The Future of Cloud Hosting in a World of AI
The Future of Cloud Hosting in a World of AI With Suhaib Zaheer, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Managed Hosting at DigitalOcean & Cloudways.
The future of cloud hosting meets AI: Explore intelligent infrastructure, predictive scaling, and next-gen solutions transforming businesses.
This Week’s Sponsors
Kinta: Kinta
LifterLMS: LifterLMS
Rollback Pro: Rollback Pro
The Show’s Main Transcript
[00:00:18.300] – Jonathan Denwood
Welcome back, folks, to the WP Tonic Show. This is episode 986. We’ve got a great guest. We’ve got Suhaib Zaheer. I’ve been practicing that. You’re so close. I’ve been practicing that for 15 minutes. When it comes to it, I still make a mess of it. I apologize. He is the Senior Vice President and General Manager of Managed Hosting at DigitalOcean and Cloudways. Thanks for coming on the show. Would you like to give the tribe a quick 10- to 15-second intro of what you do at Cloudways? Then, when we come back, we will delve a bit deeper into your history.
[00:01:20.880] – Suhaib Zaheer
Sure. Well, first off, thanks for having me on, Jonathan. Your name is a lot easier to pronounce than mine. Mine is pronounced Suhaib. I always throw people up, so it’s not a big deal at all. Today, I’m actually leading… I’m the general manager of Cloudways, which is the managed hosting product for DigitalOcean. I run that business in the end, product strategy, innovation, execution, the go-to-market, sales support, the whole gamut. I have a lot of fun. Been in the managed hosting industry for a long time, and I enjoy what I do very much.
[00:01:53.420] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. I’ve got my ever-supportive and patient co-host, Kurt. Would you like to introduce yourself to the new listeners and viewers, Kurt?
[00:02:03.480] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, Jonathan, thanks. My name is Ku Kurt von Ahnen. I own an agency called Manananomas, and we work directly with the great team over at WP Tonic.
[00:02:11.440] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. But before we go into the meat and potatoes of this great interview, I’ve got a message from one of our major sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back. We’ve also got a continued monthly sponsor, which Kirek will quickly tell you about. Over to you, Kurt.
[00:02:35.480] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, today’s episode is sponsored by Misterio LMS, and we’re excited about them. We’ve been talking about them for the last month, and the main deal is that they have a free version that’s not even a trial. No credit card required at all. It’s not limited. You get unlimited courses, unlimited lessons, unlimited students, and that’s forever. So if you think about that, you can build your entire course business without paying a cent. They have a drag-and-drop builder there. They’ve got quiz creation and student tracking. If you want to do something outside the free version, like certificates, a content drip, or other advanced features, they do have a pro version. But course creators can launch for free. I encourage you to check out Misterio LMS, M-A-S-T-E-R-I-Y-O. Com.
[00:03:23.900] – Jonathan Denwood
Thank you, Kurt. So, Suhaib, let’s go a bit deeper into your background. How did you initially get into hosting? What led to this long path of success?
[00:03:38.360] – Suhaib Zaheer
It’s a funny story. I actually stumbled into it by accident, almost. I was a bit of an entrepreneur out of high school. I started my first business then. Later, I started another commercial real estate brokerage with my father. And we had that business for years. But as part of that, we were desperately trying to get a website built. I don’t want to date myself too much, but it was some time back before things were as easy as they are today. And we would hire a developer who would show up. We’d go through the process, the scope, and everything, and pay the deposit. They’d start working on it. And then they would just disappear. And it was a major source of frustration for me because I wasn’t necessarily the most tech-savvy person back then. And so I remember one day we were at a family party, actually. And I was talking to my mom’s cousin, just telling him, like, “Oh, man, I’m so frustrated.” We’ve been trying to get this site built, and I’ve hired… I’ve literally gone through five developers over this course of time. And he’s like, hey, I’m building this product for a company called Homestead.
[00:04:45.260] – Suhaib Zaheer
Come check it out. It’s a drag-and-drop builder. You don’t even have to know how to really use anything. Really, just come on, and you can get your own site built yourself. So I checked it out and thought it was the coolest thing ever. And this is before the Wix of the world became household names. But I thought it was the most amazing creation that I could sit there as somebody who didn’t have deep web expertise or a developer team. Developers kept disappearing on me, and I just did it myself. I remember signing up for the trial and paying for it immediately. And then it took me, I think, probably three, four days to have something that I thought was professional enough looking. And so from there, I played around with the tool for a couple of weeks. And later on down that year, the same person my mom’s cousin I was talking to let me know that they had a bunch of open positions. They were growing like a weed. I was just so fascinated by the product and so pissed off at how long it took me to get this thing done that I made a career switch.
[00:05:46.950] – Suhaib Zaheer
I jumped in headfirst and joined that company. That’s how I got my start. It was just the pure fascination of what I was able to do on my own without having deep technical expertise.
[00:05:59.160] – Jonathan Denwood
All right. What led to the actual cloud hosting area?
