Is AI finally ready to make hosting management less about firefighting and more about prevention? Cloudways, part of DigitalOcean, is betting on it. Today, the company announced the general availability of Cloudways Copilot, an AI-powered toolset designed not to build websites, but to keep them alive and healthy. That distinction matters. In a market crowded with AI “assistants” promising to help you create something new, Cloudways is focusing instead on what happens after launch – when performance issues, security incidents, and uptime threats are part of daily reality.
Why this matters
Downtime isn’t just an inconvenience; it’s a bill that arrives by the minute. Industry studies peg the cost anywhere from $5,600 to $9,000 per minute. That’s before you factor in customer frustration, SEO damage, and lost trust.
Cloudways says Copilot’s SmartFix can cut the average resolution time from 30–40 minutes down to five or six – all without having to involve their human support team. One click, they claim, can deal with common culprits like unoptimized database queries, disk space issues, aggressive bot traffic, and even DDoS/DoS attacks.
If that sounds like a big leap, it’s because it is. Hosting providers have long offered monitoring and alerting, but “You have a problem” is different from “Here’s the problem and it’s already fixed.” Cloudways is pushing into that second category.
The shift in managed hosting
Here’s the interesting part: Cloudways is positioning this as a pivot in the definition of “managed hosting.” Rather than just providing infrastructure and human support, Copilot uses AI to offer root cause analysis and personalized resolution guides during downtime. This reframes the service from being reactive to being proactive.
As Suhaib Zaheer, SVP of Managed Hosting at DigitalOcean, put it:
“Cloudways Copilot represents a major step towards our vision of building a fully intelligent managed hosting platform for the AI era. The solution empowers digital businesses to confidently navigate complex hosting challenges with intelligent automation – redefining what it means to be truly ‘managed’.”
Does it work in the real world?
Customer feedback suggests the potential is real. Jonathan Sokol of Mint Media says the system has saved his team 15 hours in a single month while managing more than 180 sites. The biggest win? Turning what would have been an all-day issue into something resolved in minutes.
In his own words:
“Cloudways Copilot has transformed how we manage 180+ sites by providing automated AI insights with specific solutions for issues, saving our team 15 hours in one month. Instead of spending hours debugging, we now get detailed breakdowns that help us quickly resolve problems – including one major issue that would have taken 7–8 hours to fix manually.”
Of course, no AI system is infallible. Anyone who’s ever managed infrastructure knows that automated fixes can sometimes misdiagnose or even introduce new issues. The real test for Copilot will be whether it consistently improves resolution times without increasing risk – and whether customers trust it enough to click that “Fix” button without hesitation.
What’s next
Cloudways plans to expand Copilot with WordPress app-level issue detection, AI-assisted onboarding, bulk action updates, and MySQL-specific troubleshooting in the coming months.
If they succeed, this could pressure other managed hosting providers to bring AI deeper into the operational layer – and shift customer expectations in the process.
In the hosting world, uptime is the currency. The question now is whether AI, in the form of tools like Cloudways Copilot, can truly buy more of it.