How VisionLine made web hosting problem-free on DigitalOcean

Web development company VisionLine, based in New Jersey, runs and manages hundreds of websites for clients small and large all over the U.S. With more than 1000 clients relying on VisionLine to keep their websites up and running, hosting reliability is absolutely the top concern of Bryan Klugh, Partner at VisionLine. Having mixed results with hosting partners in the past, VisionLine turned to DigitalOcean to make provisioning new websites simpler, faster, and problem-free.

Transition to DigitalOcean

VisionLine’s small team primarily spends their time maintaining and growing their client base. The previous provider they were using to host their clients’ websites was consistently costing the team hours of work that would be better spent elsewhere. What’s more, when they needed help from their hosting provider—which was much more often than the team liked—support was unresponsive and slow. Eventually, a VisionLine developer suggested the team try out DigitalOcean Droplets for their simplicity.

“It went really, really well,” Bryan Klugh said. “It was a project where we needed to adjust resources on the fly, up and down, based on serious traffic they were getting from a national advertising campaign they were running. We needed something that we could easily just slide the scale and increase resources.” Using a Droplet provisioned precisely the way they needed, the VisionLine team was impressed at how easy it was to scale up and down.

One account being hosted on DigitalOcean quickly grew to multiple accounts hosted on DigitalOcean. Initially, the high availability of dedicated Droplets was the big selling point for the team: they needed hosting that would just work easily, no matter the traffic. The VisionLine devs linked DigitalOcean to the team’s Forge account so they could spin up a basic site on a dedicated Droplet in a matter of moments. “We did the math on it,” Bryan explained. “And we said, ‘We can give every single client a dedicated IP with dedicated resources for roughly the same as what we’re paying now and hopefully have less problems.’ And it worked out. We ended up having considerably fewer problems on DigitalOcean.” Soon the team began moving more and more of their clients over to dedicated Droplets for better security, reliability, and simplicity.

DigitalOcean has provided incredibly reliable infrastructure at an affordable price and features that make all the difference. As Bryan said, “The ability to just edit the resources on any Droplet in like 30 seconds is one of the coolest things.” Over time, DigitalOcean has helped VisionLine focus on delivering exceptional experiences day in and day out for their customers and not get bogged down in trouble-shooting their hosting provider.

In one case, a big client of VisionLine’s asked the team to shut down a website of one franchise location. “Well, in the naming convention in our Forge, I decommissioned the wrong franchise and took an active, live franchise completely offline and deleted it.” In the moments after the mistake, Bryan thought he would have to go back to the files and rebuild the website from scratch. But he thought to ask DigitalOcean Support for help. The Support team helped Bryan get the website back online in about 15 minutes. “I got on with DigitalOcean’s live chat support and somebody from DO pulled it, put it on a new Droplet, hit a button, and provisioned a new Droplet. It was totally my fault, but DigitalOcean Support bailed us out completely.”

Keeping clients happy and steadily growing with DigitalOcean

VisionLine is more than happy with their transition to DigitalOcean. The swap to DigitalOcean has saved the company a lot of time, freeing the team to do more than ever for their clients. “Time is money. So if we’re not chasing problems, my guys can focus on new work.” Bryan went on to say:

“We went from taking smaller customers who were on shared hosting on a larger provider and moving them to their individual Droplets. So we’re not making as much money on those customers. But I think you can make the case that we actually are because we don’t deal with as many problems and the customers are much happier because they say, ‘my site’s really fast.’”

Bryan and the VisionLine team are happy about working with DigitalOcean and plan to keep using dedicated Droplets to support their expanding client list. To the folks at VisionLine, DigitalOcean’s strongest benefit is the consistency and stability of our virtual machines. “We just want to do our job without headaches and DigitalOcean’s team has been complete rock stars when it comes to that. We just don’t have problems.”

“The way DigitalOcean is set up and also just the reliability of your platform—I have no complaints. That’s making my life a lot easier."