[00:06:05.140] – Suhaib Zaheer
That’s a pretty long journey. I’ve been doing that for about a decade and a half now. That same company was actually acquired by Intuit. Intuit acquired it, thinking they’d get a whole bunch of customers at the infancy stage and a whole lot of small business customers who could cross out QuickBooks, TurboTax, and all those solutions. It didn’t necessarily pan out, so they divested the business, which was acquired by Endurance International Group, which owns a ton of the biggest shared hosting companies in the world. And so that’s how it became a part of Endurance. And then, from there, I played a variety of roles over the course of my tenure, leading some of the largest hosting brands in the US, including Bluehost, which was the most recent before I left. And so that’s really how I got my experience in the hosting world. And then, from there, I went on to become the CEO of Cloudways before selling it to DigitalOcean.
[00:07:01.480] – Jonathan Denwood
All right. Over to you, Kurt.
[00:07:04.260] – Kurt von Ahnen
I find that whole thing fascinating, Suha, because when I talk to or consult with businesses on a wide breadth, most of the people I talk to in charge of things, they say the same thing. They got there by accident. No one in third grade said, oh, I want to do shared hosting when I’m growing up. But it’s amazing how well you can do when you stumble into something and it just seems to fit. So congrats for you for exploiting that the way that you have. If we’re going to take a look at cloud hosting and your involvement with hosting, what do you see as some of the major opportunities or threats that are connected to cloud hosting and AI next year, next year and a half?
[00:07:51.160] – Suhaib Zaheer
Yeah, I mean, I think we’re just at a really rare moment of time where this is probably one of the most disruptive technologies that we’ve seen in years. And we’re already starting to see the early impact of what folks can do with AI. I think there’s so many opportunities. Probably the biggest one in my mind being just that layer of intelligence that you can build within the stack. If you think about it, obviously, you guys are very familiar with hosting. From a customer lens, it can feel very reactive. Something breaks someone fixes it. That’s why all of us managed hosting companies have so many great, phenomenal support engineers who are on standby and just ready to provide support. But it’s really been reactive in that sense from a customer lens. I think one of the biggest opportunities with the AI is that level of intelligence that we’ll be able to have throughout the entire platform that would allow us to pivot from that purely reactive state to something far more predictive. And so imagine infrastructure that can sense stress or reroute traffic or optimize resources automatically. I think that that’s a massive, massive efficiency gain.
[00:09:09.730] – Suhaib Zaheer
I think that the companies that can take full advantage of that and create a step change in that user experience are going to be the ones that really survive, candidly. I think customers are going to expect platforms and products to become so much more intelligent than they are today. I think that that’s truly one of the biggest So as an outsider looking in, or maybe even better, from the perspective of what we consider an average viewer or listener right now, when we talk about AI and hosting and all those things, is AI, does it have this weird potential where it’s just…
[00:09:48.960] – Kurt von Ahnen
You mentioned efficiency, but then I also wonder, does it create such an unwarranted burden on server resources? Will it increase costs for people long run?
[00:10:00.760] – Suhaib Zaheer
Yeah, definitely. Look, I think the compute intensity of AI is enormous. I mean, that’s very, very clear. Training and inference workloads, they consume very real power. If hosting companies chase AI everywhere without factoring in some level of efficiency in mind, we’re going to pay for it with sustainability debt. I think it’s a very, very valid point. For a company like us, we’re choosing to leverage AI in very specific use cases and very in specific ways. And the intent is, one of the things about managed hosting, and you know this, I’m sure, the cost is a big factor. Transparency of costs, managing costs, keeping costs as low as physically possible, while still seeing if you can get the best level of performance possible. We know that clients and customers around the globe are very cost-conscious, and rightfully so. Especially if you’re an agency as you are, and you’re scaling across hundreds or thousands of sites, the cost can ramp up very quickly. So I do think companies like ourselves and every other manage host needs to be very mindful about how they’re leveraging AI and making sure that they’re using it to solve really the biggest customer rich in pain points.
[00:11:15.830] – Suhaib Zaheer
Because, again, the cost can balloon for sure, depending on how you’re using it and what problems you’re actually trying to solve.
[00:11:24.180] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, I’m going back to, I’ve had a ton of clients and myself actually use Cloudways for for years. And one of the things I liked about Cloudways was you were able to just dial up your server. You could just go in there and go, I’m going to take the next package, the next package. But I wonder, as people enact different tools, different AI tools, different workflows through their projects, if the temptation is to just go to the next package, if your site slows down or your page speed score goes down, you just go up an extra 20 bucks a month or an extra 30 bucks a month. I wonder if people are inclined to do that or if more inclined to troubleshoot and get to the root cause of their inefficiency.
