How dev agency efelle reduced overhead and scaled its business

Key takeaways for agencies

Simplicity

When a single developer is able to maintain and manage all of the infrastructures within an agency’s client portfolio, they don’t need to hire large (and costly) DevOps teams.

Service and reliability

DigitalOcean’s uptime guarantee and SLA translates to reliability, which helps agencies who are accountable by their clients if something goes wrong. If an issue does arise, it’s easy to get support with around-the-clock support teams.

Pricing

With DigitalOcean’s transparent pricing and cost savings, agencies can improve their margins, reinvest their savings into their core business, and significantly impact their bottom line.

About efelle

Based in Seattle, efelle creative is an award-winning website and platform development agency. Founded in 2005, the company now has more than 40 employees, including three backend developers and six front-end developers. Today, the agency serves more than 600 clients in 28 states, offering professional online marketing services and industry-leading software platforms to over a dozen industry segments, notably without any outsourcing.

In 2015, efelle used six different hosting providers to handle their clients’ infrastructures. Each of them suffered from performance issues, and efelle was forced to deal with the constant headache of their servers going down. Then, when they switched to managed services they found it was impossible to keep their costs down. When efelle found DigitalOcean, they found a solution that was a one-stop-shop and was both reliable and predictable.

Why DigitalOcean?

Moving to DigitalOcean also meant reduced overhead. “We can do more with less as we don’t need to use client budget to build infrastructure,” notes systems administrator Cameron Van Orman. The agency could use DigitalOcean’s out of the box solutions, and then add customizability as needed.

An additional benefit was the reliability around cost: “There are no surprises and customers don’t get unexpected expenses,” says Van Orman. “For example, given the generous bandwidth pricing we rarely have to think about excess bandwidth costs.” They can now offer even more services – managing their clients’ DNS, snapshots and custom images – without having to ask clients to pay more.

As efelle began the process of migrating over their customers to DigitalOcean, they worried about what the migration of legacy apps would look like. But once they started using it, they noticed that there was a lot of flexibility. It didn’t matter which version of Ubuntu they planned to use; they could just do it.

They found DigitalOcean’s extensive collection of tutorials and documentations extremely useful, in addition to the helpful million-strong community of developers. Van Orman shares that DigitalOcean has great customer service, but teasingly says they don’t really use it that often. If a customer continually needs support, he reasons, then there’s an issue with the product. Not an issue with DigitalOcean: “Support is there as a bonus,” he says.

One of the first partners to join DigitalOcean’s Solutions Partner Program, efelle is excited to continue to run their client work on DigitalOcean.

With DigitalOcean, efelle creative doesn’t need to hire and manage additional people to handle their infrastructure, because the services efficiently scale with the business. “That allows us to focus budget on the things our clients want.”