ILAC saves 4x on hosting costs and secures decades of student data with Kinsta

Biggest wins with Kinsta

• Protected 18 years of sensitive student data with enterprise-grade security
• Seamlessly migrated 18 mission-critical sites with no downtime
• Improved site performance by 25–30%, ensuring faster, more reliable access for students worldwide
• Eliminated performance issues by ensuring each site runs in its own dedicated resources
• Gained predictable, transparent scaling without surprise costs or vendor-driven upsells

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ILAC (International Language Academy of Canada) is one of the country’s largest private education providers, serving 50,000 students from 95+ countries each year.

ILAC helps international students by offering English language training, career colleges, and higher education pathways.

But ILAC’s website hosting setup was making things difficult.

ILAC’s leaders had a tough decision to make. They could keep paying more for the same problems, or they could find a partner who could provide transparency, stability, and trust.

For ILAC’s Director of Technology, Kris Bhoutika, the biggest fear was clear:
Could they migrate decades of sensitive student data and 18 interconnected websites without losing traffic, disrupting operations, or undermining student experiences?

The problem

ILAC’s websites were hosted on a shared VPS plan at WP Engine. As the number of WordPress sites grew, performance and security issues became harder to ignore.

When WP Engine, ILAC’s previous hosting vendor, told them to spend four times more money without showing proof, the company knew it needed a partner that was more transparent and trustworthy.

• Shared VPS meant one heavy site slowed down the others.
• Scaling was costly and ineffective. Upgrades were the only solution offered, without addressing the root causes.
• Recurring security breaches consumed time and resources.
• No visibility into performance bottlenecks.
• Manual site management across 18 installations left the team constantly firefighting.

This was especially frustrating for ILAC’s Director of Technology, Kris Bhoutika, when an account executive insisted the company needed to quadruple its hosting spend. When the team asked for more information, they weren’t given any. For Kris, that was the last straw.

ILAC needed a hosting partner that was reliable and transparent. One that offered stability, clarity, and tools designed specifically for growth.

The solution

ILAC wanted more than just faster load times. They needed a hosting partner who could secure nearly two decades of student records, manage 18 WordPress sites without any problems, and offer transparency instead of costly upsells.

Kinsta’s platform and team provided exactly that, and more:

The migration

Migrating a single website is challenging. Migrating 18, where some are decades old, could be a nightmare. Yet Kinsta’s expert migration team turned ILAC’s largest fear, downtime and disruption, into a smooth, seamless experience.

How Kinsta delivered:

• Planned migrations in close coordination with ILAC’s team
• Paused updates and prepared backups on ILAC’s side
• Kinsta handled transfers, testing, and troubleshooting
• Legacy sites with 18+ years of content moved without issue
• All migrations completed over a few months with zero downtime

In just a few months, all 18 critical ILAC websites were fully migrated without disruption.

The results

Switching to Kinsta gave ILAC a faster, more secure, and easier-to-manage platform for its 18 critical sites.

30% faster performance that scales globally

Within days of migration, ILAC’s websites became 25–30% faster after enabling Kinsta’s global CDN and caching. Students in more than 95 countries now access applications, registrations, and course content without delays.

ILAC has seen improvements in performance. They haven’t had any outages or security issues since switching. This fixed the problems that used to waste staff time.

Security that delivers peace of mind

Before Kinsta, ILAC often had problems with compromised websites. Even though they had good security measures, their old hosting provider couldn’t fully protect them. After switching to Kinsta, ILAC’s security problems were completely solved.

Lower cost, more resources with custom plans

After using Kinsta for a year, ILAC reviewed its use and made changes to its plan with the help of its Kinsta Account Manager. The result was lower overall hosting costs and higher PHP workers and resources to handle traffic efficiently.

Support that feels like part of the team

ILAC repeatedly points to Kinsta’s support as a true differentiator. When an English assessment app that thousands of international students rely on before applying suddenly became inaccessible, Kinsta’s Support Team stepped in immediately. Although the issue wasn’t hosting-related, the team helped diagnose the problem and guided ILAC toward a solution.

This wasn’t a one-time thing. Whenever ILAC had a concern about a performance issue, Kinsta’s engineers offered more than basic advice. They looked closely at the data, found the problems, and suggested clear steps to improve the situation.

Even with large, existing databases, Kinsta’s engineers provided guidance to improve performance.

The result: ILAC sees Kinsta not as a vendor, but as part of its own team — fast, knowledgeable, and always willing to go the extra mile.

Visibility and time savings

Before Kinsta, ILAC’s technology team spent a lot of time trying to figure out what was slowing down their websites. They also had to manually update dozens of plugins across 18 sites. With Kinsta, those tasks became faster, clearer, and more efficient.

Kinsta’s Application Performance Monitoring (APM) lets ILAC find slowdowns right away, whether it’s a problematic search or a big database. Instead of trying things out and seeing what works, the team can use clear data.

The ability to adjust resources based on demand adds to that flexibility. ILAC can scale up or down as needed, ensuring stability today while preparing for future growth.

Another major win has been global plugin management, which replaced a tedious, manual process with a single dashboard view for all sites and staging environments.

This has also allowed ILAC to try new ideas. The team has already used Kinsta’s application and database hosting to test an AI-powered assessment engine. This shows how Kinsta helps with daily work and new ideas for the future.

The conclusion

For ILAC, switching to Kinsta solved their biggest problems. They were worried about losing traffic during migration, managing bloated legacy sites, recurring hacks, and relying on an untrustworthy vendor.

Instead, they got faster, safer, worry-free hosting that saves money while allowing Kris’s team to focus on what matters most — their students.

Explore Kinsta for Higher Education: https://kinsta.com/solutions/education/

With Kinsta, we know it works, and we rely on it completely. We don’t have to think twice about it. That frees us to focus our energy on other priorities.