How DigitalOcean enables Nixa to manage impactful projects

Nixa is a Canadian web development agency that develops software, websites, and applications for a wide range of businesses and non-profit organizations. Nixa runs all of their projects on DigitalOcean, and has found that the predictable and affordable pricing and simple cloud computing tools provided by DigitalOcean enables them to pass cost savings and efficiencies on to their clients.

A simple partner for managing multiple projects

Nixa has been in business for 10 years, and is recognized as one of the top web development agencies in Canada. Their clients rely on them to create reliable and functional websites and applications. Projects they have worked on include a SaaS application for medical professionals that leverages big data, websites for the Government of Canada, and artificial intelligence in the music industry.

Nixa is dedicated to working with businesses and non-profits to do good for their community. All of their work is done in-house by a team of 40 employees, and they needed a turnkey cloud solution that enabled them to manage everything for their clients. Managing multiple accounts at once can be complex, but using DigitalOcean, the Nixa team is able to easily isolate and manage each customer’s cloud computing solutions.

“I have experience in other cloud computing environments, which can make multiple managing customers very complex. Using DigitalOcean it’s a lot easier to manage customers than in other platforms–every domain or web application has its own Droplet and the customer doesn’t have to manage anything.”

Nixa also appreciates the intuitiveness of DigitalOcean’s platform, especially as a small business that does not have large teams of cloud specialists to manage the workloads of their clients. Products like load balancers and SSL certificates are easy to set up in DigitalOcean’s UI.

“DigitalOcean is intuitive and powerful. Using hyperscalers setting up something like a load balancer can be complex, but using DigitalOcean setting it up is very simple–you just click and add it. We can keep our team of DevOps and SysAdmins lean to manage our 200+ customers because of the ease of use of DigitalOcean.”

Working with DigitalOcean, Nixa can offer more comprehensive high availability solutions to non-profits that may otherwise be out of reach.

Nixa and DigitalOcean work together on impactful projects

In addition to the efficiencies Nixa experiences due to DigitalOcean’s simplicity, being able to accurately predict the costs helps them pass along savings to their customers. This is especially important for large scale non-profit organizations that are often cost-conscious. One recent example of a non-profit organization Nixa works with is the National Head Start Association. Leveraging DigitalOcean products, Nixa was able to optimize a low income family engagement assessment tool designed specifically for Head Start and Early Head Start programs. The tool measures the parent experience and the impact of programs’ engagement efforts.

Through a series of closed- and open-ended questions, Parent Gauge explores a family’s experience with Head Start and Early Head Start programs. The tool provides immediate feedback to staff regarding family needs, but it also provides data on Head Start Programs’ effectiveness.

Frontline staff—like teachers, family service workers, and home visitors— sit down with families 2-3 times during the year for a twenty minute conversation and get immediate feedback. They enter the responses into the easy-to-use web-based platform. Leadership gets access to quantitative data to inform program design and measure progress throughout the year.

“We want to do as much as we can to ease the burden on our non-profit customers. The efficiency that we have as a company thanks to DigitalOcean is inherently beneficial to non-profits since most of their budget goes to mission-based projects rather than infrastructure or technology costs. Products like App Platform and DigitalOcean Functions continue to drive efficiencies for these organizations.”

In the future, Nixa looks to continue to grow its customer base with the support of DigitalOcean. They also want to continue to enable those in the non-profit space, as this important work is core to their culture and helps their team make an impact in their community.