[00:12:05.900] – Suhaib Zaheer
Yeah. I mean, speaking of troubleshooting, I mean, that’s one of the ways that we’re actually using AI. We launch this product, it’s really early. It’s in its infancy stage, and we We’ve trained it on a handful of use cases, right? But one of the things that we’re thinking we can do is if we can take a product like Copilot and have it very quickly detect, okay, there’s a server level issue happening. You know, in today’s world, What ends up happening? Okay, your performance is degraded. You actually don’t know off the top of your head what’s going on. You reach out to support. Now support is asking you questions around, Okay, well, did you change something? What’s going on? We’re running our own diagnostics. And there’s a lot of back and forth that happens, right? That takes It can take 20 minutes, half an hour, an hour. It really depends on what’s going wrong. Well, with this tool, with these use cases that we’ve trained it on, it’s able to, within a couple of minutes, say, Okay, you’re getting DDoS, for example. That DDoS is what’s driving, it’s taxing your CPU. Here’s what you actually need to go do about it.
[00:13:06.060] – Suhaib Zaheer
By the way, click this button and we’ll just block those malicious IPs for you and boom, problem solved. If we can reduce some of those types of contacts that come in today, we also believe that we could scale with way less people than we have today and manage our costs that way. So it’s almost trading that experience gain, which is how I really look It’s a much better experience when you do it that way versus having an agency sit on a phone call or chat or creating tickets for an hour trying to get to the root cause of something. So again, I think it’s all about how you’re going to leverage AI, what are the problems you’re going to solve, and where can you manage costs really effectively in other aspects of the business so that you’re not passing all that through to the customer at the end of the day. Yeah. Thanks.
[00:13:57.620] – Kurt von Ahnen
Jonathan?
[00:13:59.180] – Jonathan Denwood
Oh, thanks. So where do you see the growth in the next 12, 18 months? Is it in the to the consumer, to the agency? Because I don’t know how big hosting is for DigitalOcean because they have very diverse buckets of users, don’t they? I don’t know how big hosting is in general to DigitalOcean, but do you see it still growing, hosting in general for the next 18 months, or is it in a plateau Hosting is very big for us.
[00:14:49.020] – Suhaib Zaheer
I mean, it’s the core of what we do. I would say we still see tremendous opportunities for growth. But I do think that that’s going to evolve in terms I think at the end of the day, customers are going to expect more and more value beyond just hosting. I think some of our most important customers today are agencies. We know that they have a lot of things that they’re either doing manually or they have developers that have to do things that could really be automated. Maybe it was more difficult to automate prior to AI, but there’s just workflows and things that you shouldn’t have to have someone just doing repetitive writing scripts and all that. I do think the value that folks expect from hosts like us and others is going to shift over time. I see a few different opportunities from a growth perspective. One is that speed in edge computing, I think as the internet continues to become more global, user patience is really getting shorter. I think that’s across not just our industry. The Internet has made people just acclimated with just on demand. If I want something, boom, I have it.
[00:16:03.400] – Suhaib Zaheer
I think an opportunity for us is to continue to figure out how do we deliver content closer and closer to the user, caching intelligently, optimizing for real-word conditions and all that. I think that’s one thing that we have to continue to focus on to propel the growth in that pure hosting world. The second thing I would say is I do think that we’re going to see a rise of service-driven web agencies and small development teams. These are the power users. They’re looking for automation around maintenance and backups and staging and monitoring and all that so they can really scale their client base without burning weekends on managing updates. I think that the AI piece, that AI intelligence layer I was talking about, is really going to help us make leaps and bounds there for these smaller web agencies who are going to be able to do remarkable things because of AI tooling and technology. Then this third place where I do see a potential explosion on demand demand and growth is this AI builder segment. We today play in WordPress. That’s primarily what our customers are building in. But if you look at the growth of some of these businesses like Lovable and Replit, it’s insane.
[00:17:17.080] – Suhaib Zaheer
It’s absolutely insane. I mean, to go from zero to $100 million in 10 months. I mean, that’s massive, right? Now, I have read an article just the other day where some of that adoption is dropping off and folks are starting to realize, okay, you can get really great prototypes built, but then ultimately, is the infrastructure scalable enough? They’re running into some challenges. I think some of these companies will figure it out. I think the other opportunity for a host like us How do you open up the platforms beyond really just focusing on WordPress so that if someone wants to use one of these JNI tools to build their front-end, they can still come over and maybe use WordPress for the content and use us for hosting. And how do you these environments together, keep them affordable, flexible, and simple enough so people can experiment, build, and scale quickly? So I do think there’s going to be growth in the industry. Might look a little bit different. It might not purely be hosting, but I think all of us have an opportunity to figure out how do we deliver more and more value at scale and continue to change with the times.
[00:18:23.840] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s funny. I was having a conversation with a friend yesterday, and I’ve known for a number of years. She was a founder of a very successful startup, and she’s invested in a number of other startups. She’s been encouraging me for over a year to get out of WordPress, just ditch it and go into something else. She said, I’m wasting my time and abilities in this space. She said, You want to get out of it? But she’s never been a lover of WordPress. She never has been. She brought up Lovable, and she said, Look, I love Lovable. I hate WordPress, Jonathan. You want to ditch it? I don’t think it’s… I’m not ready to do that yet. So it goes into the next question. I don’t know was mine, which is, where do you find WordPress? I know you probably don’t want to delve into this, and I don’t, but obviously the founder of Automatic had a bit of a bust up with WP Engine, and you must have just been happy that you weren’t part of that. You just avoided that bullet completely. You must be a very happy man, because if I was in your shoes, I would be a very happy individual.
