As Jude came to know the townspeople over the years, the initial divide between photographer and participants all but faded; openness and sense of belonging steered Jude’s image making. Captured in his dynamic snapshots of daily life are the people that warmly welcomed him into their world; children venturing close to the lens with broad grins; fishermen with nets draped over their shoulders in regal-like poses; and a little girl in a colourful floral skirt sitting on a mooring pole, staring out to sea. Jude’s glimpse of life in Moree centres on this sense of connection — it’s an intimate insight from someone caught up in a nostalgic net.
As a self taught image maker born and raised in Accra, Jude’s journey into the world of documentary photography all started with his late grandfather who would “share stories of the countries colonial period” throughout his childhood with the use of “old reference images” and “family photo albums” — an early insight into the power of images “in telling stories and capturing history”, Jude says.
Land of the Morees is one project in an ongoing photographic practice that continues to explore the documentation of personal and cultural history from Ghana and beyond. The series was put on show for the first time in 2024 in Ghana, in a debut solo exhibition for the photographer. Since then he has continued to document the community and build connections with the people of Moree. Jude is also in the process of working on some prints of the series, in the hopes of selling some of his work with proceeds from the project directed back to the people of Moree. Outside of photography, his aim is to support the community in practical ways, “whether that’s through providing resources, assisting with local projects, or simply giving back to the people who have opened their hearts to me”, he says.
Overall, Land of the Morees stands as Jude’s heartfelt tribute to both the steadfastness of the towns people, and coastal communities as a whole. “The series captures the essence of life on the shores of Moree, celebrating the resilience, joy, and unity of its people, while also reflecting on the timeless connection between humans and the sea.”
Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, responded to concerns about the impact of recent changes in Search and was repeatedly asked to clarify his position on the web ecosystem and how it fits into what he calls the next chapter of search. Pichai’s responses were given in the context of a recent interview on the Lex Fridman podcast.
Lex Fridman challenged Pichai on whether Google will continue sending users to the human-created web. Pichai responded that supporting the web ecosystem is something he feels deeply about.
Fridman said:
“And the idea that AI mode will still take you to the web, to the human-created web?”
Pichai responded:
“Yes, that’s going to be a core design principle for us.”
Fridman followed up by noting that he’s been asking more questions from Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode and exploring but he still wants to end up on the “human-created web.”
Pichai responded:
“It helps us deliver higher quality referrals, right? You know where people are like they have a much higher likelihood of finding what they’re looking for. They’re exploring. They’re curious. Their intent is getting satisfied more… That’s what all our metrics show.”
The interviewer added:
“It makes the humans that create the web nervous. The journalists are getting they’ve already been nervous.”
Sundar Pichai answered:
“Look, I think news and journalism will play an important role, you know, in the future we’re pretty committed to it, right? And so I think making sure that ecosystem… In fact, I think we’ll be able to differentiate ourselves as a company over time because of our commitment there. So it’s something I think you know I definitely value a lot and as we are designing we’ll continue prioritizing approaches.”
Pichai mentioned that user metrics of AI search are “encouraging” and referred to it as the “next chapter of search,” underlining that AI Search is an inevitability and is not going away.
Search technologies have consistently been in a steady state of change. The strongest effects were visible in the 2004 Florida update, the 2012 Penguin links update, the 2018 Medic update, and the more recent series of helpful content updates, all of which brought massive changes to search rankings. None of those changes are as ambitious and consequential as what the human-created web is facing with Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode.
Speaking as someone who has been a part of search marketing for over 25 years, I believe Pichai may be understating the situation by calling it the next chapter in search. It may well be that Google AI Search is an entirely new book.
Lex Fridman remarked on how Google was legendary for its simple layout and the ten blue links, saying that Google is starting to “mess with that” and that surely there must have been battles within Google about that.
Pichai subtly corrected Fridman’s suggestion that Google was moving away from the ten blue links, which hasn’t been a thing for nearly 15 years by stating that the shift to mobile is the reason why Google shifted away from ten blue links, evolving along with the pace of technological advancements and user’s expectations for answers, not links.
