Web Design Agency RubyCoded Improved Website Performance by 300% and Significantly Reduced Hosting Costs After Moving to Cloudways

About RubyCoded

RubyCoded is a web design and development agency that specializes in creating delightful user experiences on WordPress. Founded in 2014 by Jenxi Seow, a former pharmacist who discovered his passion for web design in secondary school, RubyCoded has been delivering high-quality websites for clients across various industries.

In this case study, you will learn more about RubyCoded’s journey, why they chose Cloudways as their web hosting provider, and how Cloudways has helped them improve their website performance, reliability, and scalability. You will also explore some of the features and benefits that Cloudways offers to agencies like RubyCoded.

Cloudways: Can you tell us about yourself and your background? What inspired you to start RubyCoded?

Jenxi Seow: After my first class on creating websites with HTML in secondary school back in 1998, I became fascinated by the internet and creating content to showcase to anyone in the world with access to the web. I created fan sites on Geocities and Angelfire through plaintext editors and, later on, Dreamweaver. Then I started building sites with CMS software like Drupal, Joomla, and Movable Type before settling on WordPress as the main tool for the past 20 years.

I discovered that my passion was to create delightful user experiences on the web. After building my hobby sites throughout secondary and high school, I started doing freelance gigs in 2004 while in university. These projects allowed me to stay in touch while completing my Pharmacy degree. I graduated and practiced as a pharmacist for seven years. I’m still a registered pharmacist today.

While I enjoy being able to help my patients as a pharmacist, I was turning 30, and I knew that I wanted to pursue entrepreneurship. I quit my job and started RubyCoded in 2014 with my Co-founder Matthew Chung, who shared my passion for good design and user experience.

Cloudways: Why did you choose Cloudways as your web hosting provider for RubyCoded and your clients?

Jenxi Seow: We have tried many hosts over the past 20 years, from free services like Geocities, Angelfire, and Blogspot to shared hosting, where we earned credits by being active on the forums. We started testing different hosts once we could pay for hosting through credit cards.

We have switched hosts for many reasons. We left a couple of hosts due to their unreliable uptime. We were forced to leave one that closed down. The most recent one we moved away from was Webfaction which was acquired by GoDaddy. Webfaction was shut down, and users could migrate to GoDaddy. We had bad experiences with GoDaddy, so we tested several hosting providers. The priority is to ensure client sites are fast and stable.

Cloudways came up tops in our selection process, and we migrated all our clients over. We have been with Cloudways since 2015.

Cloudways How has your experience been with Cloudways so far? What are some of the benefits and challenges you’ve encountered?

Jenxi Seow: We absolutely love Cloudways! We’ve been with them for the longest time, which shows how much we trust them. They’ve never let us down, and we have nothing but good things to say about them. They’re the best!

Cloudways: Have you noticed any differences in website performance since switching to Cloudways?

Jenxi Seow: We’ve used many different hosting services, but Cloudways has the best uptime by far. Since we moved to Cloudways, our website performance has improved so much – we’re talking 200% to 300%! We’re so happy we made the switch.

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Cloudways: How does Cloudways compare to other web hosting providers you’ve used in the past?

Jenxi Seow: My first impression of Cloudways is the amazing user experience. The Cloudways dashboard makes it very intuitive to manage servers and sites. I’m pretty sure the Cloudways team manages sites a lot as well because they come up with a lot of one-click solutions to make a tedious task a breeze.

Over the years, we’ve seen Cloudways rolling out new features and integrations that empower us to manage the sites and services. Unlike other providers that felt like they were stagnating at the status quo, Cloudways is constantly improving and innovating.

Cloudways: What features of Cloudways do you find most useful for your agency?

Jenxi Seow: Cloudways optimizes WordPress performance. Features like caching, Redis, and PHP-FPM speed up our sites and are easily configured or pre-installed.

Customer support is very responsive and provides fast resolutions to emergencies. This is crucial for an agency managing client assets.

Cloudways: Can you describe any positive outcomes or results you have seen since partnering with us for hosting? Please share the stats if you’ve.

Jenxi Seow: Aside from the stability and performance we’re enjoying on Cloudways, the Cloudways add-ons via different partnerships have provided tremendous value, and we’ve been happy to be able to pass on that extra value to our clients. Therefore, costs to our clients have been significantly reduced while delivering better performance.

Cloudways: Are there any specific tools or resources like SafeUpdates or Cloudflare Enterprise you rely on from Cloudways to manage your websites?

Jenxi Seow: Cloudways WordPress Migrator plugin makes moving existing sites to our servers easy. This makes onboarding fast and painless.

1-Click Backup & Restore provides automated snapshots that can be easily recovered, giving clients peace of mind.

Application & Server Cloning and Staging Area & URLs allow us to quickly set up test sites for our clients that we can then bring live almost instantly.

Cloudways: How does Cloudways handle scalability for RubyCoded’s website? Have you had to scale up or down in the past?

Jenxi Seow: Seamless Vertical Scaling has allowed us to scale up server resources when our needs grew. We also redistributed deployment easily by cloning applications to new servers. This ensured no downtime for the sites.

Cloudways: What advice would you give to other design and marketing agencies considering using Cloudways for their hosting needs?

Jenxi Seow: Cloudways provides the best value among the hosts out there. We’ve tried many hosts over the past couple of decades. Cloudways may not look like the cheapest hosting, but the extra dollars you spend are well worth it in the long run. You get a high level of refinement and a great user experience.

Marketing agencies would know the importance of retaining control of their web assets. Cloudways is a great partner to grow an online presence we own instead of on social media or a platform we have no control over.

Cloudways: What are your plans for RubyCoded, and how do you see Cloudways playing a role in supporting your growth and success?

Jenxi Seow: Although RubyCoded started out as a web design agency, we have grown and evolved over the years while sticking to our goal of creating user experiences that delight.

Our services expanded to include branding and marketing, and we operated under RubyCoded’s brand CheeseFlow in China for brands looking to sell in the international market.

Cloudways has grown over the past 8 years, and the service quality has remained amazing. We look forward to seeing and collaborating with Cloudways for 10 years and delivering amazing products.