicated onboarding and migration support, account management and quarterly reviews to ensure our agencies are getting the maximum value out of their investment in Cloudways. Our goal is to make it as simple as possible to manage multiple hosting accounts and interfaces across different providers, unified through a single operating dashboard.
What kind of work is Cloudways doing to support the WordPress community?
We’ve spent the last 15+ years taking painstaking care to meet the evolving needs of our customers through innovation and constant customer feedback loops. We’ve built a WordPress-centric platform by leveraging the skills of in-house WordPress experts.
Our commitment to the WordPress community is to abstract complexity away from WordPress managed hosting, offering unlimited traffic across all hosting plans, a choice of cloud provider, and access to over 60 data centres globally to optimise performance based on where a user’s audience might be concentrated, and the flexibility to meet diverse technical requirements with in-platform add-on services like Malware protection and pre-installed Object Cache Pro.
Our pay-as-you-go billing model means users aren’t locked into lengthy contracts and those who’ve been customers for many years take comfort in knowing they have access to 24/7/365 technical support experts to help them resolve WordPress hosting challenges.
How is AI being used inside Cloudways to make WordPress site management easier or smarter?
Our AI vision is focused on solving the real, everyday challenges faced by our customers. Cloudways Copilot is the first phase of how we’re bringing our AI solutions to market, with a suite of transformative capabilities aimed to help customers run their web servers more efficiently.
Copilot provides real-time insights into performance-impacting issues like: complex and unoptimized database queries; DDoS/DoS attacks; disk space/inode fullness; aggressive bot crawling, etc., offering diagnostics and recommended steps for customer-led resolution. Copilot removes the need for support team intervention, reducing server issue resolution time from 40 minutes to <5 minutes.
Resolving issues up to four times faster means developers save time on troubleshooting common issues, while non-technical users gain the confidence and tools to self-resolve performance issues independently. By making complex tasks accessible and fast, Cloudways Copilot reimagines what “managed” hosting means, ensuring a frictionless experience for users through automation; this will automatically detect the problem and reduce resolution times.
What are your main priorities for the next year when it comes to product or strategy?
Rolling out the next phases of Cloudways Copilot will be a key priority for us over the next year. The majority of Cloudways innovation projects are customer-led. Putting user-centricity at the heart of everything has been a big part of our success, therefore it’s important we continue to listen to our audience and evolve Cloudways to help solve future challenges. We believe there are critical gains to be made through automation and by providing AI capabilities within the Cloudways platform to reduce the complexity of server and website management.
We’re seeing different products and services being rolled out by other hosting providers, many of which focus on the presentation layer of how AI can be applied via AI-generated page builders or through programmable helpdesk bots. Our AI solutions are designed to go deeper into the tech stack and democratise AI access for SMBs and digital agencies, helping them identify, debug, and resolve server issues faster than manual intervention.
Our users care about performance and how they can optimize resource usage to prevent unnecessary downtime, while identifying areas where they can save costs. We want their focus to be on core business activities rather than dealing with technical configuration or troubleshooting server issues. That’s where we’ll continue to innovate, prioritizing our efforts to solve the everyday pain points that disrupt digital businesses.
Where It’s All Heading
What struck me most in this conversation with Fatih is the clarity of purpose behind Cloudways’ strategy. It’s not about chasing buzzwords or adding features for the sake of it. Instead, there’s a clear through-line: help developers and agencies do more – with less friction.
From Copilot’s AI-driven diagnostics to their deep focus on infrastructure flexibility, Cloudways is deliberately solving the kinds of headaches that drain time and energy from digital teams. I especially appreciated Fatih’s transparency around how customer feedback directly shapes product development. That’s a cultural mindset, not just a process.
There’s also something refreshing about how they’re approaching AI. While much of the industry is focused on surface-level gimmicks, Cloudways is going deeper – embedding intelligence at the server level where it actually matters. That’s the kind of innovation that quietly changes the way teams work.
This interview wasn’t just about features and roadmaps – it was about philosophy, focus, and how a platform can stay developer-first without becoming developer-exclusive. And in a world where hosting is becoming more complex, that clarity is not only welcome – it’s necessary.
My thanks to Fatih for the honest and insightful conversation – and to Cloudways for being open about where they’re going and why it matters.