Pichai emphasized that Google remains the “front page of the Internet” as Fridman put it, because of their commitment to making it easier for users to explore the web, only with more context.
Pichai answered:
“Look… in some ways when mobile came… people wanted answers to more questions, so we’re …constantly evolving it. But you’re right, this moment, …that evolution, because underlying technology is becoming much more capable. You can have AI give a lot of context.
But one of our important design goals though, is when you come to Google search. You’re going to get a lot of context. But you’re going to go and find a lot of things out on the web. So that will be true in AI mode. In AI overviews and so on.
But I think to our earlier conversation, we are still giving you access to links, but think of the AI as a layer which is giving you context summary. Maybe in AI mode you can have a dialogue with it back and forth on your journey.
But through it all, you’re kind of learning what’s out there in the world. So those core principles don’t change, but I think AI mode allows us to push… we have our best models there, models which are using search as a deep tool.
Really, for every query you’re asking, fanning out doing multiple searches, assembling that knowledge in a way so you can go and consume what you want to and that’s how we think about it.”
Something that isn’t immediately apparent is that Google treats advertising as a form of content that is relevant to users. Advertising is not seen as an intrusion but as something relevant to users within a context of their interests.
Fridman next asked him about advertising in AI Mode. Pichai responded that they are currently focusing on getting the “organic experience” right but he also turned to the concept of context.
Pichai’s response:
“Two things.
Early part of AI mode will obviously focus more on the organic experience to make sure we are getting it right. I think the fundamental value of ads are it enables access to deploy the services to billions of people.
Second is, the reason we’ve always taken ads seriously is we view ads as commercial information, but it’s still information. And so we bring the same quality metrics to it.
I think with AI mode, to our earlier conversation, I think AI itself will help us over time, figure out the best way to do it.
Given we are giving context around everything, I think it will give us more opportunities to also explain, okay, here’s some commercial information. Like today, as a podcaster, you do it at certain spots and you probably figure out what’s best in your podcast.
There are aspects of that, but I think the underlying need of people value commercial information. Businesses are trying to connect to users. All that doesn’t change in an AI moment. But look, we will rethink it.”
Lex Fridman asked if Pichai sees a time where AI Mode will become the interface through which the Internet is filtered, asking if there’s a future where it completely replaces the current combination of AI Overviews and ten blue links.
Pichai answered:
“Our current plan is AI Mode is going to be there as a separate tab for people who really want to experience that, but it’s not yet at the level where our main search pages, but as features work, we’ll keep migrating it to the main page. And so you can view it as a continuum. AI model offer you the bleeding edge experience. But things that work will keep overflowing to AI Overviews in the main experience.”
The questions posed by Lex Fridman echo the fears and negative sentiment felt by many publishers about Google’s evolution to providing answers to queries instead of links to the open web.
Sundar Pichai repeatedly stated that Google intends to keep sending users to the human-created web, explaining that AI provides more context that encourages users to explore topics on the web in greater depth.
Those statements, however, are undermined by Google’s delay in enabling web publishers to accurately track referrals from AI Overviews and AI Mode. This creates the impression that publishers are an afterthought and feeds web publisher skepticism about Google’s commitment to the human-created web. While it’s refreshing to hear Google’s CEO emphatically declare his concern for the web ecosystem, I believe it will take more positive actions from Google to overcome web publishers’ negative outlook on the current state of AI search.
Watch the interview here:
Featured Image is a screenshot by author
WGBA neighborhood reporter Andrew Amouzou is leaving the Green Bay, Wisconsin NBC affiliate.
Amouzou started working at WGBA two years ago. He hasn’t said where he he’s heading next.
“The biggest thing I’ll miss is having the honor to learn and share inspirational stories of those who are on a mission to impact the city, Brown County and Northeast Wisconsin in a special way,” Amouzou said. “This area means so much to those who make Green Bay the special place that is it, and it has truly been a highlight to witness that up-close.”
“My most special memories come from hearing and seeing the reaction of people who see themselves on TV and having their stories shared with the community,” he added. “Being able to make their voices heard and their impact magnified has been rewarding and I know that it helps people of all backgrounds feel encouraged to share their own story with the world.”