[00:20:05.800] – Jonathan Denwood
But on our end, what is the relationship you think that a hosting provider the size of DigitalOcean and Cloudways has with an open source project like WordPress and its founder? You must have had your own discussions or what a balanced, fair relationship is. Are there any thoughts that you would like to share with us?
[00:20:41.880] – Suhaib Zaheer
Yeah, look, You’re right. I was a very happy camper not to be dragged into the middle of that. It was actually a sad thing for our industry, I would say.
[00:20:52.070] – Jonathan Denwood
It was, wasn’t it, in some ways.
[00:20:54.130] – Suhaib Zaheer
It was really polarizing. I mean, you had folks that were just team automatic all the and others that are team WP engine all the way.
[00:21:02.880] – Jonathan Denwood
It was a bit reluctant if I should put this question to you because in some ways I’m a little bit bored with it, yet I’m asking you a question about it. It’s a bit contradictional, but I just thought I had to ask you, really.
[00:21:17.600] – Suhaib Zaheer
Yeah, I think you’re right. I mean, look, I’m hopeful that we can put the differences aside and focus on continuing to build this great thing. I do think WordPress, look, the lovables and replets of the world, there is no doubt that they are disruptive technologies, right? And I’ve used the platforms. I have a lot of friends and colleagues and others that are in the industry that are, of course, testing them, using them. One of the things that I would say is I wouldn’t count WordPress out. Now, I know that there’s a love-hate relationship, but WordPress is the nature of open source. It enables you to truly build anything that you want. And ultimately, I think that’s been one of the beauties about WordPress and what’s helped it get to the amazing scale of powering almost half of the websites in the world. I don’t think that’s going to wait tomorrow. I mean, it’s such a powerful ecosystem. Now that said, I do think, and obviously you’ve been in the industry for so long, you and Kurt know, I mean, WordPress comes with its flaws as well. It is complex for novice users. It is a pain to make sure things are updated all the time.
[00:22:30.260] – Suhaib Zaheer
And that open source and flexibility does have a potential downside. So for your friend who you’re mentioning, we hear stuff like that a lot as well in the industry, which is, why can’t we just have a WordPress experience but as simple as a Wix, where you can truly… You don’t have to spend so much time on doing things that are just so manual and laborious in nature. But I wouldn’t count on WordPress. I mean, look, I think the shifts that we’re going to see AI, just like it’s doing for everything else, AI-assisted workflows are going to be everywhere for WordPress, right? From content creation, plugin maintenance. I think it’s going to quietly automate much of the busy work that slows people down today.
[00:23:15.640] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, that could do.
[00:23:17.120] – Suhaib Zaheer
I also think that we’re going to see more headless and hybrid architectures, developers who are using WordPress as a content engine while maybe using these modern things like Lovable to handle front-end experiences. I think there’s going to be a point in time where folks figure out how to make that work well, potentially. Then maybe- I’ve actually been looking a little bit at a platform called Website.
[00:23:45.940] – Jonathan Denwood
Studio that has some of the open source. It has some of the elements of WordPress, but it also has elements of the leading SaaS like SiteGround, not SiteGround, Wix and alike. I have been looking at that, and it does integrate with WordPress, the database as well. I have been looking at that. I think it’s a good time for us to go for our middle break. I think it’s been a fantastic discussion. We’ve covered a few things. We got some great questions for the second half. We’re going to go for our middle break, and we’ve got some other great messages from our sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. We’ve had a fantastic discussion with Suab. About hosting DigitalOcean, CloudWares, WordPress, where we find ourselves at the end of 2025. We’ve got some other great questions. But before we do that, I just want to point out we’ve got a fantastic created list of the best WordPress plugins and services for the freelancer and for the small agency owner, plus some fantastic special offers from the sponsors of the show, our major sponsors that are really appreciated, like Rowover, Kinster, and Lifter LMS.
[00:25:25.600] – Jonathan Denwood
They really help support the show. You can get all these all these goodies by going over to wp-tonic. Com/deals, Wp-tonic. Com/deals, and you can get all the free goodies there and discounts. What more does that mean? What could you ask for my beloved tribe? Probably a lot more, but that’s all you’re going to get on that page. I’m going to throw it over to Kurt. Over to you, Kurt.
