Web Agency AX Digital Ships a Node.js App with 72 API Endpoints in 5 Weeks on Cloudways Velocity

About AX Digital

AX Digital is a Melbourne agency that builds websites and then stays accountable for what those sites do next. The same team that designs and develops a site also owns its SEO, Google Ads, local search and reporting, a model that ties the agency’s success directly to results rather than deliverables.

Most of that work sits outside the industries people expect. Trades, construction, engineering and passive fire protection make up the largest share, followed by hospitality venues and retail. These are local-intent service businesses where a handful of suburb-level searches can decide a client’s month.

AX Digital’s client WordPress sites have run on Cloudways Flexible for years. But the more interesting story is what the agency built for itself once it had somewhere to put it. Read on to see how a five-week build changed what a small agency can take on.

The Challenge: Ideas Stuck Without Infrastructure

For years, AX Digital’s best ideas were not websites. They were applications: an SEO reporting engine, a site-audit tool, a client portal, none of which could live inside the WordPress infrastructure the agency already trusted.

Each one meant taking on a new vendor. MacMillan found that every addition brought its own console, its own billing, its own credentials and its own deployment process, with something new to check whenever it broke.

“It is the reason a few good ideas sat unbuilt for a couple of years.” — Alastair MacMillan

That vendor sprawl, not the hosting bill, was the real cost. MacMillan was clear about what he needed instead: no DevOps hire to run one internal tool, a deploy process that did not require him to own a pipeline, the operational layer handled for him, and a single vendor relationship rather than a second one bolted onto the first.

The Solution: Velocity Hosts Axific’s Launch

The tool AX Digital finally built is Axific, its own SEO content-intelligence product. It runs long jobs by design: crawling a client site, calling third-party keyword APIs, running entity clustering across a page set, and making a series of Claude API calls, work measured in minutes rather than milliseconds.

– Axific’s five-stage analysis pipeline: crawling, entity extraction, topic clustering, gap detection and brief generation, run without manual review. (Source: axific.com)

MacMillan looked at running it on an edge platform and ruled it out. In his view, a multi-minute audit combined with a headless browser simply could not run inside a request-scoped serverless environment. Velocity gave Axific a persistent Node.js process instead, with no cold starts to work around and a managed platform wrapped around it.

“That [combination of a persistent Node.js process and a managed platform] is surprisingly hard to buy.” — Alastair MacMillan

Flat, predictable pricing mattered just as much. AX Digital’s retainers are priced off its own labour cost, so a bursty workload, like onboarding a client with a full crawl and hundreds of API calls in one afternoon, needed a hosting bill that would not move with it.

Cloudflare Enterprise sits in front of the app through Cloudways’ own integration, Supabase Postgres connects through the platform’s database layer, and cron jobs run in the same console, all without AX Digital building or maintaining any of it itself.

– Axific’s site graph shows every real page and content gap as a node, positioned by actual link distance from the homepage. (Source: axific.com)

That isolation from the WordPress side changed how confidently MacMillan could ship. Axific has its own runtime, its own environment variables and its own deploy source.

A push to the main branch now deploys straight to production and applies any pending database migrations along the way, a schema versioned across twenty migration files as of 7 September, something MacMillan says he would never risk on a shared server. Removing that blast radius, rather than any change to team structure, is what let the deploy process run itself.

– Cloudways Velocity overview showing a completed Node.js deployment on the main branch, an active PM2 process, and automatic deployment with Cloudflare protection enabled. (Source: unified.cloudways.com)

The Result: Five Weeks, One Product

Axific went from first commit to real use inside five weeks. MacMillan built it alone, with AI assistance, starting on 4 August and reaching that milestone by 7 September.

• 90 commits, 26 pages and 72 API endpoints shipped.
• Roughly 19,000 lines of application code.
• 10+ production deploys, each a plain git push with database migrations applied automatically.
• 50 to 90 milliseconds to first byte from Melbourne on requests that reach the app.
• Backed by Cloudflare Enterprise’s 330+ location network.
• 0.05GB used of a 100GB monthly allowance, with headroom before cost becomes a factor.

“The only infrastructure work in the entire five weeks was pointing a domain at the app once.” — Alastair MacMillan

Growth hasn’t stopped at that five-week mark. Axific now stands at 425 commits, 58 pages and 141 API endpoints, roughly 76,000 lines of code, and 111 database migrations.

Server administration did not shrink for AX Digital. It disappeared from the week entirely: no web server configuration, no process manager to maintain, no OS patching, no certificate renewals.

– Axific crawl results: pages crawled, topic clusters, content gaps, competitors diffed and briefs generated. (Source: axific.com)

The tool itself is changing how AX Digital runs SEO work. Site audits and content-gap analysis that used to be manual spreadsheet exercises now run on a nightly schedule against live client data, which means the analysis happens every month rather than whenever time allows.

Because that work is no longer manual, retainer margins improve without clients paying more, freeing up capacity for the agency to take on more work with the same team.

Axific is now expanding beyond SEO into client records, quoting, project management and reporting, gradually replacing an older WordPress-based internal portal. A second product sits behind it on the same shape of stack, and MacMillan says that if either is ever sold outside the agency, the platform it already runs on is the platform it would launch on.

For MacMillan, consolidation is not a future plan but a description of how AX Digital already operates: more than 100 applications across 35 servers, all under one Cloudways account since 2022, WordPress on Cloudways Flexible and, now, its own products on Velocity. As he put it to a fellow agency owner considering the same move, Velocity is where the rest of your ideas can finally live, the app you keep not building because you do not want to be responsible for a server.

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