Media Company clovio Grows Multiple Brands, Accelerates Market Entry, & Reduces Hosting Costs by Up to 25% with Cloudways

About clovio

clovio, founded by Sander Delabie, is a media company operating trusted brands like Best Reviews and Feeling Lucky. With a background in business and digital marketing for major ecommerce brands, Sander established clovio in 2011. The company excels at creating authoritative content that delivers high-quality leads and sales for its advertising partners.

This success created a critical technological challenge. As clovio expanded its platforms and entered new markets, its existing hosting setup became a bottleneck. The need for a flexible, scalable, and reliable foundation became non-negotiable to support their ambitious growth and maintain their high performance standards.

Discover how the strategic shift to a Cloudways managed hosting empowered clovio to achieve new levels of agility and seamless scalability. Read the full case study to explore the measurable impact on their workflow and expansion, and see how this powerful combination drives tangible business growth.

Cloudways: Please tell us about your business in terms of team size, the type of clients you serve, and the markets you focus on. What makes your media company unique in such a competitive space, and what is your main value proposition to clients?

Sander Delabie: Our team counts about 10 clovions. We are a team of content marketing professionals who create written and video content, manage partnerships with our advertisers, set up successful performance-based marketing campaigns, and develop helpful content platforms.

– The clovio team celebrating together, a close-knit group powering diverse media brands.

Best Reviews tailors to brands and vendors in the online software and services space, including companies offering cloud communications services like RingCentral, online security providers like NordVPN, and webinar software providers like WebinarGeek.

Our brand Feeling Lucky is a valuable partner for regulated gambling brands active in Belgium and Portugal, such as bwin, Betano, and Solverde.pt.

We pride ourselves on delivering valuable insights and guidance to our users, making them highly desired and top-converting leads for our advertising partners.

Cloudways: What were the main challenges you faced with your previous hosting setup, whether related to scalability, performance, security, or client satisfaction, that made you start searching for a better alternative like Cloudways?

Sander Delabie: Before we started using Cloudways, we worked with multiple hosting companies.

About 1.5 years ago, we started building new platforms for our existing media brands, while laying the foundations of new media brands like Esthesis. It was more practical and made sense for us to rely on a single hosting provider.

Cloudways: When did hosting become a critical point in your business growth, and how did that timing affect the way you evaluated different solutions and the features you considered non-negotiable for your agency?

Sander Delabie: As we began developing new brands that utilize a variety of technologies and other solutions, including API integrations, we decided it was time to centralize our hosting and partner with a provider that enabled flexibility and rapid scaling.

Cloudways: Where have you noticed the biggest improvements since moving to Cloudways, for example in workflow efficiency, client project delivery, or the way your team collaborates across technical and non-technical roles?

Sander Delabie: Most of our media brands are based on WordPress. We appreciate how Cloudways is well-suited for WordPress websites and how it integrates with other essential technologies. The flexibility of Cloudways enables us to easily set up new server configurations to create new platforms.

– Behind the scenes at a clovio media production, creating high-quality content for digital audiences.

When we created the new platform for our Feeling Lucky media brand, Cloudways made it easy to migrate each country version one by one to the new platform and environment. The website migration of this multi-country brand was hassle-free and resulted in no downtime.

Cloudways: Why did you ultimately choose Cloudways managed hosting over other providers, and which deciding factors, such as speed, security, scalability, cost, or support influenced your choice the most?

Sander Delabie: The Cloudways platform makes it easy to manage servers and applications.

Since we started using Cloudways, we’ve opened Feeling Lucky websites in new geographic markets. The Cloudways platform makes it straightforward to migrate applications from one server to another, allowing for convenient scaling up and down.

Cloudways: Which Cloudways features, like vertical scaling, staging environments, or automated backups, have delivered the most value to your agency, and how have they directly impacted the results you provide for your clients?

Sander Delabie: We decided to develop the new platform for our flagship brand Best Reviews, on a staging environment on Cloudways.

Once we took the new website live, scaling of our live environment went smoothly as traffic spiked. At the same time, we were pushing new updates rapidly to fix bugs and apply optimizations.

– Cloudways’ Vertical Scaling gave clovio the agility to deploy new media brands and handle surges effortlessly.

Cloudways: How has website performance improved for your brands since switching to Cloudways, in terms of loading speed, uptime, and responsiveness, and what measurable benefits such as client retention or satisfaction have followed?

Sander Delabie: The secure Cloudways Platform is easy to use, with minimal hurdles, saving our business time.

The backup and restore feature of Cloudways has proven to be reliable and very valuable to us. We’ve relied on the backup and restore to quickly revert updates that didn’t perform well in our live environment.

Using free Let’s Encrypt and our own SSL certificates is fast and secure. In the past, these tasks consumed significant development time from our web development team.

– clovio’s workspace reflects its focus on productivity, precision, and brand-driven performance.

Cloudways: What has been your experience with Cloudways customer support and technical guidance, and how has that level of assistance helped your agency resolve client issues quickly and maintain a professional service standard?

Sander Delabie: We’ve always experienced Cloudways to be readily available in case we encountered any problems. The support documentation is concise and has clarified many questions and challenges we encountered.

Cloudways: How do you view Cloudways Copilot, an AI-powered assistant that helps with troubleshooting, recommendations, and optimization? Do you see it as a valuable tool for agencies like yours and how could it shape your hosting strategy in the future?

Sander Delabie: We’re thrilled to see Cloudways is adopting AI to optimize how its clients make the most of their websites and apps. We don’t have any experience with Cloudways Copilot yet, but we are eager to try it soon.

Cloudways: Would you recommend Cloudways to other agencies or businesses in your niche, and if so, what advice would you share with them to help them take full advantage of the platform based on your own hosting journey?

Sander Delabie: clovio has been able to push out new updates faster since we rely on Cloudways. We can now set up new projects for both new and existing media brands in a more cost- and time-efficient manner than before, providing us with the scalability we were seeking.

In a highly competitive environment like affiliate marketing, we achieve greater success due to our high level of agility. We highly recommend Cloudways to anyone seeking a hosting solution provider that scales with their business.

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