Web Agency Mainstay Digital Fixes Hosting Issues for 8-Person Team, Guaranteeing On-Time Delivery for Clients

About Mainstay Digital

Mainstay Digital set out to do things differently. After years of seeing the same hosting frustrations, Director Matthew McLean wanted to build an agency focused on reliable, high-quality development. Since 2017, his team has been helping businesses across industries with custom technical solutions that truly work.

But as projects grew more complex, hosting challenges began slowing things down: unpredictable uptime, slow support, hidden costs, and limits on control were draining valuable time. That’s when Cloudways came in, offering the flexibility, transparency, and reliability Mainstay Digital needed to scale with confidence and deliver stronger results for clients.

This case study shows how Cloudways improved Mainstay Digital’s hosting experience, reduced operational headaches, and boosted client trust. If you want to see how a managed platform can simplify your workflows and strengthen your agency’s growth, read on.

Cloudways: Who are you as a business today? Can you share a little about your agency’s background, the size of your team, the type of clients you usually serve, and what makes your agency stand out from others in the same market?

Matthew McLean: After 13 years of working in various agencies I launched Mainstay Digital in late 2017, a fully Australian-based development agency.

I love working with both clients and developers, so it made sense to create a boutique, development-focused agency. We currently have 8 in the team, plus strategic partners.

We work with a broad range of organisations and business, both public and private sector. Industries include Health, Education, Finance, Travel, Engineering, Construction and Non-profit.

We’re unique as an agency – or mini tech company – in that we are development specialists. We have no design or marketing services. We’re a technical outfit. We work as an extension of our client’s marketing, web, product and innovation teams.

– From health to non-profit, Mainstay Digital partners with clients to deliver scalable, secure, and impactful digital solutions.

A little more about how we work:

→ Gain a clear view of our clients’ business, challenges and objectives – we find technology solutions which have the most practical, positive impact. 

→ Our values underpin our work, approach and thinking: Integrity, Quality, Reliability, Transparency & Respect.

→ Australian owned and operated. We’re experienced, local experts, and we work with clients across the country.

→ For projects, we guarantee to deliver on time, budget and provide support

→ We take a focus on top-notch communications, whether it be for general support or your latest project.

→ We keep our rates competitive to deliver digital products which propel our clients’ business, whatever the budget.

Our services include custom application development, open-source dev, AI + automations, web support, web security, systems integration, hosting, consultation and accessibility. Key platforms include WordPress and Craft Commerce, and frameworks such as Laravel and React

Cloudways: What challenges did you face with your previous hosting providers, whether it was downtime, limited scalability, hidden costs, or lack of reliable support, and how did those issues affect both your internal team’s efficiency and the results you were delivering to clients?

Matthew McLean: Over many years working with a range of hosting providers, we’ve seen recurring challenges that can arise and materially affect delivery:

• Oversubscribed shared environments leading to inconsistent performance and occasional downtime
• Slow or inconsistent support response times, with unclear escalation paths
• Limited administrative access (e.g., SSH, logs, firewall rules) and insufficient staging/granular roles
• Irregular maintenance and patching practices
• Limited transparency around security posture and incident communication
• Backups that are hard to access, verify, or restore (and unclear retention policies)
• Constrained developer tooling and controls (versioned deploys, cron, custom workflows)
• Opaque pricing for scaling or de-scaling, bandwidth, storage, and egress

These issues can create a significant drain on internal time. More coordination and firefighting, fewer planned deliverables. This can lead to longer incident resolution, slower deployments, and unpredictable timelines. Ultimately, they can erode stakeholder confidence and result in dissatisfied clients, whether we’re the direct customer or acting on behalf of other agencies.

– From downtime and hidden costs to smooth workflows, Cloudways simplified Mainstay Digital’s hosting experience.

Cloudways: When did you realize that your agency needed a more flexible and managed hosting solution, and what were the main triggers or events such as growth in client demand, large-scale projects, or scaling issues that pushed you to actively look for alternatives?

