CrucianPoint is a full-service agency based in St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands. The company was founded in 2010 with a mission to provide user-centered design and development services.
They serve a wide variety of clients, from small and medium businesses to government agencies, to offer them the same level of custom software, website design and development, and hosting services offered by large multinational firms at rates they can afford.
With over 10 years of experience, CrucianPoint’s team helps streamline client sites to comply with modern standards of user navigation and Internet marketing. They incorporate theories from human perception and action, human cognition, and behavioral research methodologies into their design practices.
Shomari Moorehead, Founder of CrucianPoint, explained what led them to Kinsta, what this web hosting alliance means for them in terms of performance and cost-effectiveness, and how it reshaped their site creation, testing, and management routines.
Snapshot
- Industry: Software Design & Marketing
- Business size: 6 employees
The problem
Time-consuming server setup on VPS hosting
CrucianPoint worked with several hosting providers, from HostGator and 1&1 to ReadyHosting. Prior to moving to Kinsta, they used MediaTemple’s platform to host sites on Virtual Private Servers.
As the agency grew, VPS hosting became a burden with site management, and site creation became tedious. Shomari explains: “It became time-consuming managing Virtual Private Servers, especially when we kept dev and production sites separate. Right around the time GoDaddy bought MediaTemple, we started looking for an alternative solution.”
More complicated service and ownership changes at the previous provider
CrucianPoint’s team felt that the service they used became more complicated and did not meet their expectations. The turning point came with MediaTemple’s acquisition, and they decided that they did not want to continue managing multiple virtual private servers: “GoDaddy started off as an excellent domain name registrar, and for many years they were our go-to registrar. As GoDaddy grew, their services became more complicated. The MediaTemple WordPress hosting didn’t work as expected. We knew that once GoDaddy took over, the service may not improve to the level we expected.”
Thus, the search for a new provider began: “We have clients across a variety of industries, all with different needs, so we needed a platform that worked really well. We couldn’t afford downtime from security issues or traffic.”
The solution
Performance, security, and ease of use were their non-negotiables in their quest for a suitable solution. Shomari and his team came across Kinsta’s Managed WordPress hosting, and after a few weeks of research and tests, they felt they had found the right service provider. “What stood out to us was the hosting performance, simple but extensive MyKinsta dashboard, knowledgeable tech support and Malware Security Pledge, available pricing options, and 24/7/365 support.”
From VPS to Managed Hosting: Smoother site creation with one-click staging
Kinsta’s Managed WordPress hosting is different from traditional shared or VPS hosting infrastructures. Each Kinsta site is built inside its own isolated containers powered by Google Cloud’s Premium Tier network and fastest servers. Paired with Kinsta tools at hand to smoothen site management and WordPress development, switching to Kinsta has brought a new web hosting experience for CrucianPoint’s team. One tool, in particular, has significantly contributed to their success, bringing their team a faster and more efficient workflow. That is one-click staging.
Here’s how Shomari reflects on the immediate effects they experienced in their daily workflow thanks to Kinsta’s staging: “In the past, we would spin up VPS servers when building new sites for clients or when testing WordPress updates. Every Kinsta site comes with a complimentary staging site, and additional sites can be added at a nominal cost, so there is no need for separate VPS servers. We’re also saving on labor and time.”
More cost-effective solution with flexible billing
Shomari considers cost savings as one of the biggest benefits of moving to Kinsta: “We save by not having to pay for additional VPS servers or pay separately for features like CDN and Edge Caching.”
The scalable WordPress hosting plans at Kinsta allow clients to choose a suitable solution for their sites and businesses with the possibility to upgrade or downgrade at any time and customizations available to accommodate higher resource needs. The core infrastructure is the same across all plans with an enterprise-level Cloudflare integration with features like the CDN network, Edge Caching, Early Hints, HTTP/3 support, or wildcard SSL included at no additional cost. There are no hidden fees, and no client is locked into a fixed-term contract.
Shomari also compliments Kinsta’s flexible billing cycles and plan customizations and its Billing Team’s responsiveness to his company’s needs: “For budgeting purposes, we like to have invoices on the first of the month. Kinsta had no problem adjusting our billing date. When we exceeded the highest plan available on the Kinsta website, they created a custom plan that fit our needs as we continue to bring on new clients.”
Fast and secure infrastructure with Google and Cloudflare
During the process of finding a new hosting provider, CrucianPoint’s team ran TTFB (Time to First Byte) tests; Kinsta performed best compared to the former VPS host and other hosting providers tested. Leveraging Google Cloud’s Premium Tier network and its fastest C2 and C3D machines, as well as an extensive CDN network powered by Cloudflare, Kinsta ensures a performance-optimized infrastructure for all customers. Thus, Kinsta continued to live up to the standards when tested on GTMetrix as well.