[00:25:55.040] – Kurt von Ahnen
I got a question burning in my brain that’s not on the list, and so I might get shot. Suhab, I hear you guys talking about WordPress, and my brain is getting stretched in two completely different directions right now. I’m trying to listen to Kevin Geary. I’m trying to learn Edge. I signed up for… I was an early adopter at Edge. I’m trying to get my my brain into that, and that’s operating at what I consider a high level. And then there’s the Cadence and Astera tools of the world, where we install Astera or Cadence, and we put in a paragraph about our customers’ business. Lickety split, we got a website, right? And so there’s a huge disparity in services between that and this, right? So I’m not a fool. I understand that there’s a huge difference there, but I’m thinking about who the customer is, how to communicate, do a needs assessment, and the use case that goes with it, right? And then I picked up in your conversation with Jonathan, you said, well, what if we had a Wix-like experience, right? Hosting with WordPress, I’m thinking about WP Tonic offer. Wp Tonic offers the hosting, offers a curated suite of plugins, and does the updates and stuff for the customer, which is great.
[00:27:13.740] – Kurt von Ahnen
But then that puts you in a pricing market comparable to SaaS, and everyone thinks WordPress is synonymous with free or low cost, and it ends up being a race to the bottom. And so when we’re saying, how do you find WordPress at the end of 2025? I’m stuck in the middle there. I’m thinking, well, I got a ton of customers racing to the bottom over here. And then I’ve got Kevin Geary in my other ear saying, I should be able to sell $50,000 websites using a premium tool like Edge. And there’s definitely a conflict there. Are you are you sensing that at your level of the business?
[00:27:50.100] – Suhaib Zaheer
A hundred %. And look, I think it’s easy to generalize and say, well, WordPress does this, right? But the reality is that there’s different segments of the market And I think, yes, you’re a hundred % right, that there is a segment of our industry and a segment of the customers who expect us to become cheaper and cheaper and cheaper over time. But I will say in the space where Cloudways is operating, and I think some of maybe we’ll call them upscale managed hosts. There’s something else that we’re seeing, which is very interesting, which is customers are willing to invest more money if we’re providing some transformational value. And I I think that with AI and this intelligence layer that I’m talking about, we have so many developers and agencies and builders on our platform. I’m talking to customers every day, and so many of these folks are like, Hey, if you can give me hours of my life back, I would happily spend another 10, 20, 30, 50, 100 bucks a month. Because I know that right now this is the very cost for me to have 10, 15 developers doing XYZ. And if you’re giving me this time back, I would happily spend another 50 bucks a month.
[00:28:58.820] – Suhaib Zaheer
I do I think in order for folks to see WordPress outside of just this cheap way to get an online presence built and host, I think that value that you can deliver by tightly integrating that experience between content, the plugin aspect, the value you’re delivering, maybe for developer workflows, there is an opportunity to monetize this in a different way that I think historically hosts have thought about. If you deliver a step change in experience, I think before you raise prices or you try to charge more for something, that experience piece, which is candidly where I think WordPress has always struggled, that experience piece has to be nailed. But I do believe AI will enable us to do things very differently than we’ve ever had in the past, right? Because there’s just so much that it can do that was just never possible before. I think that folks are going to figure out. I mean, there’s a beautiful thing about the community, right? We are going to find a way. Folks are going to find a way. There’s just too How many people investing in it to not find a way to create that step change environment.
[00:30:04.280] – Suhaib Zaheer
I think that’ll be monetized very differently as well.
[00:30:07.200] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, I’m thinking back on my own most recent sales conversations, and I didn’t mention WordPress. I did a needs assessment. And I was like, we can absolutely build you a product that handles your learning requirements. But it wasn’t like, I’m going to use WordPress with this tool and this plugin and this CRM tool. And it was more like, hey, you were looking at X, Y, and Z as a product. We can match that with our services and keep your expenses where they need to be.
[00:30:35.620] – Suhaib Zaheer
Yeah. Are you seeing the younger generation? Because there’s one thing I’m noticing with some of the younger folks. They’re not talking about WordPress at all. The first thing they’re talking about is the lovable, the replets, the vibe coding products that enable you to get out there and use natural language and spin up online presence. I’m seeing this trend where you’ve got this legacy generation A lot of us who grew up in the last 15, 20 years in the industry who understand the power and the amazing things WordPress can do. And then you’ve got these other folks who are like, why the hell would I even bother with it?
[00:31:09.880] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, I actually speak at the high school here locally, and their IT class came. There were 60 kids that wanted to hear my talk, which I was thrilled about. But when in the presentation, I said, How many people have heard of WordPress? Only two had even heard of WordPress. So then we said, Well, it’s 43% of the Internet. It does this. It’s open source. But then I asked the It’s a tragic question. And I said, In Kansas, you could have an agency for… If you have access to a laptop in the internet, you can be an agency. That’s literally how easy it is to be in business in Kansas. And so I said, If I showed you how to make, let’s say, $6,000 before summer, who would be interested in that? And all the hands went up. You have to change the thinking. There’s like a switch in there. So we have an apprentice project we’re putting forward for the community now, but that’s just to get young people in it because all us old people are doing it and we’re going time out.