Marvel may have a permeating presence in pop culture, but its forays into video games haven’t always been a great success. From 2017’s thoroughly disappointing crossover fighting game Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite to 2020’s blockbuster flop Marvel’s Avengers, uncanny adherences to the MCU have led to uninspiring character designs that fell short of their big-screen counterparts.
Marvel Rivals has, however, smashed expectations since its launch last December, having already reached 40 million players worldwide as of February. That’s no mean feat given that it’s a team-based PvP shooter, a genre that faces fierce competition and only a few emerge victorious.
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Google retires seven structured data features including Book Actions, Course Info, and Claim Review to streamline search results. Rankings unaffected.
There’s a troubling trend in boardrooms worldwide. As companies move from startup mode and scale into growth-stage execution, many are choosing to underinvest in marketing leadership, mistaking it as a cost center rather than the strategic engine behind revenue generation and go-to-market (GTM) execution.
Instead of hiring experienced VPs or CMOs, founders and investors hire cheaper, less seasoned marketers. While they are often digitally savvy, they have little exposure to the full scope or strategy behind GTM leadership. Many have only worked in one or two areas of marketing, like demand gen or content, and lack the experience with brand, product marketing, operations, analytics and sales alignment needed to grow a company.
You know these seasoned marketing leaders. They’re battle-tested, data-driven and growth-proven. Suddenly, thousands or tens of thousands of them aren’t getting interviews because companies choose budget over backbone. Unfortunately, the cost of that decision shows up in pipeline gaps, missed revenue targets and stalled growth.
The sad fact is that these leaders were the builders behind the very success stories VCs now chase. Many led companies through scale-ups, acquisitions and IPOs. And yet, they’ve been cast aside in a tech economy increasingly unwilling to pay for experience.
What has changed? Startups think they’re being lean. In reality, they’re blind.
Dig deeper: Why ‘head of marketing’ is the most misunderstood title in startups
The logic appears sound: Hire early career exceptional talent now, layer in leadership later. This misstep introduces significant risk. GTM execution and the rise of account-based strategies are not just about sales enablement and running siloed campaigns. They require the orchestration of:
All of these require building organizational alignment (or what I call herding cats). That requires meeting your stakeholders where they are, not where you are. It is the biggest challenge for marketing and not for the inexperienced or faint of heart.
When startups build without senior marketing leadership, they gamble on short-term activity over long-term strategy. It rarely pays off and is certainly not a sustainable pipeline strategy.
But do startup CEOs know any better? Many do not. Marketing is one of the most misunderstood parts of the business.
A great marketing leader is not just a storyteller but a strategist, growth driver and cross-functional partner who works closely with sales, product and customer success to accelerate pipeline and expand customer value. They translate market insights into action, structure high-performing teams and build scalable, measurable campaigns.
Marketing doesn’t directly drive opportunities, create meetings or close deals. Sales does that. But great marketing makes doing those things easier, faster and more predictable. Marketing does this by building awareness, generating demand, warming up the market and positioning the brand as the best choice. It shapes the narrative, identifies high-intent accounts and arms sales with the insights, messaging and content needed to convert interest into action.
Marketing is the strategic force multiplier behind every deal closed. When aligned with sales, marketing doesn’t just hand off leads; it fuels pipeline velocity and increases win rates.
If you haven’t hired a marketing leader for this profile, what are you losing and what is the impact on the business?
Startups without seasoned marketing leadership often skip out on:
Without this, messaging lacks resonance, product launches miss the mark and teams chase unqualified leads. Misalignment here leads to churn, poor retention and missed revenue from high-fit segments.
Without a seasoned marketing leader to align strategy across functions, silos form quickly.
The result is a fractured GTM effort where revenue opportunities are lost not from a lack of leads but from a lack of cohesion.
Startups are racing to adopt AI, automation, big-box ABM platforms and analytics. However, these tools are expensive clutter without the strategic guidance to deploy them effectively and the respected leadership to gain cooperation. Misconfigured platforms and misaligned talent can cost companies hundreds of thousands in wasted budget without moving the revenue needle.
