Short · checked 29 September 2026
The Malta hosting layer that DigitalOcean bought for $350 million.
A 2014 listing from Mosta, Malta for one-click managed hosting on DigitalOcean and Amazon servers; DigitalOcean bought Cloudways for $350 million in 2022 and it still runs under its own name.
Cloudways joined Stompstart in July 2014 with a three-word pitch, "Managed Hosting Platform," and an address in Mosta, Malta. The listing offered "1 click managed cloud hosting": customers picked an application such as WordPress, Magento, Moodle, MediaWiki, Joomla, SugarCRM or PrestaShop, or brought their own PHP code, and Cloudways ran it for them on cloud servers from other companies. It named two: "Digital Ocean and Amazon Cloud." The Wayback Machine saved the page that September.
One of those suppliers became the buyer. On 23 August 2022, DigitalOcean announced that it would acquire Cloudways for $350 million in cash, with a significant part of the price paid over 30 months. It called the two companies close partners since 2014 and said about half of Cloudways customers already ran on DigitalOcean infrastructure. DigitalOcean said it expected Cloudways to bring in more than $52 million of revenue in 2022, after three years of compound annual growth above 50 percent, and that the deal would add 30 percent to its own workforce. The release named Aaqib Gadit as co-founder and chief executive of Cloudways.
DigitalOcean completed the purchase on 8 September 2022, describing Cloudways as a managed cloud hosting and software-as-a-service provider for small and medium-sized businesses.
Cloudways still runs under its own name at cloudways.com, with a 2026 copyright notice for Cloudways, LLC. It offers servers on DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, AWS and Google's cloud, has added products such as managed AI agents, and says it serves more than 100,000 businesses.