[00:32:01.860] – Suhaib Zaheer
I couldn’t agree more. And so I was curious if you’re seeing the same trends that we are. I think it’s a bit of a branding problem, but it goes back to that thing around experience. I think you know what the Internet did, right? I mean, it made everybody… We lost patience. You can have anything that’s at your fingertips, information, ordering things, whatever it is, Amazon Prime. I mean, anything that you want can arrive at your doorstep. I live in Dubai. You can order things in a 10 minutes, right? And I I just think this generation that’s growing up in this environment, they have even less and less and less patience. It’s like if you don’t give them exactly what they want, right when they want it, they’re not going to sit around for an hour, let alone five minutes. I just think that if we don’t find a way, if the community doesn’t find a way to make WordPress simpler, easier, I do think there’s going to be challenges. I think that the lovables and the replets of the world, while they’re struggling in some cases to enable really production-heavy workloads, and they’re not necessarily at that level yet, some will probably figure it out.
[00:33:09.350] – Suhaib Zaheer
But I do think that there’s going to be an experience gap, and it’s only going to grow if we can’t figure out how to make this thing simpler and easier to use.
[00:33:15.940] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, I have to agree. Jonathan?
[00:33:18.980] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I’m going to go a little bit off script there because my response is, I think what you’re suggesting is the utilizing AI is that providing more customizable experience to specific niches at affordable price to that niche because of a certain niche and the amount of customization that could be offered just wasn’t in business terms viable. By utilizing AI, it becomes more affordable to provide a more customizable experience to niche groups. I think that’s what you were hinting. Am I correct about that?
[00:34:04.880] – Suhaib Zaheer
Yeah, I absolutely think that AI will enable that in a way that just wasn’t possible before.
[00:34:12.660] – Jonathan Denwood
Now, what’s your thoughts about e-commerce? Because I’m not in that space. I’m in learning management systems and memberships for individuals, for associations, nonprofits, schools, e-learning. But the e-commerce, Shopify, I know wooCommerce, or woo, still is the biggest second player in it. But I just see enormous opportunity that hasn’t materialized in the e-commerce space around woo. What’s your own thoughts about that? Because I would have thought I think that’s a major part of Cloudways around e-commerce and around supporting Wu.
[00:35:08.580] – Suhaib Zaheer
I almost think some of the same stuff applies where, look, again, I talk to agencies all the time that are using our platform. One of the things I found is there is a deep appreciation for platforms like Shopify, where it’s like anybody can use it and you can have a store spun up in minutes, truly minutes, compared to Wu, which is like, okay, you need a handful of plugins before it’ll do the base level functionality that you actually need to deliver an end-to-end experience for your end customer. I think that complexity aspect of Wu is a very real problem. I think that part of the reason Shopify had the explosive growth it did is because it is, in my opinion, probably the best alternative if you don’t want to monkey around with the WordPress ecosystem and learn plugins and all this stuff. And again, if you think about stitching together a user experience that potentially does some of that thinking for you instead of you coming in and having to figure out, okay, which shipping plugin do I want to use out of the 10,000 that are available? Which plugin do I need for SEO optimization?
[00:36:21.640] – Suhaib Zaheer
There’s so many decisions that have to be made when you’re building an e-commerce store in Woo. Why do people I love it because of that flexibility, that choice, the fact that you can build anything that you want to. But it comes with that same huge downside, if you want to call it that, which is that friction point of getting the store set up, optimize. It’s not just about building in WU, you got to add in all of these other things in order for it to have the functionality that comes almost out of the box with Shopify. So again, I think we’re also looking at, okay, what do our customers that are using WU commerce, what are they really is asking for. The developers, the agencies, they have a very real different ask than setting up the store. They’re fine doing that. They’re fine doing it on their own. What they’re asking for is give us a different level of intelligence that will help us understand where we should market products and where customers are getting lost in terms of the flow and the funnel. And so, again, I just think that the way that we’re going to embed AI into the platform, we’ll be able to learn, we’ll be able to make recommendations, we’ll be able to create a step change in user experience.
[00:37:33.260] – Suhaib Zaheer
There’s going to be things that we do that I think will make Willecommerce much more appealing to the general base. But I do believe it has that same challenge, which is the complexity. It’s inherent. Because obviously, automatic, they’ve got wordpress.
[00:37:49.560] – Jonathan Denwood
Com. It’s their business. They can go whatever direction they want to. But do you think that some of the leading hosting providers, that’s what they’re looking at, is to provide a more onboarding, customized experience for WooCommerce. I would imagine all the leading hosting providers are looking at that because It is a natural, isn’t it?
[00:38:17.440] – Suhaib Zaheer
It is. I personally think for those folks that want to be around in the future, that simplicity and ease of use has to become a focal point for all of us. And to Kurt’s point, when he was in that high school, there’s a reason people aren’t talking about WordPress. Look at these tools. I don’t know if you’ve actually used Levelful or Replit or any of these tools, but The simplicity that it delivers and the fact that you can build a working prototype without writing a link of code or without having really a strong technical aptitude, it’s pretty remarkable what’s happening in the industry. And I think I think for those of us that don’t understand or see that as a massive threat to the status quo, it’s going to be problematic. These younger folks are not going to want to… They’re going to be more and more impatient, and they’re not going to sit around They’re monkeying around with 40 different plug-ins to get a store working. They’re just going to want it to go out of the box. I think we have to leverage AI to create those step changes and experiences.
