Founded in 2008, Bookswarm is a UK-based digital agency that exclusively delivers website and ecommerce projects for publishers, authors, literary agents, and other book-related businesses in the United Kingdom.
Throughout the years, the agency has worked with numerous high-profile publishers like Bloomsbury, Faber, and Headline, bestseller authors from Alice Oseman (“Heartstopper”) to Stephen King, and legendary literary agents like Felicity Bryan and Susanna Lea.
Bookswarm has become a well-established brand in the book publishing world; its team regularly attends book fairs and trade shows. The year 2021 brought a huge milestone for the company when it was granted the Services to Independent Publishers Award from the Independent Publishers Guild.
Get your reading glasses and join us as we discuss how Simon Appleby, Founder, and Director of Bookswarm, reveals how his agency’s sites became faster and more secure with Kinsta’s help.
Snapshot
- Industry: Book publishing
- Business size: 5 team members
- Kinsta Plan: Custom Agency Plan
The problem
Simon of Bookswarm wanted his holidays back
Bookswarm used Plesk hosting for their sites. Eventually, they moved to Cloudways—it seemed to be a suitable solution. But after a few years, its infrastructure could not keep up with the company’s business growth. Managing multiple sites on the platform created extra tasks for Simon:
“As the number of sites we hosted increased, I realized I was spending too much time monitoring server loads and fighting fires. The tipping point was planning for a long trip abroad, during which I knew I needed our hosting to be bombproof so I could enjoy a stress-free holiday!”
Security threats on shared hosting infrastructure
It wasn’t just server monitoring that raised concerns for Bookswarm; using different server setups poses a security threat. One solution Bookswarm used for its sites was shared hosting.
“Having each site isolated from the next was the key thing for me – on Cloudways, we couldn’t have each site on its own server (that would have been over 200 servers), so it was a mix of shared servers and dedicated boxes – and that meant an attack on one was an attack on others.”
With shared hosting, multiple sites are managed on the same server. The shared setup may affect site performance (especially if there are resource-intensive sites on the server) but is also less secure.
The solution
Highly secure core infrastructure with advanced security
“I wanted hosting that just worked, so we could focus on supporting our clients and delivering new projects without getting distracted by performance and security challenges.”
After his experience with the mixed server setup, Simon wanted to ensure that his sites were isolated from each other. Kinsta’s isolated container technology solved this for the Bookswarm team.
Even if a client hosts multiple sites on the platform, they won’t share resources or affect each other in any way. This technology significantly reduces security issues; if one site gets hacked, the risk doesn’t spread to others.
Kinsta’s isolated container technology provides secure core infrastructure for sites which is further strengthened with built-in features like regular uptime monitoring (480/ day/ site), daily backups – retainable for up to 30 days, or 99.9% SLA-backed uptime.
Additionally, our Malware Security Pledge means that in the event of a hack, Kinsta’s team will work with the client for free to fix issues and restore the site.
Better latency and increased site protection with Cloudflare
Kinsta includes Cloudflare integration for all clients, including Bookswarm. It gives Simon and his team access to a fast, global CDN network to help reduce the latency of each of their client sites.
Beyond its features to help increase performance (like Edge Caching or Early Hints), Kinsta’s Cloudflare integration unlocks numerous security features such as hardware firewall, DDoS protection, HTTP/3 support, and wildcard SSL. With these, Bookswarm can guarantee their clients peace of mind without the need for complex security systems, or additional third-party site protection services.
Smooth site migrations led by a team of experts
Switching hosting providers when you manage dozens or hundreds of client sites can be dreadful—the same was true for Bookswarm. Kinsta’s free, unlimited migrations handled by its expert team made the process stress-free for Simon and his team. He compliments the team, saying:
“The migration team deserves my eternal gratitude – we were taking around 220 websites onto Kinsta, which was a lot of migrations to keep track of!”
“Some of the sites were older, so there were issues with migrating to PHP 8, but they did a brilliant job keeping tabs on all the different migrations, helping resolve the ones with issues, and keeping it all moving along with good humor.”
Kinsta provides a free, unlimited migration service. An expert Migrations team is responsible for scheduling migrations, moving sites to Kinsta’s platform, and preventing downtime or issues. A cleanup of infected sites is also included for free.
The result
DDoS issues decreased, site performance enhanced
After moving to Kinsta, Bookswarm saw massive improvements in site performance and security. The switch got them out of a risky shared hosting situation and into a more reliable, secure platform. Now, Bookswarm manages its sites on Kinsta’s solid infrastructure.
“The combination of isolated containers and Cloudflare means that we have seen a marked decrease in DDoS style issues, and everything is running much better.”
The switch to Kinsta not only brought benefits in site security but an improvement in site speed, too, allowing Simon to focus on growing his business:
“Page speed has definitely increased, along with back-end performance on complex sites. Downtime is considerably less, and as a result, I sometimes spend whole days without having to think about hosting issues at all!”
Stress-free hosting you can trust even on long vacations
“I’ve been massively impressed by [Kinsta’s] support, which is helpful, friendly, and knowledgeable – and I love that I can host each site in the best location for the client. Most of our clients are in the UK, but we have sites hosted in the US, Australia and mainland Europe too.”
“I do feel it’s freed me up to spend more time doing what I want to do, project managing the development of more sites to add to Kinsta.”
Migrating client sites to Kinsta brought Bookswarm relief. They now feel reassured that their sites are in good hands. The managed hosting features and built-in tools helped reduce the time spent fixing issues and worrying about site slowdowns or crashes. Freed from constant site monitoring, Simon can now focus more on growing his agency.
“Kinsta has unquestionably taken the stress out of hosting – giving us the confidence to strongly recommend to clients that they allow us to host their completed websites.”
Conclusion
Bookswarm entered a new era in its business operations with the help of Kinsta. Trusting our company with its client sites has brought peace of mind and helped stabilize growth. As a result, the agency is now close to reaching a milestone with Kinsta.
Kinsta has freed me up to spend more time doing what I want to do, project managing the development of more sites. It won’t be too long before we have 250 live websites on Kinsta (we’re currently on 236 in production and 13 in development). Maybe we should have a party when we hit the big 250?!
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