NEW YORK: DigitalOcean Holdings Inc., a cloud services provider, has agreed to acquire website-hosting firm Cloudways for $350 million in an all-cash deal. 

DigitalOcean will buy Malta-based Cloudways in a bid to pick up more small-and-medium sized business customers.

The transaction is expected to close in September, and a “significant portion” of the $350 million will be paid over a 30-month period following the completion of the acquisition, DigitalOcean said Tuesday in a statement. 

Cloudways is the leading managed cloud hosting and SaaS provider for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs).

This acquisition will enhance DigitalOcean’s ability to serve small business owners at every stage of their business journey, no matter their technical skill level.

“If the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that time-strapped small business owners desire simplicity and value in their digital tools. When I meet with customers who are in the early stages of growing their business, a common refrain is that they want to be able to build their websites faster and with less technical complexity,” company noted.

Adding Cloudways to DigitalOcean’s portfolio of capabilities will provide SMBs with easier workflows and on-ramps to build their websites and applications.

“DigitalOcean has always been focused on helping get ideas on the internet quickly, grow them, and scale them — with Cloudways we will be able to make that process even easier and for a wider range of SMBs”.

Why Cloudways?
DigitalOcean and Cloudways have been trusted partners since 2014 and together have helped champion developers and startups who are growing their businesses.

As Cloudways has grown, our teams, including co-founder and CEO, Aaqib Gadit, routinely work closely together to serve the SMB opportunity. “Over the years, I have been more and more impressed with their team’s ability to deliver and improve upon solutions that make their customers’ lives easier.”

“We have a shared focus on delivering simplicity and ease of use for our customers, making the Cloudways team a great cultural fit for DigitalOcean. Their product and performance make them a great addition to the set of technology, tools, and products in the DigitalOcean portfolio.”

For many business owners, a managed service is an attractive offering as it offloads technical infrastructure management, in order to spend more time building and running their business, particularly those hosting on WordPress, PHP, and Magento.

WordPress is the most popular website building tool and content management system in the world; by some accounts, it represents 43% of all websites on the internet, and now it just got easier to access through DigitalOcean.

What’s Next
There’s much more to come as we look to close the acquisition in September. We are extremely fortunate to not only acquire Cloudways’ technology and platform but their extremely talented team as well — expanding our global employee base by 30%.

“We intend for Cloudways to remain a standalone business unit led by co-founder and CEO, Aaqib Gadit, and look forward to the DigitalOcean and Cloudways teams learning and growing together, making the sum total bigger and better than either of us can do alone”.

“We are excited to offer more business owners simpler ways to get their ideas onto the internet as we continue further our mission to simplify cloud computing so builders can spend more time creating software that changes the world”.