Without a senior leader to shape the narrative, pressure-test messaging and own win/loss insights, startups often sound like everyone else. Generic messaging kills conversion. Immature positioning leads to:
Every seasoned marketing leader knows how important it is to choose and partner with reliable and trustworthy vendors. A rebrand or website redesign can quickly go off track due to delays and poor content management, undermining a marketing leader’s credibility. These failures ripple across the GTM engine, stalling demand generation and diminishing revenue impact.
Dig deeper: Key marketing lessons from startup to scale-up
In the wake of widespread tech layoffs and challenging reentry into the workforce, many seasoned VPs and CMOs are turning to fractional CMO or GTM consulting roles — some to stay professionally active and support their families, others as a step toward building their businesses or agencies after leaving corporate life behind.
Each VP or CMO on the sidelines has a unique story, but most are eager to reenter the full-time workforce. Access to health insurance and retirement benefits like a 401(k) are critical for many who support families and plan for the future.
While some enjoy fractional work, they describe it as challenging to find and retain long-term clients. Without a recurring revenue model, which is rare in strategic advisory roles, this path is often unsustainable and falls short of replacing their previous income.
There’s a growing belief that fractional marketing work is becoming necessary in today’s revenue landscape. Sangram Vajre, co-founder of GTM Partners and Terminus, is a leading advocate of this perspective. He promotes fractional GTM consultants and CMOs through a newly launched certification program, offering independent senior marketing leaders the opportunity to leverage his brand, materials and methodologies for a fee.
He believes fractional GTM roles represent the future. They can provide startups with fast, flexible, cost-effective access to senior-level expertise without the lengthy hiring cycles or overhead of full-time executives. He positions fractionals as ideal for early-stage or transitional companies needing to define ICPs, build GTM infrastructure and test strategy until they’re ready for a permanent leader. It’s a model aligned with agility and outcomes.
But here’s the risk: while some experienced marketing leaders intentionally choose the fractional path, the majority view it as a stopgap while they seek full-time roles that fully utilize their capabilities and track record. That is not a true talent evolution. It’s a reactive trend born from a flawed hiring market and perpetuated by misguided narratives.
If the real risks of placing early-stage GTM ownership in inexperienced hands were fully understood, seasoned marketing leaders wouldn’t find themselves sidelined in the first place.
To be clear, I support the value of consultants — I am one myself — but when companies treat fractional roles as permanent substitutes for executive leadership, they normalize a revolving-door approach to marketing. It creates serious risks:
Fractionals aren’t in the weekly leadership meetings, and they aren’t present for boardroom decisions. They can’t drive internal culture, mentor teams daily or adapt to shifting business contexts in real time. They may temporarily herd the cats, but once they step away, they can’t transfer the credibility or organizational trust needed to sustain alignment.
Marketing isn’t a gig; it’s a core function. When you outsource leadership, you lose control of the discipline that connects your product, market and revenue engine.
This isn’t about age or title. It’s about outcome ownership. Seasoned marketing leaders are expensive because they reduce risk. They’ve built repeatable demand engines, scaled GTM models, adapted to downturns and driven sustainable growth. When companies choose not to hire them, they’re not saving money. They’re exposing themselves to:
In today’s AI-first, ABM-centric world, GTM execution is far too complex for junior staff or part-time leadership.
Respecting seasoned marketing leadership protects your GTM from unnecessary risk.
Why would you entrust GTM strategy to someone without proven executive chops? How important is revenue attainment to your VC or PE investors or to raising your next round of funding?
Here’s what a risk-mitigating, growth-ready C-suite does:
If product-market fit matters to you, so does marketing leadership. Fit doesn’t scale itself. Without a senior leader driving it, the machine breaks, the product stalls, the pipeline clogs, and the business suffers.
Stop asking why seasoned talent costs more. Start asking what it costs not to have it. Because when the pressure to grow arrives (and it always does), your leader will either be someone who’s done it before or who’s trying to figure it out on your dime.
And in the end, you get what you pay for.
