Marketing Agency North Shore Digital Scales to 140+ Client Sites & 7 Figures ARR on Cloudways

About North Shore Digital

North Shore Digital is an award-winning agency in Canada. They help businesses grow using smart digital marketing. Their team focuses on lead generation, Google Ads, and SEO for five key industries. They serve clients across the entire country, from coast to coast.

Before Cloudways, they faced big problems. Slow websites and downtime hurt their clients. Finding reliable hosting was tough. They needed a partner to keep sites fast and secure. This challenged their mission to boost client success.

Switching to Cloudways changed everything. Performance and reliability soared. Scaling became simple, letting them manage over 140 websites easily. See how this partnership powered their growth and brought peace of mind to their clients. Read their success story!

Cloudways: Can you describe North Shore Digital’s core services, team structure, and the specific markets you serve? What makes your agency unique?

Andrew Jackson: We are an award-winning digital marketing agency based in North Vancouver, BC.

We specialize in lead generation, Google Ads, SEO, and ROI analytics, in 5 major verticals:

landscaping, home services, construction, health practices, and private schools.

Our team comprises digital marketing experts who must have 3 characteristics:

1. They are curious consultants
2. Resilient troubleshooters, and
3. Lifelong learners. 

We emphasize a culture of support and celebration among team members, with a strong commitment to client success.

Our mission is to help 100 companies increase revenues, profit, and impact. We focus on sustainable growth, aiming to build long-term resilience and results.

Our core values – Growth, Sustainability, and Legacy – guide our approach to client partnerships and digital marketing.

We recently hit 70 clients from coast to coast in Canada, from Victoria, BC, to St. John’s, Newfoundland, and recently became a 7-figure agency in terms of Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR).

We combine industry-specific expertise with a data-driven approach, aiming to be a trusted growth partner for our clients.

– LTR: Kaan Turker, Andrew Jackson, and Ira Thomson — The three co-founders of North Shore Digital bring years of experience and a shared passion for helping businesses grow with smart, sustainable marketing strategies.

Cloudways: What challenges did you face with hosting providers before Cloudways, and how did these issues affect your clients or workflows?

Andrew Jackson: As part of our mission to best serve our clients, we decided to include managed hosting and website maintenance as a core part of our monthly marketing programs.

The reason for this was so that we could maximize our clients’ WordPress website performance.

Having a reliable, trustworthy, robust hosting partner like Cloudways ensures that we benefit from being a Gold Partner with enhanced technical support and exceptional performance.

Before working with Cloudways, we had issues with website uptime, performance and a lack of innovation and foresight when it came to futureproofing website infrastructure and server technology.

– A high-performance hosting stack combining NGINX, Apache, Memcached, MySQL/MariaDB, Varnish Cache, PHP-FPM, Redis, and PHP 8 to deliver unmatched speed, scalability, and reliability for modern web applications.

Cloudways: How did you decide Cloudways was the right fit for your agency’s hosting needs? What stood out during your evaluation process?

Andrew Jackson: You were referred to us by an ex-web development partner of ours.

We started a trial server, and we could immediately see how much better a fit the Cloudways Platform was for our needs, with the ease of upscaling server performance and size.

Getting rid of the cPanel and individual access to clients to their website’s server management took a bit of getting used to, but all in all, we were really impressed with the new environment and haven’t looked back.

We began with a staging environment with a single server and a few websites, and now we have 3 servers hosting over 140 business websites, and we are a Gold Partner.

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Cloudways: Which performance metrics (e.g., speed, uptime) matter most for your clients’ websites, and how does Cloudways help you meet those expectations?

Andrew Jackson: I would say performance is very important, but typically our clients are local service providers who don’t have big, sophisticated websites. They want reliability, uptime, security, and peace of mind just as much as a fast website.

By becoming a Cloudflare Enterprise Agency Partner, this has taken things to the next level. We appreciate being able to easily integrate Cloudways and Cloudflare in your dashboard, and we will turn on the Cloudflare Enterprise Add-on for all our clients now. This has unlocked even better security and performance for our clients. 

We also like how the server migration tool works and automatically adds the correct plugins to maximize the server environment, such as Breeze and Object Cache Pro, to work with Varnish on the server backend. 

Cloudways: Why did Cloudways’ Agency Partnership Program appeal to you over other hosting providers’ offerings? What specific benefits stood out?

Andrew Jackson: We didn’t join to become an agency partner – this was just the benefit of transferring and switching to Cloudways. 

It’s always nice to get extra support, technical help, and an account manager to help keep us on top of new technology and trends.

Cloudways: When managing client websites, how does Cloudways simplify tasks like scaling, backups, or security compared to past solutions?

Andrew Jackson: I’ve alluded to this in previous answers; scaling is really simple and effective. 

The backup system is something we already had in place through another tool, but it’s nice to have a backup to your backup system (and one built into the server).

Security is robust, especially with the Cloudflare Enterprise integration.

– A powerful integration delivering top-tier performance and security features, including the fastest CDN, enterprise-grade WAF, DDoS protection, image and mobile optimization, and Edge Page Caching, right from the Cloudways Platform.

Cloudways: Have you seen tangible business benefits like faster project delivery or higher margins since joining Cloudways’ Agency Partnership Program?

Andrew Jackson: Most of the business websites we host are on monthly marketing programs with us that include consulting, website content/updates, SEO, advertising, and analytics, so it’s part of a more holistic package. 

We have some legacy clients that just do hosting with us, but this is a very small revenue stream. It all helps, though, in terms of being able to upgrade and downgrade clients as their situations change. It helps maintain those relationships and keeps the doors open. 

Cloudways: In what ways has the partnership program strengthened your ability to upsell hosting or maintenance services to clients?

Andrew Jackson: Referring back to the previous answer, it’s more of an add-on that we use to serve clients better and to help give us better access to their websites with better technical SEO and performance. 

Cloudways: Did migrating to Cloudways improve your team’s efficiency or free up time for higher-value tasks like website design and development?

Andrew Jackson: It’s definitely made the workflow/work processes more efficient and faster. It’s been easier to scale and go from 50 to 150 websites.

Cloudways: Would you recommend Cloudways to other web agencies in niches like home services or healthcare? What advice would you give them?

Andrew Jackson: If any agency is looking for a hosting partner, Cloudways would be our number #1 pick.