[00:39:25.580] – Jonathan Denwood
All right. Over to you, Kurt.
[00:39:28.840] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, I think we’ve had a great conversation, but I fear we’re to the time machine question. Are we, Jonathan?
[00:39:35.300] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, I think you’ve missed one question. What’s your personal thoughts connected to AI?
[00:39:44.730] – Kurt von Ahnen
Oh, I thought he loved it.
[00:39:48.200] – Suhaib Zaheer
Oh, there’s a darker side.
[00:39:49.600] – Jonathan Denwood
I think you’ve got a very balanced view to it. But also, I’m extremely frustrated with the AI industry in some ways because I’m not expert, but I probably have spent too much time listening to podcasts and experts, heads of AI laboratories. I probably know a bit more than I should really know about it because it’s not going to make me any richer in some ways, but it just seems to be a enormous enormous amount of propaganda, especially around general AI, general intelligence, or utilizing the word intelligence, I Push back after I found out how these large learning models actually work. Utilizing intelligence with it is a stretch. It’s a bridge Too far for me, really. But a lot of people that I know, like my friend I was speaking to with yesterday, she’s married to an AI experts, so they’re fully in. They’re committed, both of them. But my cynicism doesn’t mean that I can’t see the benefits because I use a lot of AI myself on on a daily basis, but I just push back. What’s your own feelings around this?
[00:41:35.700] – Suhaib Zaheer
I actually tend to agree with you on a couple of things. I would say, look, I’m an internal optimist. I’m wired that way, and I do see it as being probably one of the most transformative things that’s happened in this generation. But I’m very cautious about it. I do agree with you. I think there’s a lot of companies who get out there. The buzzword is AI, AI in everything you’re doing. The reality is if you look under the hood, it’s not even happening at the way that folks are positioning or talking about it, including a lot of the companies who you hear, I won’t drop the names, but you hear all these companies who are letting folks go because AI is doing all this remarkable stuff underneath. It’s really not true. It’s like we over-hired during COVID and now they’re rightsizing businesses, and they’re trying to give all the credit to AI. People can see through that. I do think it’s very transformational. I do think there’s going to be amazing things that it can do. I also think that it carries a darker side, and it’s one that nobody can afford to ignore. Ai can be misused in ways that can amplify bias, spread misinformation, erode privacy.
[00:42:44.740] – Suhaib Zaheer
If you want to know my biggest fear, as it begins to control physical systems, which it will do at some state in the future, not tomorrow, but at some state in the future, where more vehicles and robots and autonomous drones are powered by this thing, we’re talking about real consequences. And one of the things that terrifies me the most is the human connection. We’re already starting to see people forming relationships with chat bots. It’s crazy, right? And think about this. When’s the last time you went out and sat at a restaurant? If you look around the room, 80% of the people are on their smartphones. They’re not even talking to each other. They’re not looking at each other. You walk around the world and just look at them.
[00:43:28.940] – Jonathan Denwood
This is going to What is the excuse for that? Because they’re married, aren’t they? Long time ago, they stopped talking to one another.
[00:43:38.840] – Suhaib Zaheer
But you know where I go with this, right? It’s like the technology, while I think it’s going to There’s some amazing things for the human race. I think that there’s some real potential downsides here, and it scares me. I think that we have to be careful and we have to make sure there’s guardrails around things. As to your earlier point, once AI is smart enough to do actual reasoning, it opens up a completely different world.
[00:44:06.660] – Jonathan Denwood
The problem with that is my understanding of large learning models and how they actually work. They can’t reason. You can put elements where you can put memory or give the impression that it has memory. That, to some degree, is a trick as well. But to my understanding, they really don’t… That’s one of the reasons why, in my opinion, they wanted all this money to be invested because they’re taking a gamble that they can utilize that money to find an answer that can lead to general intelligence. But my understanding, large learning models cannot achieve that, but I’m probably totally wrong. Over to you, Kurt.
[00:44:53.260] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, with the AI thing, I am curious to know how Suhab feels. If AI ingests pre-existing information and then starts to reformulate that pre-existing information on its own and then regurgitates that to itself, do you feel that the information over time will get better or do you feel it get watered down and actually worse over time? Because my fear is that the information we get from AI is actually going to get worse over time instead of better.
[00:45:22.000] – Suhaib Zaheer
Yeah, I think you could be right. I mean, the reality is that nobody knows, right? But one thing that I would say is the more and more folks are using these tools and the less and less you’re relying on human creativity, I do think that that’s actually a very real risk, right? It’s the same stuff being repeated in cycles. That’s the reason why the way I look at it is really the power of AI is a productivity multiplier when you combine it with that human innovation and human creativity. I think the lack of that connectivity is going to do exactly what you said, which is… And that’s a very real risk, a very real risk. And the reality is, nobody knows.