Matthew McLean: We recognised the need for a more flexible, managed hosting platform early in the agency’s growth and standardised on Cloudways from the outset. As our portfolio moved from simpler sites to larger, higher-traffic builds, applications and multi-environment workflows, we were happy to stay with Cloudways.

Cloudways has met and exceeded our needs: it’s straightforward for non-engineers to administer, robust in day-to-day operations, and has continued to mature year over year. Support has been fast and reliable, redundancy/backups are easy to manage, and our developers and DevOps team have the control they need without unnecessary overhead.

Cloudways: Where in your decision-making process did Cloudways come into the picture, and how did it compare against other hosting providers you considered in terms of pricing, performance, transparency, and the level of control it gave you as an agency?

Matthew McLean: See the previous answer – and in terms of pricing and plans, for quality and value it’s unrivalled in the global marketplace.

– Cloudways offers transparent pricing and flexible hosting plans, making it easy for agencies like Mainstay Digital to scale without surprises.

Cloudways: Why did Cloudways feel like the right choice for your agency, especially given the technical depth and long-term partnerships your business is built on, and what specific features or benefits convinced you this was the right fit?

Matthew McLean: Cloudways balances the control our engineers want with the simplicity our producers need. We get robust managed hosting with staging, backups, role-based access, SSH/Git workflows, and straightforward scaling without the drag of maintaining our own stack. The platform’s reliability, transparent security posture, and responsive support aligned with our long-term, partnership-focused delivery model, so it felt like the right fit from day one.

Cloudways: How has Cloudways improved the way your team manages client websites, whether that is through easier project handovers, faster deployments, better uptime, or smoother workflows, and what measurable impact has it had on client satisfaction?

Matthew McLean: Standardising on Cloudways simplified handovers and sped up deployments. Staging to production is clean, rollbacks are simple, and routine tasks don’t require specialist intervention. Uptime and performance have been consistently strong, which reduced incidents and cut back-and-forth comms. The net effect has been faster turnaround on requests, more predictable timelines, and higher client confidence across the board.

Cloudways: What has been your experience with the Cloudways Agency Partnership Program, including access to co-marketing, dedicated support, and other benefits, and how has it supported your agency in scaling operations or attracting new opportunities?

Matthew McLean: The Agency Partnership Program has been genuinely useful. Dedicated partner support, co-marketing options, and practical resources made it easier to scale our operations and sharpen our go-to-market. It adds credibility in proposals and gives our team a fast lane when we need guidance, which has helped us qualify and win the right opportunities.

– With Cloudways’ Agency Partnership Program, Mainstay Digital ensures faster delivery, stronger client trust, and long-term growth.

Cloudways: How has the Agency Partnership Program helped your agency strengthen client relationships? Did benefits such as free migrations, priority support, or tier discounts play a role in winning client confidence and making project delivery more efficient?

Matthew McLean: Benefits like free migrations and priority support translate directly into smoother onboarding and faster issue resolution both of which clients feel immediately. Tier discounts help us package clear, sustainable pricing, while the elevated support experience reassures stakeholders during critical phases. Together, those elements make delivery more efficient and trust easier to build.

Cloudways: Which features of the Cloudways Agency Partnership Program, such as lead referrals, co-marketing, or access to exclusive resources, have you found most valuable, and how do they align with your agency’s long-term growth strategy?

Matthew McLean: Lead referrals and co-marketing are standouts for growth, while exclusive technical resources and priority channels keep our team moving without blockers. That combination supports our strategy of reliable, repeatable delivery for long-term clients which helps us scale capacity, maintain quality, and stay focused on outcomes rather than infrastructure overhead.

Cloudways: Would you recommend Cloudways to other agencies in your niche, and if so, what would you tell them about your journey, the hosting problems it solved for you, and the advantages they could expect by moving to a platform like Cloudways?

Matthew McLean: Yes. Cloudways resolved common hosting pain points such as unclear access, slow support, opaque backups, and scaling surprises and replaced them with a managed, transparent platform our whole team can work with. If you want to reduce firefighting, speed up delivery, and improve client confidence, moving to Cloudways is a straightforward way to get there.

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