DigitalOcean Announces General Availability of Cloudways Copilot, To Help Customers Reduce Server Issue Resolution Time

Designed to reduce operational friction for agencies, developers and e-commerce businesses, Copilot’s features like AI Insights and SmartFix empower teams to resolve issues faster and stay focused on driving business growth

BROOMFIELD, Colo.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Cloudways, part of DigitalOcean Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: DOCN), the simplest scalable cloud for digital native enterprises, today announced the general availability of Cloudways Copilot, its artificial intelligence (AI) powered issue diagnostic and automatic resolution solution. Since its public preview earlier this year, Cloudways Copilot has successfully helped customers reduce server issue resolution time to five to six minutes on average. Previously, customers were spending approximately 30 to 40 minutes troubleshooting, needing to engage Cloudways’ human support team to resolve issues.

Website performance is critical to the customer experience and website crashes typically take teams hours to resolve, resulting in downtime for end users. These crashes lead to technical in-house teams spending multiple minutes troubleshooting, affecting customer trust and business in the process. Studies estimate the average cost of downtime to be ranging between $5,600 to nearly $9,000 per minute¹.

During a website downtime incident, Cloudways Copilot shares AI-based insights with users—a pre-assessed root cause analysis and a personalized, step-by-step resolution guide, instead of a reactive alert to self-manage. Through these insights, Cloudways Copilot offers real-time visibility into performance-impacting issues such as unoptimized database queries, disk space/inode limitations, aggressive bot crawling, and DDoS/DoS attacks.

These issues can be resolved through Cloudways Copilot SmartFix, a feature that provides one-click remediation, eliminating the need for support intervention and empowering users to resolve issues independently. By proactively identifying issues before they impact site performance, Copilot SmartFix can shrink time-to-resolution—potentially saving critical hours and reducing troubleshooting to help keep businesses online, optimized, and responsive.

The Cloudways Copilot suite is designed to help developers save time addressing common issues, and help non-technical users gain the confidence and tools to resolve performance issues independently. It helps make complex technical tasks accessible and easy to fix, reimagining what managed hosting offers through accurate issue identification and fast resolution.

With this launch, Cloudways becomes one of the first managed hosting providers to bring AI-powered automation focused on the site management layer rather than the site creation layer, making a significant shift in how infrastructure issues are proactively addressed.

Suhaib Zaheer, SVP of Managed Hosting at DigitalOcean, commented, “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’. We’re proud to be a pioneer in bringing AI-powered automation to site management, helping our customers unlock new levels of reliability, simplicity, and security. With AI evolving every day, we’re continuously expanding our AI capabilities to give customers solutions that drive real business impact.”

Jonathan Sokol, a Cloudways customer and owner of Mint Media, said, “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. It's like having a great assistant that identifies exactly what's wrong and how to fix it, making our troubleshooting workflow incredibly efficient.”

Bratin Saha, Chief Product and Technology Officer at DigitalOcean, added, "Cloudways Copilot is the managed hosting-focused agentic capability from the DigitalOcean Gradient™ AI platform. It leverages Gradient AI’s SRE agents to bring intelligent automation to Cloudways’ customers, such as SmartFix for self-healing infrastructure. While Cloudways Copilot includes additional agents tailored for WordPress and third-party app optimization, Gradient AI’s SRE agents power the core experience. It uses a single, credit-based pricing model to adhere to our simple pricing tenet for customers. Cloudways Copilot is a pioneering step toward proactive infrastructure, where DigitalOcean's Gradient AI platform and applications anticipate the needs of our users, resolve issues, and accelerate growth, and I am excited about what we have in store for customers.”

Cloudways plans to introduce new Copilot capabilities in the coming months, including WordPress app-level issue detection, AI-assisted onboarding, bulk action updates, and MySQL issue coverage.

About Cloudways:

Cloudways, a DigitalOcean service, offers businesses fully managed cloud hosting to enable their website to flourish. Cloudways managed hosting delivers unmatched performance, security, reliability, and value with 24/7 support that acts as your extended team, making Cloudways the ultimate choice for growing agencies and eCommerce businesses. Find out more at https://www.cloudways.com

About DigitalOcean:

DigitalOcean is the simplest scalable cloud platform that democratizes cloud and AI for digital native enterprises around the world. Our mission is to simplify cloud computing and AI to allow builders to spend more time creating software that changes the world. More than 600,000 customers trust DigitalOcean to deliver the cloud, AI, and ML infrastructure they need to build and scale their organisations. To learn more about DigitalOcean, visit www.digitalocean.com.

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¹ From “ What is the cost of IT downtime for small businesses in 2024?” by Scott Jack, E.N Computers