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Cut Throat Marketing is a full-service digital marketing agency that’s focused on helping small businesses scale by leveraging the power of the internet. Their strategy revolves around building the most conversion-optimized website possible, then leveraging analytics and tracking to find the cheapest ways to deliver traffic/leads. They know how crucial online visibility is for their clients and this is why they preferred Cloudways over other providers.
Cloudways: What challenges were you facing that compelled you to look for a better solution?
Geoffrey: Our previous hosting provider was having serious reliability problems. On an almost weekly basis, groups of our websites were going down for hours at a time. We were noticing that our websites ran slower than we expected them to for how light they were.
The problem was so bad that we were getting billing credits for missing SLAs on a monthly basis. The problem is that billing credits don’t make up for the lost credibility as an agency when your customer’s website is constantly going down.
Cloudways: What specific solution were you looking for in your ideal solution to your problem?
Geoffrey: Uptime was what we were primarily looking for. Since we usually build 2-3 websites a month, ease in administering multiple websites was extremely important. Lastly, as an ex-IT security professional on staff, we really wanted to make sure that security was a top priority.
Cloudways: How did you figure Cloudways had the best solution for your problems?
Geoffrey: We actually signed up for 10 different hosting providers and put the same staging site on them. We broke the site and evaluated support, and we ran speed tests on all the sites every day for a week straight. Cloudways came out on top.
We are also planning on writing another one this year and going into a lot more detail. Outside of the speed tests, we pretty much dove right in and started moving some websites over to see how the uptime was. Support was super helpful in getting everything moved over.
Lastly, the control over everything that we had was really nice. Being able to pick our version of WordPress/PHP is super convenient. Especially when we have to migrate old sites that may not have been updated in years.
Cloudways: How did you find the process of porting to Cloudways?
Geoffrey: Moving websites into Cloudways was much easier than our previous hosting provider. The self-migration tool is super simple to use. It made the migration process much easier. Support was also great about helping out with any issues we had.
Cloudways: Has Cloudways helped you save money or increase productivity?
Geoffrey: We’re spending about 43% less per website hosted than our previous provider on a per-website basis.
Cloudways: Can you share any specific KPI or metric that shows how Cloudways works better for your projects?
Geoffrey: Nothing internal regarding uptime.
I can’t find where we stored the documents, but when we moved everything over, sites were loading an average of 1.5 seconds faster than they were on our previous hosting provider.
Cloudways: What cloud providers did you choose? What do you think of the flexibility of choosing a cloud provider at Cloudways?
Geoffrey: We went with DigitalOcean. It was purely based on how quickly websites loaded based on testing. We wrote an on this topic!
Cloudways: How would you rate our customer support experience?
Geoffrey: Customer support experience is generally great. The support staff seem to know their stuff and are pretty willing to help out. Live chat support is an absolute lifesaver when you have an emergency or need a quick answer.
Cloudways: What impact did Cloudways have on your business? Before and after? Speed, performance, multiple site management?
Geoffrey: Cloudways had a significant impact on how much time we spent supporting websites that were already built and live. As I mentioned, our infrastructure-related issues practically went to zero. Giving team members access and taking it away is super easy, so you can control.
Cloudways: Was there anything surprising about moving to Cloudways?
Geoffrey: Generally, how few problems we’ve had with our websites since moving over. These days, the majority of our website issues are caused by faulty WordPress plugins. We’ve got almost 100 sites hosted through Cloudways, have been on here for 3 years, and can count the number of times we’ve had issues with servers going down on one hand. It’s been rock solid.
We hadn’t worked with a hosting provider that had staging sites before, and it’s been a game-changer for us. Being able to update pages, test plugin changes, and run major updates through QA, then deploy all the changes at once with the push of a single button is super convenient.
Cloudways: Do you have any advice for people or businesses that may face the same problem as you did?
Geoffrey: First, if you’re experiencing downtime through your current hosting provider, you absolutely need to switch providers. When people go to a website that doesn’t load properly, they hit the back button and move to the next competitor on the list. Second, take the time to do some research and figure out which hosting provider is going to best meet your needs.
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