Dig deeper: Rethinking fit, growth and go-to-market for the modern startup
Contributing authors are invited to create content for MarTech and are chosen for their expertise and contribution to the martech community. Our contributors work under the oversight of the editorial staff and contributions are checked for quality and relevance to our readers. The opinions they express are their own.
Following this first poster, the pair built up an Instagram following, featuring more artist posters and creating a buzz around Ipswich by putting up pieces “in shop windows and bars across the town, spreading some colour and highlighting the amazing talent of each artist’s on our doorstep”, shares Steve. One poster was discovered by a representative of Ipswich Town FC in a local pub toilet and the team loved it so much that they reached out to Steve and Richard asking permission to use their artwork on the cover of their official Premier League match-day programmes.
“The project snowballed really quickly”, Steve says, “we recruited our friends Kevin Bennett and Andy Mortimer to become a four-man team”, and from that point onward the team set out to gather an incredible lineup of artistic talent for everything that came next. Each poster took the idea of following a football club in so many different directions: “we had the static horse from the Ipswich badge come to life in fantastical style courtesy of Colombian born and now Ipswich resident Catalina Carvajal; Brie Harrison presented a still life with subtle hints to the teams involved; while Kelly Anna imagined a bold powerful character bursting through the fragmented badges of Ipswich and Arsenal”, Richard says. The project found its finish to the season with a collaboration with Ed Sheeran for poster 19.
To celebrate the community that the project has built, the Call Me Ted team recently hosted a pop-up exhibition in Ipswich town centre displaying all 19 of their artist collaborations to date at scale, “we also held artist-led workshops with more than 300 local school children, helping inspire the next generation of design talent”, shares Steve. As well as giving fans the chance to see works in person, the pair have started an online shop where you can get your hands on A3 posters and postcard sets of each match poster.
Whilst the premier league may not have ended in Ipswich’s favour, this intersection of art and football is something that the creative team want to keep exploring: “we’re now planning for season two of Call Me Ted, so watch this space!” ends Richard.
Regular audits are one of the foundational workflows in any paid media strategy.
Whether you’re investigating account anomalies, evaluating growth opportunities, or preparing to transition strategies or vendors, audits are an essential pillar of PPC success.
Here’s the thing: Not every audit strategy fits every account. A one-size-fits-all checklist won’t account for platform quirks, business goals, or campaign maturity.
That’s why in this month’s Ask the PPC, we’re taking a closer look at the value of doing regular audits – and how to do them in a way that actually drives meaningful insights and actions.
We’ll focus on cross-platform audits, with takeaways that apply whether you’re managing paid search or paid social campaigns.
At its core, the biggest benefit of auditing is clarity. If you’ve ever been surprised by an ad invoice and found yourself wondering, “What exactly did I pay for?” – you’re not alone.
Regular audits demystify performance. They help you understand why certain trends are happening and whether your structure is actually supporting your goals.
Beyond performance monitoring, audits unlock three critical value areas:
Ad platforms generally prefer putting spend behind “known” quantities – ads, keywords, and audiences with conversion data.
While that makes sense from a machine learning standpoint, it can sideline your new campaigns, ads, or targeting experiments unless you’re intentional about how you test.
Auditing helps ensure that newer entities aren’t starved for budget simply because older ones exist in competing campaigns/portfolios.
You can spot opportunities to move testing into separate campaigns or determine whether an older asset already covers the newer idea.
Go Do: When reviewing entity-level spend, ask: Are my new tests getting a fair shot? If not, consider spinning them out into their own campaigns with protected budgets. You’ll be able to tell if they’re being stifled by checking for impressions and budget access.
One of the biggest indicators of an account’s strategic health is the ratio of active to passive management.
If your audit reveals a lopsided emphasis on passive tasks, it may mean strategic opportunities are being missed.
While there’s value in letting campaigns run and gather data, relying too much on autopilot can result in performance stagnation.
Note: Passive tasks are important and shouldn’t be discontinued, but they shouldn’t be the only ones completed in an account.
Go Do: Review the change history. Are most changes bid-based or budget-related? If so, build a cadence to test new creative or targeting ideas each month.
