RaDiance Conseil is multi-award winning French web agency – offices based in Biarritz, Lyon, and Haute-Savoie. It has more than 17 years of a strong background in web development, marketing, and SEO. Their team has developed a real testing laboratory to stay top on the game. They have worked on hundreds of projects ranging from individuals to businesses.
In this customer Q&A with Cloudways, Florence Le Vot, the founder of the agency shares the insights from the beginning. So, let’s read on!
Cloudways: How and when did you start your SEO Agency? What are some of the projects that you are proud of?
Florence Le Vot: I founded RaDiance Conseil in 2002. I’m not the kind of person who is proud of anything. I just get a good feeling when my clients and employees are happy. Little by little, we do our best to improve the impact we have by what we do and offer the best value possible for one’s money. That’s probably why we’re still here 17 years later.
Cloudways: Share your experience with WordPress, PHP, & WooCommerce. How challenging it is to optimize them for search? How many of your clients are hosted on Cloudways?
Florence Le Vot: We build a lot of websites with WP. In fact, almost 90% of the apps built by our team are powered by WordPress. The remaining 10% are built with Drupal, Typo3, and Symfony. As for ecommerce websites, we mainly use PrestaShop for now; however, in the past, we have built several e-shops with Magento. We only use WooCommerce for very small e-shops. All in all, we now have a little more than 600 clients hosted on Cloudways.
Cloudways: Which hosting company were you using before Cloudways and what limitations made you switch? When did you first come to know about Cloudways?
Florence Le Vot: We don’t put all our eggs in one basket, so we’re still using several hosting companies, but Cloudways is at the top of our list for several reasons:
- Our websites are extremely fast when they’re hosted on Cloudways. We have done several tests and they’re as fast as a fine-tuned dedicated server. Faster than more expensive managed WordPress hosting too.
- The hosting service is incredibly reliable. We monitor all our websites (every 20 minutes) and during the last five years, I don’t remember a single time one of our websites hosted on Cloudways going down.
- It’s not expensive, especially when you take the two previous points into consideration. (See Cloudways Pricing)
- And last but not least, should you have any questions, Cloudways tech support is proactive and available all the time, providing the right answers to our questions.
Cloudways: In terms of a client + agency experience, is there a particular customer who faced a challenge that Cloudways helped to resolve?
Florence Le Vot: Yes. We have a certain number of clients who want nothing but the best for their website. So, I asked my team to test and compare several hosting companies for several weeks, including the more expensive companies dedicated to WP hosting. None were faster than a basic VPS through Cloudways.
Cloudways: How did Cloudways help you resolve your problems? What do you think about the performance, speed, and security offered by Cloudways?
Florence Le Vot: I can only say that we haven’t had any websites hacked but we’re also very safe on our end, so I can’t tell if this result is in part thanks to Cloudways and to what proportion.
Cloudways: Are there any specific tools or features on Cloudways that help increase productivity or that you find very useful?
Florence Le Vot: Yes. My team loves the cloning feature that lets you clone a live website and get a staging site out of it in two minutes, plus the ability to overwrite the live site quickly when having completed our work on the staging site. That’s a game-changer.
(See Cloudways Features)
Cloudways: What are five things that you think we do better than any other hosting provider and why would you recommend your customers to use Cloudways?
Florence Le Vot: To me, it’s not five things that you do better, it’s the whole experience and the excellence you offer at every level which places you at the very top of my personal list of more than 110 hosting companies. I host my most important websites on Cloudways, and that says a lot. For example, Consultante-seo is hosted on Cloudways and it’s ranking #1 (or in the Top 3) on Google.fr for many French keywords such as “SEO consultant”, “SEO expert”, etc.
Saad Khan
Muhammad Saad Khan is a Director of Product Marketing at Cloudways (by DigitalOcean), a Growth Hacker extraordinaire, and a force to be reckoned with on the table tennis court. He's spent a decade building innovative customer-led growth strategies that helped Cloudways grow from 0 to 89,000 customers & is a regular at WordCamp events worldwide.
