Reduced Costs, Faster Sites: How Magento Agency Develo Design Uses Cloudways to Power Magento Stores

About Develo Design

For 14 years, Develo Design wrestled with finding the perfect hosting solution. Traditional options like shared hosting fell short on performance and security, while dedicated servers, although powerful, were expensive and complex to manage.

Cloudways swooped in as a breath of fresh air. Their solution boasts top-notch performance and user-friendly management, freeing Develo Design to focus on client growth. Plus, the pay-as-you-go pricing keeps costs in check.

Cloudways tackles Magento’s needs and simplifies tasks for Develo Design. Curious how they optimize performance and handle traffic surges? Learn more about their ecommerce success with Cloudways in this case study!

Cloudways: Can you provide an overview of Develo Design’s experience as an ecommerce agency and how Cloudways has played a role in supporting your web hosting needs?

Luke Collymore: We’ve been building ecommerce stores, primarily on Magento, for nearly 14 years now and have been through a transition of many different ways of hosting and managing these stores.

From old-school shared hosting to VPS (Virtual Private Servers) and dedicated servers to cloud hosting, we’ve experienced a wide array of hosting and understand the benefits and drawbacks of these. 

We now offer two options to our customers: either they have some specialist requirements, and we go with a dedicated Magento hosting provider, these will traditionally be far more expensive, but it ensures they get the specialist support they need, or we offer Cloudways which gives them great support and flexibility for growth while keeping costs down and reducing server management on our side. 

Cloudways: What were the main reasons for choosing Cloudways as your hosting provider for Develo Design’s customers’ websites? How was the migration process?

Luke Collymore: From the first site I hosted on Cloudways, I’ve been impressed with the solution and service.

The ease of use with which a site can be created, the advanced tools for hosting, and the ability to customize the site’s hosting for our needs have all been there, and if something wasn’t exactly as I needed, then Cloudways Support has been there to help. 

Cloudways: How has Cloudways contributed to the overall performance and speed of your ecommerce store compared to other hosting solutions you may have used in the past?

Luke Collymore: Cloudways has opened up the option of hosting smaller Magento stores – we can offer better value to our customers as we don’t need to hire a specialist technical DevOps developer who would cost a lot of money to manage these stores.

Having Cloudways Support on hand for the customers as a first line of support has been extremely beneficial; the cost savings are passed on directly to our customers. 

Cloudways: How has Cloudways supported the specific requirements and demands of Magento stores in terms of performance, security, and customization options?

Luke Collymore: It’s been surprisingly good; I did have concerns with not having root access to the server to manage a Magento store, but so far, after over two years, I’ve not had any problems that support hasn’t been able to resolve. So, I am happy with not having root access and leaning on the Cloudways team to keep the site stable and secure. 

Cloudways: How has the performance of the Hyva theme on Cloudways contributed to the overall speed and user experience of your client’s Magento store?

Luke Collymore: The server performance has been impressive. Varnish is configured and offers sub-100ms response times for all cacheable pages. We can get our customers’ sites in the green for Core Web Vitals.

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Luke Collymore: The Cloudways server and application level control panels are intuitive, super easy to use, and powerful enough for nearly all server management tasks we’ve had to do in one easy-to-use platform.

Cloudways: How has Cloudways accommodated the growth of your ecommerce business and handled increases in website traffic during peak seasons or promotional campaigns?

Luke Collymore: Cloudways has allowed us to scale up the resources on our customers’ sites as demand has required. Starting on a very cheap server and increasing as the site has grown is the best possible way and one that works very well on Cloudways.

Cloudways: Can you discuss any cost-saving benefits you’ve experienced, such as optimized resource allocation, efficient caching mechanisms, or pay-as-you-go pricing models?

Luke Collymore: All of the above that I’ve mentioned, having a fully configurable Magento 2 store out of the box with Varnish, Redis, and all other awesome caching tools have been great, scaling up the customers’ stores for Black Friday and other peak seasons allows them to keep costs to a minimum. 

Cloudways: Do you foresee any specific needs or requirements that Cloudways can address to support your agency’s growth and success?

Luke Collymore: It would be great to get features such as a separate Magento app and database server. Currently, the option of creating a single server with both an app and a database is limited. Separating these would allow for more scalability.

Also, creating a VPN between servers that DigitalOcean allows would be great for Progressive Web Apps (PWA) stores with separate frontend and backend servers. 

Cloudways: Would you recommend Cloudways to other ecommerce agencies or Magento users? If so, what are the key reasons behind your recommendation?

Luke Collymore: Yes, I’d 100% recommend that companies looking to reduce their Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for their Magento hosting, without the need for technical expertise in-house or having to hire an expensive agency or developers, Cloudways Support has you covered.