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Snapshot
Clients cornershop creative, an award-winning web services firm founded in 2012, is dedicated to listening closely to our nonprofit and small business clients. They specialise in assisting businesses in making the most of the internet. Their team has the technicals experience to make your website design, fundraising, advocacy, sales, or engagement goals a reality!
They’ve been focusing on WordPress for years, with much of our work for the nonprofit sectors focused on integrating the WordPress sites they build with an variety of nonprofit-focused CRM platforms. Based in the United States but operating as a fully distributed team from the start, they’ve been focusing on WordPress for years, with much of our work for the nonprofit sectors focused on integrating the WordPress sites they build with an variety of nonprofit-focused CRM platforms. Clients cornershop creative began with a three-team team and has grown to around 30 people, including designers, engineers, project managers, and content and SEO experts.
Ben Byrne, Co-Founder of Cornershop Creative, was interviewed for this article.
The problem at hand
We didn’t want to get into a position where our clients expected us to be there 24/7 for any hosting concerns, so we sought to “meet clients where they were” in term of hosting, letting them call the shots on where their websites were housed.
“However, we found that we were spending too much time understanding the quirks of too many hosts over time, so we decided to propose three alternative host options based on the client’s demands.” Even with those “recommended hosts,” though, we were running across problems – a lot of them!
For example, we occasionally ran into problems with how our slightly tweaked base WordPress interacted with the host’s architecture. Despite the fact that these adjustments were simple, they proved to cause mayhem with some hosts (especially DreamPress).
We also had issues with hosts not allowing us to create up agency accounts (each site was attached to a different account), downtime, updates breaking everything, unhelpful support that blamed us for any problems, and more. In short, if there was a problem you might have with a host, we had encountered it!
It became clears to us that we needed a single host that could see the entire scope of our clients base and provide performant hosting and excellent support at a price point that our nonprofit clients cornershop creative — including the smallest, most budget-conscious — could afford, while also handling sites with over 100,000 monthly visits.”
The Alternative
We began our search for a new host by generating a big list of possible hosts based on our previous experiences as well as online evaluations and studies. We had a lot of criteria and preferences, so it was a struggle.
“We had a look at everything:
- Does the host provide technical details such as the number of CPU cores or PHP workers?
- Is git, ssh, and wp-cli supported by the host? (We utilise these tools to manage deployments and updates, therefore this was non-negotiable)
- Is it possible to support agency-style accounts with the host?
- Is multisite supported by the host? (This wasn’t critical, but it was something to think about)
- Does the host provide staging areas?
- Does the host provide a CDN or other caching services?
- Does the host provide a lot of storage space?
When many hosts were missing a few, it was evident early on that Kinsta was one of the few “finals” choices who checked all of these boxes. We took some time after we had a shortlist of seven or eight finalists to set up sites on each host and run our own jMeter load tests to examine how the hosts ran strong traffic that avoided the caching that cheaper hosts rely on to deliver decent performance.
Kinsta performed admirably in our testing, especially considering its low pricing. After then, it was just an matter of dealing with a sales agent to acquire answers to our remaining queries and clients cornershop creative. Kinsta’s ability to provide us with complete SSH+git access put them over the top.”
As a result,
We’ve been quite pleased with our decision to work with Kinsta, and we now host over 110 sites on the platform, which receive over 1.2 million monthly views. “We’ve made a lot of smart judgments here over the years, and I feel that Kinsta was one of the better ones,” I told my co-founder the other day.
“Compared to our former ‘preferred’ hosts, our support team now handles with far fewer downtime-related concerns.”
The chat support provided by clients cornershop creative is simple and easy to use, and the customer service experts are competent and friendly. We also found the migration team to be outstanding at both communication and technical intricacies of transferring over 60 sites onto Kinsta from a variety of hosts (including DNS-management problems).
What we couldn’t have predicted when we first started working with Kinsta in early 2021 were the modifications that Kinsta would implement, which continue to prove how wise our decision was.
Kinsta’s shift to Cloudflare — which was our preferred performance/security proxy before we started working with Kinsta — has been a pain at times, but it was the best decision we could make for ourselves and our clients. The advancements in staging, such as selective push, have been tremendous. And, as we’ve increased the number of sites our plan can support, we’ve found the sales team to be easy to work with.
We began with the Enterprise 1 plan and have already upgraded to a custom agency plan that supports up to 150 sites! Without Kinsta, I don’t believe we would have been able to develop as much as we have in the last year.”
There Aren’t Any Others When It Comes to Resources and Documentation
One of the most enjoyable aspects of migrating to Kinsta has been how frequently our team (especially our developers) sees Kinsta blog entries pop up in our Google clients cornershop creative results as we look for plugins, solve technical problems, or discover best practises.
Not only for technical documentation on the Kinsta platform, but also for WordPress development in general, the Kinsta blog is a fantastic resource.
