Continuing with our series of agency owners, today we have Johnny Dunhin, founder of iAdminWP, a WordPress maintenance agency from South Africa. His agency helps WordPress users run their websites smoothly by taking care of their backups, cleanups, updates, and a lot more.
Without wasting any time, let’s hear more from Johnny about iAdminWP and how Cloudways has helped his agency gain more success.
Cloudways: Hello Johnny, tell us a little bit about iAdminWP. How and when did you start? What are some of the projects that you are proud of?
Johnny: iAdminWP was born in Pretoria, South Africa, and officially registered as a company in 2017. Up until then, we were just a couple of WordPress developers working as freelancers. We develop all kinds of websites for everyone, from bloggers to big-name companies.
There was one common problem with all the websites we worked with – lack of a good hosting and maintenance plan. A plan that was not only affordable but also delivered by a company that actually cares about your website.
Our focus is not just on big companies with big budgets but on small bloggers and website owners that do not have the budget to spend on hiring a developer or website maintenance.
This is where iAdminWP comes in. We wanted a service that works for every business and is (very) affordable for everyone who needs a proper hosting and maintenance solution.
We are changing the WordPress managed hosting and maintenance world for good. WordPress is growing fast, and all of us who love building with WordPress has a responsibility to keep it secure. This means not only keeping the websites secure but also keeping the WordPress platform safe and secure.
Cloudways: Why did you choose WordPress to be the center of your business model? What was it about the platform that led to this decision?
Johnny: We chose WordPress because it is user-friendly. From blogging to running an online store, is very simple for clients and developers.
Updating and maintaining websites for clients is also easier and optimization is a simple matter of dealing with a single platform.
Cloudways: What are some of the challenges that you have faced with running a WordPress business? How do you overcome these challenges?
Johnny: One of our biggest challenges when getting a new client’s website is bad development and a WordPress version that was last updated in 2014 or older. As everybody knows, outdated core, themes, or plugins are a huge security risk.
Cloudways: Why did you choose Cloudways? Describe your selection process and what criteria you were looking for. What made our solution stand out over others that you researched?
Johnny: iAdminWP wanted to focus more on maintenance and site-care for WordPress websites. But to do both maintenance and site-care, we need a good solid cloud hosting provider.
Our requirement is a hosting provider that takes out the stress of real-time backups, server installations, and cloud server security updates. Also, the option to use leading cloud providers is a huge bonus.
This is where we found Cloudways to be the best hosting partner for iAdminWP. We can now focus on our clients and know that the cloud servers are in good hands.
Cloudways: How long have you been with Cloudways? What sort of things does Cloudways help iAdminWP with?
Johnny: Cloudways take the stress of both backup and cloud server security and manage them for us. Better yet, Cloudways helps us with SSL certificates and configurations for both servers and apps.
Cloudways: How did Cloudways help you resolve your problems? What do you think about the performance, speed, and security offered by Cloudways?
Johnny: For a WordPress website to run efficiently for your client and your client’s customers, you need security, speed, and a well-developed website! To back it, you need a good hosting provider with an easy configuration admin panel.
With Cloudways Breeze (WordPress cache plugin), Varnish, and Redis cache, you can supercharge your website. Only with a few clicks in the admin panel, you can activate Redis. You don’t have to login via SSH to install complicated scripts.
Cloudways: Share your experience with WordPress, PHP, & WooCommerce. How challenging it is to optimize them for performance? How many of your clients are hosted on Cloudways?
Johnny: iAdminWP runs only WordPress websites, with just a handful of Moodle websites. All of our clients are hosted with Cloudways on managed DigitalOcean servers.
Cloudways: Which hosting company were you using before Cloudways and what limitations made you switch? When did you first come to know about Cloudways?
We used a couple of hosting providers with dedicated servers and some with cloud servers. Managing them was a pain because we spent more time maintaining the servers rather than maintaining the clients’ websites. When we found Cloudways, we were skeptical but after a few months, we were hooked, and we are not moving soon.
Cloudways: What are the three most used features on Cloudways that help increase productivity or that you find very useful?
Johnny: The three most used features for us at iAdminWP are SSL certificates, cloning/staging, and simple PHP settings in the Cloudways admin panel. It is difficult to just name three because it is the whole package from server setup to going live with a website that does the trick for us.
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?
Johnny: It depends on what you want to focus on. If your only focus is hosting, then I would recommend the following five:
- Adding a Moodle installation package/1-click option.
- Let the customers choose where they want to store offline backups.
- Integration with WHMCS for both cloud servers and apps.
- More useful email panel.
- More server configurations for large news websites hosted across multiple servers.
If your focus is just on one server and having few apps on the server:
- You are spot on and don’t need more settings!
Cloudways: It would be great if you can share some pictures (stats, performance, team, etc.).
Johnny: We are extremely happy with Cloudways. We have a perfect uptime record on all our websites hosted by Cloudways DigitalOcean.
iAdminWP Uptime Robot Scores
Here is a speed test of iAmindWP that scores 97 on the desktop test of Google PageSpeed Insights.
It was optimized by Breeze, Varnish, and Redis cache.
Mansoor Ahmed Khan
Been in content marketing since 2014, and I still get a kick out of creating stories that resonate with the target audience and drive results. At Cloudways by DigitalOcean (a leading cloud hosting company, btw!), I lead a dream team of content creators. Together, we brainstorm, write, and churn out awesome content across all the channels: blogs, social media, emails, you name it! You can reach out to me at [email protected].
