Seota Digital Marketing - Case Study

Here’s How Seota Won By Focusing Resources on Clients with Cloudways Support

casestudy-seotadigital

In Conversation With

william-hogsett
William Hogsett
CEO

Share Case Study

About Seota

Founded in 2009, Seota began its humble journey in digital marketing by offering SEO consultancy and web design and development. With time, SEO and digital marketing strategies became more sophisticated, and Seota was agile to adapt and compete in today’s hyper-competitive environment.

Cloudways: Tell us about yourself. What is your designation at the agency? What are your core responsibilities?

William Hogsett: I am working in the capacity of a CEO for Seota. It is always exciting for me to leverage my skills in business and technology to have a positive impact on the lives of mid-market and small business owners everywhere. I feel accomplished when people leverage my digital agency and the tools we build to improve the return from their digital assets.

How Lost Media Group’s Value-Proposition-First Approach Helped it Rise to Success

Cloudways: What services does your agency provide and how many clients do you currently have? Please tell us a bit about your agency here, like which capacity do you operate in, your team size, your market, and your USP.

William Hogsett Seota is a boutique digital agency with 16 employees. We primarily focus on WordPress design & development and custom PHP development. We have two WordPress teams that focus on enterprise clients and a WordPress team that focuses on smaller clients. Unlike most boutique agencies, we have a team that knows what is happening under the hood of WordPress. We build every new website from scratch, starting with a rendering “comp” that reflects our translation/vision of what our clients communicate to us. We employ experts in Adobe XD, WordPress architecture, PHP, CodeIgniter, CSS, JavaScript, Website Security, and many other frameworks and platforms. Therefore, our customers’ marketing technology investment will be safe for a long time to come.

Cloudways: How did you first hear about Cloudways? Name one major problem that you were facing that made you switch to Cloudways. Something that was the tipping point, and how Cloudways fixed that for you.?

William Hogsett: We have been using Cloudways for our internal projects for quite some time, and we really like how quick it is to spin up. We are able to jump into development in minutes.

In 2020, we started to host more of our clients on Cloudways when we were having serious performance issues on an AWS cloud with another hosting provider. We were spending top dollar for a Big AWS configuration that was getting hit with CPU throttling. We have never had this issue on Cloudways AWS or other Cloudways servers so we moved the client site to Cloudways.

The client’s site on Cloudways is lightning fast, never has CPU issues, and is far less of a headache than dealing with AWS directly. We use VULTR via Cloudways for this client. Not only do we get better performance, but this client’s server costs us 40% less than what we were spending before.

Cloudways: Before Cloudways, which hosting solution did you use? Are you using any other hosting service currently? If “Yes” Why?

William Hogsett: We used AWS via Amazon, SiteGround, and we still have clients on WP Engine. As contracts expire, we are slowly moving clients off of SiteGround over to Cloudways.

How the Cloudways Platform Helps Agencies Become Better at Delivering Projects

Cloudways: What was your experience with Cloudways when you first signed up? Please tell us about first impressions.

William Hogsett: Cloudways is super easy to use and when we first started using Cloudways, it was the only way to easily spin up a cloud server.

Cloudways: In your opinion, what sets us apart from other hosting providers? How has our in-built support for Php-based apps such as WordPress, Laravel, and Magento made matters easier for you?

William Hogsett: Another thing we love about Cloudways is the no-gimmick pricing. The competitors are all about offering gimmick prices and then tripling the monthly/yearly rates when the gimmick offer runs out.

Cloudways: How do you use Cloudways to solve your client’s problem(s)?

William Hogsett: When we were using another big AWS configuration, we were having CPU issues. However, ever since we moved our clients’ site from AWS to Cloudways, we have not had that issue once with Cloudways using VULTR for that site.

Cloudways: How has Cloudways contributed to the success of your agency? Tell us about how Cloudways’ features align with your needs.

William Hogsett: As a small agency with only 16 employees it is important for us to have partners like Cloudways that are quick to respond to our support requests. We almost never have support issues, but when we do, we need help right away. Cloudways never lets us down, and we look like heroes to our clients. When you couple the great support with the ability to spin up WordPress applications in seconds, Cloudways is the right choice for our agency.

Cloudways: Out of five cloud providers available on Cloudways, which one(s) do you prefer to use and why?

William Hogsett: We are using four of the five providers at this time – If we have a heavy app need we lean towards the VULTR servers. We are leaning away from doing anything on AWS and will likely sunset the two AWS servers we have.

Cloudways: How do you resell Cloudways to your clients?

William Hogsett: We sell a support service that includes hosting, but we lead with the support – hosting is a byproduct.

How to Resell Hosting to Your Digital Agency Clients

Cloudways: If you could briefly describe the values you perceive from Cloudways?

William Hogsett: You seem to value making our life easy!

Cloudways: Do you think that by switching to Cloudways, you were able to free up resources at your end? If yes, how were you able to utilize those?

William Hogsett: As a boutique agency, human capital is our most important asset – using Cloudways lets us focus resources on our clients instead of on managing servers.

Cloudways: Thank you for your time, William Hogsett. We wish you to go miles ahead with Seota.

William Hogsett: Thank you for your support and assistance.

Agency partner

Join the Agency Partnership Program

Receive the growth, reach and support your agency deserves.

Apply Now