We’re all susceptible to sticking with what’s worked in the past. That’s human nature. Yet, strategies that delivered last year might not be relevant today.
A solid audit can uncover blind spots, such as missing impression share, rising cost per click, or declining lead quality, and challenge assumptions you’ve made about your best performers.
Go Do: Build a comparison view of top-performing assets this quarter vs. last. Are your “winning” campaigns still winning? Or are they riding on past success?
Now that we’ve explored the why, let’s get into the how.
Block off time every quarter for structured audits. One to two hours per quarter per account is a good benchmark – not because the audit takes that long, but because carving out dedicated time ensures it actually gets done.
Pro Tip: Treat it like a client meeting, even if it’s internal. If it’s on your calendar, it’s happening.
A good audit doesn’t just ask, “Is my CPA low?” It asks, “Is this CPA real, and does it reflect meaningful conversions?”
If you’re seeing great-looking cost-per-acquisition numbers, dig deeper:
Make sure you differentiate between reported cost per acquisition (in your CRM or Google Analytics 4) and platform CPA (Google, Meta, Microsoft, etc.). If there’s a mismatch, it might be time to clean up your conversion tracking setup.
Go Do: Pull a side-by-side view of your platform-reported CPA vs. your actual revenue-driving conversions. Audit the quality and intent behind each tracked action.
Creative audits aren’t just about freshness or click-through rate. They’re also about compliance, especially in regulated industries. Messaging that skirts policy lines (even unintentionally) can tank account performance.
This is where industry-specific knowledge becomes non-negotiable. Your creative might be attention-grabbing, but is it allowed in your vertical?
Go Do: Cross-reference your current ad copy and creative with the platform’s most recent ad policy update. Bonus: Loop in your legal or compliance team before launching new assets.
Audits are more than housekeeping; they’re strategic resets. They help you validate your current direction, challenge stale assumptions, and carve out space to innovate.
Too often, accounts get stuck in maintenance mode. Auditing breaks that cycle.
By incorporating regular, structured audits into your workflow, you create a feedback loop that protects budget, sharpens strategy, and ultimately drives better results.
Have a question you want addressed? Ask here!
More Resources:
Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal
This article is a WTF explainer, in which we break down media and marketing’s most confusing terms. More from the series →
This video is sponsored by Index Exchange. For more information about sell-side decisioning, check out this report.
A lot of decisions are made between the time someone shows up on a website and when an ad loads on the page. But many of those decisions are left up to advertisers and the demand-side platforms they deploy to do their programmatic ad buying. Fewer decisions are made by publishers and the supply-side platforms they use to sell impressions.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. With programmatic processes speeding up, publishers and SSPs can do more merchandising of impressions before they are put up for auction. This merchandising can take different forms — such as setting price floors, adding contextual signals and affixing brand suitability scores to a bid request — all of which can fall under the umbrella term of sell-side decisioning, as the video below explains.
Index Exchange did not have any input or approval over the video’s editorial content.
https://digiday.com/?p=580735
This post was sponsored by Cloudways. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.
Have you ever woken up to a 3 AM client website panic?
Did your client’s ecommerce site crash during a flash sale?
Has another client asked why their site is slow, “even though we’re paying for premium hosting.”
This isn’t just an occasional nuisance.
If you’re managing multiple client sites, hosting maintenance becomes a full-on job in itself. The worst part? None of this time is billable, and every minute spent troubleshooting is a minute you’re not spending on business growth.
Here’s the truth: The way you handle hosting maintenance may be broken. And it’s costing you far more than you realize, in time, money, and missed opportunities.
In this article, we’ll explore:
You and your agency may lose countless hours to hosting maintenance without realizing the true cost.
Behind every “quick fix” lies a hidden drain on productivity and profits.
A frantic client message or monitoring alert, often hours after the problem started. Then:
The financial impact is staggering when you do the math.
Consider an agency managing just 30 websites.
If each site experiences only 2 hosting incidents per month requiring 3 hours to resolve, that’s 180 hours annually.
This is nearly an entire month’s worth of lost productivity.
