Bold Web Design is an Australian-based design and development agency that is helping businesses around the world. The team behind this agency has created some of the best projects like Optus, Intercontinental, and Mitre 10. Let’s read what Sam Jean-Marc says about the role of Cloudways in creating better projects for Bold Web Design.
Mansoor: Hi Sam, could you please tell us about your background? What does your company do? What was the biggest challenge you were facing before moving to Cloudways?
Sam: At Bold Web Design, we make killer websites for our clients. We love using WordPress and being part of the open-source community as a whole. That said, open-source and self-hosted CMS comes with its own unique set of challenges for us.
Speed. We had previously used several hosting companies in the past and our website’s speed was terrible. Not just on the front end but in the WordPress CMS itself. On the front end, sites were sluggish and just lacked that snappy response time.
Reliability. We had several issues with client sites going down; we hated that dreaded email from a client on a Saturday afternoon, “My site is down, and I’m losing money.” It makes me sick just thinking about it.
Ease of use. Simply put, we are designers and WordPress devs, not server technicians. We needed a dashboard that was easy for our staff (and myself) to quickly deploy new servers and applications in just a few clicks. A dashboard where backups were easy to create, manage and restore.
Mansoor: How did you come across Cloudways and what was your first impression?
Sam: We know affiliates are constantly pushing the hosting provider that makes them the most money, so we had to trudge through so many fake reviews. We ended up finding Cloudways through a vlogger and basically thought that it must be good if he is recommending this service. Given all the issues we had experienced previously, it was worth a try.
Mansoor: What were your criteria to choose a hosting provider? What made our solution stand out over others that you researched?
Sam: We were looking for a platform that made it easy for us to create servers and applications and had great customer service. Cloudways stood out because they are so quick to help and their support staff is very knowledgeable.
Mansoor: What did Cloudways do to contribute to the outcome you wanted? Did “Faster website, more conversions” work with Cloudways?
Sam: When I logged into the Cloudways dashboard, I knew this was going to be a different experience. I couldn’t believe how easy it was to deploy an Amazon Server with WordPress. For us, this was a big deal. The fact that I can create a template site application with all the necessary plugins, theme, user credentials, and settings pre-done, then simply clone that application was like magic.
Using unreliable backup plugins became a thing of the past. Cloudways backups are auto-created and are easy to restore. Having a reliable backup solution is key; even when working on dev servers, it’s always handy.
When I first logged into WordPress, I couldn’t believe how snappy the WordPress admin loaded, and on the front end, the speed was incredible. I had come from VPS and shared hosting and I had always wondered how other agencies were able to achieve such speed.
Mansoor: What are the key features that you like about our hosting?
Sam: Support. The response times from support are fast. Within a minute, I can get an expert server tech. In the past, we would create a support ticket, wait for a day, then respond, then wait another day, and the entire process would take days instead of minutes.
Speed. It’s just fast. The caching technology, the server response times are all fantastic. It’s worth mentioning here that Cloudways now offers the High-Frequency servers with Vultr, and they are blazing fast!
Dashboard. We found the Cloudways user interface for managing servers and applications very intuitive. For example, let’s say I want to update the PHP version, I can do it in 1 click. Cloning applications or entire servers? Easy. Even increasing the upload limit on WordPress is easier. Adding SSL certificates and automatically redirecting all the URLs to HTTPS. Nice!
Mansoor: What would have happened if you had not made the purchase?
Sam: If I hadn’t gone with Cloudways, I think I would have made it through okay, but I would have been stressed, frustrated, and would have had another thing to worry about in my agency. Using Cloudways isn’t just about ease of use for us as an agency, it’s also about maintaining a professional image to our clients and providing them with a seamless web experience.
Mansoor: What features contributed the most during your business peak hours?
Sam: Quick and instant live chat support.
Mansoor: What overall promising outcome have you seen after using Cloudways?
Sam: It’s great to actually have a team of server techs that really know what they are doing. It’s kind of like they are part of our team.
Mansoor Ahmed Khan
Been in content marketing since 2014, and I still get a kick out of creating stories that resonate with the target audience and drive results. At Cloudways by DigitalOcean (a leading cloud hosting company, btw!), I lead a dream team of content creators. Together, we brainstorm, write, and churn out awesome content across all the channels: blogs, social media, emails, you name it! You can reach out to me at [email protected].
