Millions in profits, thousands of followers, hundreds of projects, dozens of positive reviews…
Achieving success isn’t easy. It requires dedication, consistency, resilience, standing up to the face of failure, not paying heed to what people say, and having the support of people and platforms that care about you and your business.
This is how Paul Portelli, the Head of Development at Keen, defines success and freedom that the business achieved with the help of Cloudways managed hosting. Today, his digital marketing agency works with multiple Fortune 500 companies and is a popular choice for compelling digital marketing campaigns.
However, the road to success wasn’t always smooth. Keen experienced ups and downs, especially at the start of the business.Let’s start from the beginning…
It was the summer of 2006, John (at the moment the Director of Keen) decided to start a digital agency that would provide a wide range of marketing services from development and design to marketing and advertising.
3,2,1 … Lift Off
The company slowly started to grow, and the projects started pouring in. All was going well, until…
“Given that it’s in the nature of what we do to have quite a large number of projects, it was difficult to keep track of all of our clients and their respective projects,” Paul says talking about the big setback.The clients’ projects required a different set of specifications. The current hosting solution provider had limited resources and was not able to deliver the flexibility that Keen required.
Paul says, “We had no server administrators on our team, and maintaining our previous servers and the applications hosted on them was putting a lot of unwanted stress on our development team. This was horrendous!”
On top of that, Paul’s agency was already hosting multiple clients, each with a separate set of web hosting requirements. Handling all this together was clearly becoming a huge mess for his business.
“We were really not happy with the above situation so we started looking out for other providers and new solutions,” It was clear that Keen has outgrown the current provider and now needed a more flexible solution for distributing server load equally. This was just one of the several issues that were troubling Paul’s agency.
So, he started searching for alternative solutions. After spending a great deal of time researching options, Keen discovered Cloudways.
Help Comes in Many Shapes
Since he was already looking for a hosting solution that offered flexibility without the need of a dedicated system administrator, the recommendation checked all the right boxes.
“Cloudways came up in our research and it solved all of the issues at once. The main two reasons for us to choose Cloudways at that time were, the fact that we could have all of our clients under one roof even if that meant using another hosting provider (DigitalOcean or AWS, for example). Secondly, it seemed to be very cost effective and we did not have to do any major price updates to our current hosting price list,” Paul added.
Expectations Met (and Exceeded!)
Paul has now been using Cloudways for a few years without any major complaints. Cloudways is not just another business tool for Keen – rather it is an essential part of the development/deployment process. “We are able to provision servers and WordPress websites (amongst others) very quickly and effectively but at the same time, we still have the power of things like SSH access, Git integration, etc,” he added.
Cloudways also offers premium support that allows businesses owners more flexibility in operations. For premium support, Cloudways dedicates a representative that provides support (server and app level) including migration to server security.
“The premium support channel has helped us remove more load over our development team so that we can focus on core business instead of wasting time on fixing server related issues,” he added.
After switching to Cloudways, Keen has witnessed exponential growth. Even clients that weren’t hosting their apps and websites, have now opted to switch hosting to Keen’s recommendations. It now hosts all of its clients with Cloudways because of the seamless support and profitability.
Paul now proudly says, “We have over 150 satisfied clients hosted with Cloudways.”
Sharjeel Ashraf
Sharjeel loves to write about startups and ecommerce. In his free time, he is on the road or working on some cool project in his den.