Each downtime incident plants seeds of doubt about your agency’s technical competence. After just a few occurrences, clients start questioning why they’re paying premium rates for what feels like unreliable service. This erosion of confidence makes contract renewals harder and opens the door for competitors.
Most agencies cycle through the same ineffective solutions, each with significant drawbacks:
The most common solution is hiring dedicated infrastructure staff. Many agencies believe bringing a systems admin or DevOps engineer on board will solve their hosting woes. While this provides more control, it creates new problems. You’re now responsible for recruiting, managing, and covering the cost of specialized technical talent.
Many agencies turn to managed hosting providers to alleviate their maintenance burden.
Technically adept teams can absolutely handle straightforward server-level maintenance, security patches, and core updates; however, most still require some additional support when faced with:
The key difference lies in how managed hosting providers address these residual needs. Traditional hosting providers might still leave you waiting in support queues, while next-gen platforms automatically begin repairs.
You may think about attempting to solve the problem through monitoring tools.
Website monitoring tools layer on services like New Relic, Datadog, and UptimeRobot, hoping the better visibility will reduce firefighting.
While these tools provide valuable data, they primarily generate more alerts for your team to interpret and take action on. You’ve essentially traded one problem for another – instead of lacking information, you’re now drowning in it.
Imagine, instead of the chaotic process, you:
Copilots that can do these tasks are your first step towards using and creating a self-learning, auto-healing hosting platform.
They can use intelligent monitoring to detect and help resolve the most common and critical server issues.
The Old Way:
With Cloudways Copilot:
You can configure Cloudways Copilot to manage many facets of web hosting.
Host Health
Triggers when your entire server goes down, typically from:
Webstack Health
Disk & Inode Health
Warns before you hit critical limits:
Result: Instant problem detection!
Copilot continuously monitors your servers and applications for:
Unlike traditional monitoring tools that just tell you “something’s wrong,” Copilot identifies the specific issue.
For each problem detected, Copilot provides:
Instead of just “High CPU Usage” alert, Copilot tells you:
“Your WordPress site on Server X is experiencing high CPU due to a poorly optimized WooCommerce query in Plugin Y. Disable the plugin or contact the developer for an update.”
To be more specific, the example below shows Copilot detecting a DDOS attack, listing malicious IPs, and identifying the file that is being attacked. It then provides remediation steps to prevent the DDOS attack.
Investigation Summary
The investigation shows that much of the server load is driven by multiple concurrent Magento cron tasks and frequent POST requests to the xmlrpc.php endpoint. These factors have caused high CPU usage and intermittent HTTP 500 errors. It appears that the repeated bot visits to xmlrpc.php and resource-intensive Magento cron jobs are the likely cause of the problem.
Remediation Steps
To mitigate the issues related to the potential DDoS attack and improve server performance, please follow these steps:
By taking these actions, you can significantly reduce the strain on your server and improve its performance.”,
Support links:
https://support.cloudways.com/en/articles/6009152-how-to-integrate-cloudflare-with-your-application
https://support.cloudways.com/en/articles/5120765-how-to-monitor-system-processes-using-htop-command
This is how Cloudways Copilot uses AI to identify hosting and server issues by comparing them to similar cases across the fleet, quickly suggesting the most effective remediation solutions with step-by-step instructions. This saves you time by providing immediate solutions without the need for manual detection, troubleshooting, or back-and-forth support tickets, preventing disappointment for your clients.
Image create by Cloudways, April 2025
At the end of the day, hosting headaches shouldn’t waste your agency’s most valuable resource: time. Every minute spent troubleshooting is a minute taken away from client work, business growth, or simply having a life outside of server emergencies.
Cloudways Copilot tackles this problem at its root by:
What’s coming next makes Cloudways Copilot even better:
Best of all? During our early access period, Cloudways Copilot is completely free. We’re currently onboarding users through our limited-access program – visit the Cloudways Copilot page and submit your details to secure your spot.
Image Credits
Featured Image: Image by Cloudways. Used with permission.
In-Post Image: Images by Cloudways. Used with permission.
