How Consensus Creative Delivers Faster, More Reliable Client Websites with Cloudways

About Consensus Creative

Consensus Creative, a Toronto-based web design and SEO agency, is on a mission to help service-based businesses maximize revenue through high-performance websites. However, slow-loading sites and unreliable hosting support posed significant challenges in delivering seamless digital experiences for clients.

To overcome these issues, the agency made the switch to Cloudways in 2020. With Cloudways’ high-speed hosting, intuitive dashboard, and expert support, Consensus Creative has streamlined its workflow, improved client website performance, and freed up resources to focus on growth.

Read on to discover how Cloudways has empowered Consensus Creative to enhance reliability, speed, and efficiency in their web development process.

Cloudways: What’s your agency name and where is your agency’s headquarters situated?

Art Karapetov: Our agency is Consensus Creative, and we’re based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Cloudways: Tell us about yourself. Your name, what is your designation at the agency? What are your core responsibilities?

Art Karapetov: My name is Art Karapetov, and I’m the Creative Director and Owner of Consensus Creative.

In the early days, I was a one-man show—handling everything from web design to sales and marketing. But as the agency grew, I built a talented team to take care of client fulfillment. Now, my primary focus is on project management and hiring, ensuring we deliver top-notch work while expanding our capabilities.

Cloudways: What services does your agency provide, and how many clients do you currently have? Please tell us a bit about your agency here, like what you guys do, your team size, which market you serve, your USP, etc.

Art Karapetov: At Consensus Creative, our mission is simple: help service-based businesses generate as much revenue as possible through an integrated website redesign and SEO process. This focus on ROI-driven results is what sets us apart from competitors.

We specialize in web design, development, and SEO—and we go beyond just launching websites. Most of our clients trust us for ongoing maintenance and hosting, which we provide through Cloudways.

Our primary market is service-based businesses in Canada (mainly Toronto) and the U.S. who want to rank higher on Google. We work with industries that thrive on SEO, such as home services, dentists, and law firms.

Unlike agencies that focus on animation-heavy portfolio sites or eCommerce projects, we prioritize building revenue-generating websites for our service-based business clients. Our goal is to turn every website into a 24/7 digital salesperson, driving a 20-30%+ increase in online inquiries post-redesign—and even more with a full SEO campaign.

Cloudways: How did you first hear about Cloudways? Name one major problem that you were facing that made you switch to Cloudways. Something that was the tipping point, and how Cloudways fixed that for you.

Art Karapetov: I first heard about Cloudways through WordPress Facebook communities and YouTube creators who specialize in web design. The positive feedback caught my attention, so I decided to explore it further.

At the time, our previous host was causing major challenges—client sites were slow, and support was unreliable. I needed a hosting provider that offered better performance and dependable support to handle technical issues when necessary.

Cloudways met those needs, so we made the switch in 2020, and it has significantly improved our workflow and site performance.

Cloudways: Before Cloudways, which hosting solution did you use? Are you using any other hosting service currently? If “Yes” Why?

Art Karapetov: Before switching to Cloudways, we tried several shared hosting providers, but none of them met our expectations. The performance was often mediocre, and we faced frequent speed and reliability issues.

As of now, Cloudways is our primary hosting solution, and we don’t actively use other providers.

Cloudways: What was your experience like with Cloudways when you first signed up? Please tell us about your first impressions.

Art Karapetov: I had a great first impression of Cloudways, especially the Cloudways dashboard UI. It was miles ahead of all of the competitors at the time, who were mostly relying on the outdated cPanel interface.

I also loved how Cloudways combined a lot of features into a single package, which makes the process very convenient for our developer and removes the need for us to connect multiple tools together.

Cloudways: In your opinion, what sets us apart from other hosting providers? How has our in-built support for Php-based apps such as WordPress, Laravel and Magento made matters easier for you?

Art Karapetov: What I love about Cloudways the most is its technical support. We used to build a lot of feature-heavy sites that involved a lot of plugins like BuddyBoss, LearnDash, WooCommerce, and a lot more. A lot of the times, we had issues with these sites, and Cloudways support really helped us in a lot of tricky situations.

Cloudways: How do you use Cloudways to solve your client’s problem(s)?

Art Karapetov: Beyond performance, Cloudways’ support team has been a great resource whenever technical issues arise. Having a dependable hosting solution allows us to focus on delivering results for our clients without worrying about downtime or slow loading speeds.

Cloudways: How has Cloudways contributed to the success of your agency? Tell us about how Cloudways’ features align with your needs.

Art Karapetov: Cloudways made it very easy for us to create new sites for our clients, duplicate sites, and create staging environments. This saves us a lot of time, which means we can focus most of our time on the actual design and development.

The time savings that Cloudways provides (with its integrated dashboard, support, etc.) make the price really worth it in comparison to other providers I’ve seen on the market.

Cloudways: Out of three cloud providers available on Cloudways, which one(s) do you prefer to use and why?

Art Karapetov: I prefer Vultr servers, as we’ve seen the best speeds with this provider.

Cloudways: How do you resell Cloudways to your clients?

Art Karapetov: We used to refer clients to Cloudways as affiliates. Now, we host them on our own Cloudways server and charge for both hosting and a monthly WordPress care plan.

Cloudways: If you could briefly describe the values you perceive from Cloudways?

Art Karapetov: Cloudways provides reliability, speed, and excellent support—all of which are crucial for our agency. The intuitive dashboard and time-saving features make hosting and managing client websites much easier, allowing us to focus on delivering great results.

Cloudways: How do you feel about being a part of the Cloudways Agency Partnership Program? What additional value does the program provide to you? Do you think this program is going to help your agency grow in the long run?

Art Karapetov: It’s great to see that Cloudways cares about its partners and offers co-marketing opportunities. I also enjoy the support we receive, which makes Cloudways even better.

Cloudways: Do you think that by switching to Cloudways, you were able to free up resources at your end? If yes, how were you able to utilize those?

Art Karapetov: Yes, switching to Cloudways saved us a lot of time on server management and troubleshooting. This allowed us to focus more on client projects, improving website performance, and scaling our agency.

Cloudways: What features or improvements do you want to see in the future at Cloudways?

Art Karapetov: Right now, we’re happy with Cloudways and don’t have any specific feature requests.