[00:46:02.460] – Kurt von Ahnen
I’m such a huge fan of organic things, hunting, farming, working on your own car, things like that. Jonathan, I’m going to jump to six unless you got it, something else.
[00:46:14.640] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, they’re on the elephant. Well, yes, this go for six, and then, yeah, gone.
[00:46:19.740] – Kurt von Ahnen
So, Ab, if you could go back in time, if you had a time machine and you went back to when you were 20, what would be the key advice that you’d give yourself?
[00:46:30.000] – Suhaib Zaheer
When I was 20, probably optimize for learning. I think staying curious, not worrying about what comes next, but just staying curious and trying to solve complex problems. Earlier in my career, I just think it opens up so many different windows and opportunities when you’re constantly just trying to push yourself and learn. And maybe the other thing would be just learning how to communicate clearly and effectively. I’ve been running businesses for so long, and there’s one thing that I realized is leading a team, inspiring folks, and trying to drive a mission or vision does really require clarity and strong communication skills. And that’s something that I think oftentimes we overlook, and probably an art that I would have loved to master earlier in life, and something I’m still working to for the very day.
[00:47:23.830] – Kurt von Ahnen
I don’t think that one ever gets mastered.
[00:47:26.420] – Suhaib Zaheer
Yeah, exactly.
[00:47:27.920] – Kurt von Ahnen
That’s a tough one.
[00:47:30.000] – Suhaib Zaheer
Nice.
[00:47:31.280] – Kurt von Ahnen
Jonathan?
[00:47:31.880] – Suhaib Zaheer
Maybe a third thing. Surround yourself with people who will raise your standards and challenge you. In the early 20s, I can’t always say I had the best group of friends, but you want to surround yourself with people who will challenge you and just tell you the truth. I think that’s the important thing in life.
[00:47:46.640] – Jonathan Denwood
Oh, well, but some leaders don’t want the truth, do they?
[00:47:50.340] – Suhaib Zaheer
That’s true.
[00:47:53.560] – Jonathan Denwood
We’re rapidly approaching the end of 2025. At the end of 2026, where would you like Cloudways to be? What would be a successful… Obviously, more customers, more revenue, but are there any goalposts that you would like to share with us, or that you feel you can share with us at the end of 2026, that you felt in your heart that Cloudways had moved in the right direction?
[00:48:31.400] – Suhaib Zaheer
I would have to say this concept of proactive versus reactive. Kurt, owning an agency, will tell you, I’m sure, especially when you’re managing hundreds of applications with some of our agencies, or thousands in some cases, that being purely reactive is very hurtful to that agency’s business. Ultimately, if we wait until things go down or performance degrades, we’re causing real harm to someone’s business. I do think where AI is going to play a role, and it’s already playing a role for us in some ways, is when you get really good telemetry, you get really good intelligence, if you want to call it that, where you can start to pick up that, Okay, something’s going wrong, somebody’s CPU usage went from 25 to 75% in just a second, you know something’s about to go wrong. How do you proactively intervene to solve an issue and let the customer know you’re addressing it before they actually experience real harm to their business? I think there are some pretty cool things that we’re working on that will take us there. It’s going to be a long journey. It won’t happen overnight. But I do believe that AI will at least help us become far more proactive.
[00:49:46.040] – Suhaib Zaheer
That’s something that every customer at the end of the day would appreciate, right? Waiting until you’re down. It’s never a fun experience for anybody.
[00:49:54.300] – Jonathan Denwood
All right. Thank you. So, Sonab, what’s the best way for people to learn more about you and your general thoughts?
[00:50:02.840] – Suhaib Zaheer
Find me on LinkedIn. My contact information is there. I’m always happy to connect with folks, learn, network, meet new people, hear what other problems people are trying to solve, and see how we can help each other.
[00:50:16.880] – Jonathan Denwood
You definitely have to come back, hopefully, sometime in the new year. I’ve really enjoyed the discussion. Kurt, what’s the best way for people to find you about you and your thoughts?
[00:50:27.660] – Kurt von Ahnen
Like Suhab, I’m also on LinkedIn almost every day. That’s a great place to make a connection. If it’s for business, I’m at maniananomas on all socials and maniananomas. Com.
[00:50:38.260] – Jonathan Denwood
He certainly is. If you want to support the show, leave us a review on iTunes or Spotify. It’s really easy to listen to this podcast on your phone. Our numbers have been growing rapidly this year. I even surprised Kurt by the number of people who listen to this podcast. It’s been growing. But if you could leave us a review, it really helps us promote on those platforms to new listeners. That really helps the show and helps me get some fantastic sponsors who enable me to continue this podcast. If you could do that, it would be really appreciated by Kurt and me. We will be back next week with another fabulous guest. We’ll see you soon. Bye. Let’s get my mouse. Let’s get this off. Here we go.
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