Web Agency Stone Digital Achieves 100+ High-Performance Sites & Seamless Scaling with Cloudways

About Stone Digital

Stone Digital creates fast, custom websites for businesses. Their team focuses on simplicity and quality, ensuring every site meets clients’ unique goals. They build solutions that work smoothly and look great.

Founder Brett Stone started as a solo developer in 2017. Today, his agency is one of Australia’s top-rated web teams. They pride themselves on clear communication, honest pricing, and websites that deliver results.

Stone Digital now hosts over 100 client sites on Cloudways. This partnership gives them reliable performance, easy scaling, and hassle-free security. With fewer hosting issues, they spend more time designing and less time troubleshooting.

Cloudways: Stone Digital has built a reputation for delivering high-quality custom web development services. What made Cloudways the right hosting partner for your diverse range of projects?

Brett Stone: At Stone Digital, we specialize in high-quality, custom-built websites, so a high-quality web host who can deliver top performance at an affordable price is important to us.

We’re very happy with Cloudways because it provides top-quality servers at reasonable prices.

We also really like the reliability, scalability, and simplicity of using Cloudways. We’re getting access to top-tier servers from the leading cloud providers with an intuitive dashboard interface for management.

We find there are essentially no bugs or random issues when using Cloudways, it just works. Which is a big contrast from other web hosts where we encounter random bugs that requires a conversation with support to resolve.

Through client-hosted projects, we frequently deal with other hosting providers and consistently encounter more downtime, performance issues, and server management challenges compared to Cloudways.

– All-in-one server access: SSH, secure credentials & in-browser terminal on Cloudways.

Cloudways: With clients spread across Australia and a global team, what role does Cloudways’ worldwide data center network play in ensuring reliable and fast services?

Brett Stone: We primarily serve clients in Australia, and having the option to choose Australian-based data centers is a major advantage, something our clients also appreciate.

One of the key benefits of using Cloudways is the transparency it provides into the underlying server infrastructure, giving both us and our clients greater peace of mind.

Cloudways: Custom WordPress and WooCommerce development often demands optimized environments. What improvements have you noticed in website performance since moving to Cloudways?

Brett Stone: Overall, we’ve seen a noticeable improvement in performance with our websites hosted on Cloudways compared to other hosting providers.

Through comprehensive testing with test websites across Cloudways and competitor hosts, we found Cloudways consistently outperformed the alternatives when using a comparable spec hosting package.

Given the performance and reliability benefits, we’ve gone all in on Cloudways over the past few years, now hosting over 100 websites on the platform and referred dozens of clients and businesses to consider Cloudways as their hosting solution.

Cloudways has been particularly beneficial for our Custom WordPress Development and Custom WooCommerce Development projects, where optimized hosting environments are important because we want to provide the best performance for our Client websites and their users.

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Cloudways: Integrating advanced features and automation can be challenging in custom projects. How does Cloudways complement your development processes and make these integrations seamless?

Brett Stone: I think Cloudways has found the right balance in its feature set to help with development processes. We just use the following simple features in our development process, and it’s all we need for our projects:

• SFTP
• Password Protection
• Cloudways Migration Plugin

We feel Cloudways provides the essential features / tools that you’d want from any web host but also hasn’t over complicated the dashboard with unnecessary tools that might cause complications or break functionality.

They provide everything you need from a web host while keeping the interface clean and straightforward.

Cloudways: Security is a top priority for e-commerce websites. In what ways has Cloudways ensured robust protection for your clients’ online stores?

Brett Stone: Cloudways strikes the perfect balance between robust security features and the flexibility to adjust them as needed within the dashboard.

We notice that Cloudway’s built-in server-level firewall occasionally gets triggered, but troubleshooting is straightforward and far less of a headache compared to other hosts.

With many other providers, resolving firewall issues often requires manual intervention from support, whereas with Cloudways, we can handle it ourselves.

In other hosts, we’ve found the web hosting firewall difficult to navigate, often requiring a manual conversation with the Support Team to resolve, while with Cloudways, we can resolve it ourselves.

Additionally, we appreciate that Cloudways disables XML-RPC and SSH access by default, adding an extra layer of security right out of the box.

Cloudways: Managing a variety of projects often requires juggling multiple servers and applications. How has Cloudways made this process more efficient for your team?

Brett Stone: We’re definitely one of those accounts that are juggling multiple servers and many applications in the dashboard! It’s a great testimony to Cloudways that we’re able to manage all those different servers and applications in their dashboard seamlessly without any issues.

Cloudways: Every agency values cost-effective solutions. How has working with Cloudways helped you strike a balance between budget and performance for your hosting needs?

Brett Stone: I think the answer is simple: Cloudways is hands down the best solution for cost-effective managed hosting.

I’ve spoken with many agency owners and read countless online reviews, and I think the data/consensus is clear: Cloudways consistently delivers the best balance of performance, reliability, and affordability in managed hosting.

– Agencies trust Cloudways to handle servers so they can focus on their work, growing their clients’ websites.

Sure, you could get a lower price by setting up your own cloud server on AWS or DigitalOcean, but that comes with significant hidden costs, both in terms of time and expertise required for server and cloud management. Managing infrastructure in-house can be complex, resource-intensive, and a distraction from core agency work.

Cloudways: Your agency is known for clear communication and pricing. How do you think this approach has impacted your client relationships?

Brett Stone: We definitely aim to be upfront and clear with our clients about pricing for hosting and the different options they have. We don’t force our clients to use any particular hosting, however, we strongly recommend Cloudways due to our positive experience, which often leads them to select the hosting that we recommend.

For some clients, we recommend that they have their own Cloudways account and have a standalone server for their website. We manage the hosting for other clients, and they pay an additional buffer on top of our hosting fee from Cloudways.

I think it depends on the client, some clients want to have that sense of oversight across the whole stack and own the hosting account. While with other less technical business owners, they’re happy to have Stone Digital manage the hosting on their behalf.

Cloudways provides the core hosting services that we need, and we can easily fit our client hosting billing around that.

Cloudways: Stone Digital is constantly growing and evolving. How does Cloudways support your vision for scalability and adaptability in the web development industry?

Brett Stone: If we have a client that requires a scale-up, we can do that easily in Cloudways, and we’ve done that multiple times with no hiccups.

If we have a website that’s taking off and we need to migrate to a new server in Cloudways, we can do that easily with the Cloudways Migration plugin. We definitely have all the tools we need to cater to growing websites that require scaling up.

Cloudways: Looking back on your journey with Cloudways, how would you describe the overall experience? Would you recommend it to other agencies?

Brett Stone: I highly recommend Cloudways to other agencies. Since migrating all our websites to Cloudways, we’ve spent far less time worrying about server management and hosting issues. Everything just works. This allows us to focus on what truly matters: delivering high-quality, custom-built websites and ensuring the right code is deployed for our clients.

With other hosting providers, we often found ourselves caught up in hosting issues that took time away from our core work. Cloudways eliminates those distractions, providing a seamless and reliable hosting experience that lets us stay focused on development.