B Corp Agency Verve Frees Developers from Manual Server Management with Cloudways MCP

About Verve

Verve is a full service digital agency that offers strategy, branding, web development, and marketing under one roof. The team builds and manages client sites across WordPress, Magento, WooCommerce, and custom Laravel builds.

As a certified B Corp, Verve holds sustainability as a core part of its business identity. That commitment shaped its choice of hosting partner and, later, its approach to server management as the agency began integrating AI more deeply into daily operations.

Marketing Director Sam Blackbourn oversees a role that spans both client-facing hosting support and broader marketing responsibilities, including server-side tracking. He is often the first point of contact when client sites run into issues.

This case study looks at how Verve moved from manual, time-consuming server management to a streamlined, AI-assisted workflow with Cloudways MCP. Read on to see the challenges the agency faced, the approach it took, and the results it has seen so far.

– Verve’s track record spans over 1 billion clicks generated, 2 million leads, £100 million in revenue, and 450+ total projects delivered for clients. (Source: verve-design.co.uk)

The Challenge: Manual Server Management

Before adopting Cloudways MCP, Verve managed its infrastructure through an internal portal the team had built. It connected directly into each server and into various APIs, giving Verve a centralized system for making changes and addressing issues quickly.

That system worked, but it came with a hidden cost: time. Blackbourn explains, “We were spending a lot of time doing simple things regularly. So setting things up, restarting servers, running our crons, running our scripts, running our regularly scheduled tasks on them.”

“We just wanted to take all that pain away from us so that we could manage things faster, move faster, and then deal with the more pertinent things for our clients rather than just sort of general hosting admin.” — Sam Blackbourn

Much of this routine work fell to senior developers. Instead of focusing on complex, high-value client projects, they were tied up with basic server setup and monitoring. Verve needed a way to lift that admin weight off skilled staff so they could focus on harder problems.

The Solution: A Platform Built to Scale With AI

Verve was already a Cloudways customer before adopting the MCP. Part of what drew the agency to Cloudways in the first place was the ability to trace the sustainability of its hosting infrastructure, a natural fit for a B Corp.

As Blackbourn puts it, “The fact that we could track the sustainability of our web hosting back to its very root was a massive plus for us, which is why we became a Cloudways customer.”

As Verve leaned further into AI across its operations, adopting Cloudways MCP followed naturally. The agency now uses it to run its regularly scheduled server routines: keeping status updated, handling restarts, and monitoring resource usage.

– Cloudways access token setup, the first step to connecting Cloudways MCP so agencies can manage servers by chatting instead of clicking through dashboards. (Source: cloudways.com)

This matters across Verve’s varied server setup, which includes shared servers hosting multiple client sites alongside individual dedicated servers. Managing both types used to mean jumping between separate status screens and dashboards.

“Being able to bring that all into one view where we can chat back and forth more naturally, rather than having to jump back and forth between status screens, was a massive bonus for our workflow.” — Sam Blackbourn

That shift, from screen-switching to conversational management, changed how the team approaches routine infrastructure work day to day.

The Result: Faster Workflows, Freed Developers

The impact on Verve’s development workflow has been substantial. Blackbourn describes the change directly: “It’s massively improved our workflow and our development tasks.”

A key driver is the MCP’s memory system, which lets Verve re-action tasks on new or bare-bones servers without starting from scratch each time. This cuts down significantly on repeat setup work.

“The MCP has taken out a lot of the admin headache that we used to have, where you’d have a senior developer who should be working on something a lot more complex having to do some very basic setups. They’re now able to get onto it, so it’s massively improved our efficiency as an agency.” — Sam Blackbourn

Verve has built daily, weekly, and monthly automated routines that report server status back to clients through custom-integrated portals. For issues that are easily diagnosable, automated assistants can now act directly, without waiting on a developer.

– A Verve developer working across code and version control, the kind of complex technical work the team can focus on with routine server tasks automated. (Source: verve-design.co.uk)

While Blackbourn doesn’t cite specific time-saved figures, the pattern is clear: a steady stream of admin work that once required manual attention now runs on its own, freeing the team’s time for higher-value tasks.

Looking ahead, Blackbourn expects this shift to keep compounding as Verve grows. “I see our productivity massively increasing and us working on the more interesting, more creative side of things and being able to leave that sort of thing to our now built systems.”

For an agency built on sustainability and efficiency, that combination, less time on server admin, more time on creative and technical work, is exactly the direction Verve wants to keep moving.

Free Your Developers From Routine Server Tasks!

Cloudways MCP takes care of routine server tasks through simple conversation, so your team can spend more time building for clients.

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