It wasn’t just the performance results that convinced CrucianPoint that they had made the right decision. Shomari praises Kinsta’s SLA-backed uptime, quality support, and plugin vulnerability reporting: “The uptime has been amazing, and the staff has been proactive in notifying us when security vulnerabilities are discovered for the plugins we use. They’ve become an extension of our internal support team.”
Powerful tool stack readily available from MyKinsta
MyKinsta has a wide range of tools available with just one click to make site management and development workflows fast and easy. Tools such as Edge Caching, staging, and or CDN helped CrucianPoint increase its efficiency. They also took advantage of Kinsta’s local WordPress development tool, DevKinsta, to test changes locally and push them from staging to the live site.
Shomari recalled one specific instance when the use of DevKinsta contributed to much faster, hassle-free site creation: “We developed a custom solution for a real estate client. The system worked well, but the API calls were excessive. We used DevKinsta to quickly create a local copy of the site, modify the API calls, and then push it back to the staging server. There was no need for SFTP, database backups, or modifying any settings. It just worked.”
The result
Business growth through reimagined daily site maintenance and development workflows
Moving from VPS hosting to Kinsta’s Managed WordPress Hosting completely changed CrucianPoint‘s daily processes. Right after migrating to Kinsta, CrucianPoint began experiencing the platform’s benefits—a smoother site setup workflow and cost savings. Thanks to Kinsta’s built-in tools, the former 30-60-minute process of creating new WordPress sites was reduced to 5 minutes.
Not only has site creation become faster, Shomari reflects: “Our monthly maintenance routine is now focused solely on WordPress core and plugin updates. We no longer need to focus on server updates, work that could add 5-10 hours per month.”
The successful web hosting alliance with Kinsta has allowed CrucianPoint to focus on business growth. The seamless site creation process and simplified development and maintenance workflows led to a significant increase in the company’s customer base. Shomari says, “In the 4 years we’ve been with Kinsta, we’ve added at least one new web design and hosting client every month, and we still have time to grow our custom software and mobile application business.”
Up to 50% performance improvement
Kinsta’s performance stood out for CrucianPoint during the initial phase of researching hosting providers. Beyond the performance-optimized core infrastructure, Kinsta offers several features (such as Edge Caching, Early Hints, or CDN) that users can enable to further improve their sites’ load times without having to engage in heavy coding or purchasing additional plugins or add-ons.
CrucianPoint’s team was blown away by the results they saw when they enabled Kinsta’s Edge Caching and CDN on their sites: “Many of our WordPress sites were 20-50% faster without any code modifications and went up by at least one letter grade on GTMetrix.”
High-quality hosting that triggered a revision of CMS strategy
The level and quality of service experienced at Kinsta led CrucianPoint to seek similar standards for hosting their Drupal sites. The unsuccessful search resulted in a paradigm shift in CrucianPoint’s CMS strategy: “We tried to find a hosting provider for Drupal sites that was just as easy as Kinsta. As much as we like Drupal for the market it serves, we could not find a hosting platform that matched Kinsta. We decided it would be better to migrate all Drupal sites to WordPress and Kinsta.”
Shomari explains that while other companies have offered hosting solutions, they haven’t found a competing solution:
“We’ve had other companies contact us and try to convince us to use their services for hosting and website backups, but when I explain the quality and simplicity of Kinsta, they realize they can’t compete with it.”
From server management to client management
Shomari explained and emphasized that Kinsta’s hosting has brought a new focus to their business. It allowed them to provide an overall better client experience instead of managing and adding new servers on a daily basis. They’ve harnessed the power of MyKinsta’s tools to take their business one step further, leading them to create a customized system for client management.
“The support for WP-CLI and the recent release of the Kinsta API has provided us with tools to integrate our hosting services with the rest of our business. We’ve created a custom CRM that allows our team to see clients, billing, websites, and projects. Long term, this improves our communication and relationships with our clients. With a centralized dashboard for managing client relationships, we can work on significantly expanding our web design, hosting, and maintenance services without increasing the cost of doing business.”
Shomari also compliments Kinsta’s service improvements and feature updates: “Every new feature release seems to have been carefully thought out rather than just a feature release for the sake of it.”
The conclusion
CrucianPoint left VPS hosting behind to find better performance, a more cost-effective solution that helped them reshape their site creation, maintenance and development routine. Making the switch to Kinsta also resulted in a change in CrucianPoint’s CMS strategy, brought business growth, and opened new dimensions in the company’s client management.
What’s a better way to close the case study than sharing Shomari’s compliments on Kinsta’s service?
