How Jala Design enforces a non-negotiable reliability standard for its clients

Intro

Jala Design is a Sydney-based WordPress agency built on long-term relationships. The team works closely with clients across the business, arts, and nonprofit sectors, delivering digital strategy, design, development, accessibility, and ongoing support through their Active Care plans.

Because of the clients they work with, reliability is a top priority. Many of the sites Jala manages support fundraising campaigns, ticket launches, and other high-stakes moments. Their clients trust them to deliver websites that are stable, fast, and dependable, not just at launch, but over the long term.

• Company: Jala Design
• Industry: Website Design & Development
• Team: 11 people
• Founded: 2011
• Website: jaladesign.com.au/

That expectation shapes how Jala operates. They work exclusively with WordPress and avoid one-size-fits-all solutions, taking the time to understand each client’s goals, audience, and constraints.

By 2020, Jala began to see signs that its existing hosting setup was no longer supporting that standard. Performance issues became more frequent, deployments took longer than they should have, and support responses were slower and less reliable. While the team could work around these issues, doing so added friction and unnecessary risk to client work.

That gap between how Jala wanted to work and what their infrastructure could support led them to reassess their hosting setup.

The challenge: When the infrastructure stopped meeting the standard

Jala had been hosting client sites on a dedicated server with Crucial. While the setup worked well initially, over time, it became harder to maintain consistent performance and get timely support when issues arose. Routine tasks started to require more effort, and the team found themselves spending time managing infrastructure instead of focusing on client delivery.

The situation came into sharper focus during a nonprofit fundraising campaign, when a donation page went down at a critical moment. Despite repeated attempts, Jala was unable to reach their hosting provider for over six hours. During that time, the team manually redirected traffic, handled urgent client communication, and worked to limit the impact on the campaign.

Not long after, a larger issue followed. A prolonged outage in the Sydney data centre took all client sites offline for multiple days. While the outage itself was outside their control, it confirmed something the team had already been questioning. The infrastructure they were relying on no longer matched the level of reliability they expected to provide.

“Our clients expect seamless experiences,” says Jarrad Langdon, Managing Director at Jala Design. “We needed hosting that allowed us to meet those expectations without compromise.”

At that point, the decision became clear. Continuing to manage risk and work around limitations wasn’t sustainable. Jala needed a more resilient hosting platform, backed by modern infrastructure and responsive support, so they could focus on delivering high-quality work and maintaining the trust they had built with clients.

The solution: Choosing a platform built for reliability

After the outage, Jala made the decision to move all client sites to Kinsta. The priority was clear from the start: they needed a hosting platform that delivered consistent performance, strong uptime, and fast, knowledgeable support, without requiring constant oversight from their team.

The migration itself was straightforward. Over the course of two weeks, Jala moved their client sites to Kinsta without disruption. Automated daily backups were already in place, security was handled at the platform level, and the team didn’t need to spend time configuring or maintaining infrastructure. From day one, the setup has always been stable and predictable.

One of the biggest changes was how much easier it became to manage sites day to day. The MyKinsta dashboard brought site management, backups, analytics, and performance monitoring into one place. Tasks that once required multiple tools or manual work came built into the platform, freeing up hours of the team’s time.

Kinsta also changed how Jala handled development and testing. The team set up staging environments quickly and relied on them to test updates before pushing changes live. DevKinsta became part of their regular workflow, allowing developers to spin up local environments, test changes, and move updates through staging without extra setup or cleanup.

Support worked differently as well. When questions or issues came up, Jala could contact Kinsta’s support team and get clear answers without long delays. That made launches and time-sensitive updates easier to manage, because the team knew help was available if needed.

By moving to Kinsta, Jala delivered reliability and peace of mind to their customers by replacing a fragile hosting setup with a platform that handled performance, security, and support at the infrastructure level. That shift removed much of the manual work that had slowed the team down, making it easier to deliver consistently across client sites.

The partnership: A hosting partner built for agency teams

As the team settled into their new workflow on Kinsta, another benefit became just as meaningful: the Agency Partner Program.

The program offered support in the places agencies often feel stretched, including sales materials, training, co-marketing opportunities, and resources to help position hosting as part of a broader service. It also opened the door to referral leads and a dedicated partner manager, creating resilience and new revenue pathways without adding to the team’s workload.

For an agency refining its processes and reinforcing client trust, that additional layer of support made the long-term direction feel clearer and more achievable with a hosting partner moving in step with their goals.

The result: Set up for the long run

Once their sites were running on Kinsta, the team stopped managing infrastructure and started building again. Client sites became faster and more consistent, and the worry of another prolonged outage faded into the background. For Jala Design — and for the clients who had lived through the downtime with them — that reliability rebuilt confidence quickly.

“Kinsta has become a foundational part of how we operate,” says Jarrad. “It lets us focus fully on building great websites and strong client relationships.”

Hosting simply works in the background, letting the team move at the rhythm their clients expect. The clarity that came with a stable platform affected everything else: timelines, confidence, and the kind of projects they felt comfortable taking on. With a stable infrastructure and fewer surprises pulling them off course, they could plan projects with more certainty, support clients more effectively, and approach complex builds with greater confidence.

“Knowing we have a reliable, high-performance hosting partner allows us to shift our focus away from infrastructure concerns and fully concentrate on what we do best, which is building great websites and developing strong client relationships,” Jarrad shares.

Looking ahead

Partnering with Kinsta has given the team more room to refine how they build and maintain sites. “Having a platform that not only performs but evolves is critical for an agency like ours,” says Jarrad Langdon. And Jarrad has taken that evolution to the next level, using Kinsta’s sister brand Sevalla to build Jala Forge, their own agency management portal.

What used to be a question of reliability is no longer something they plan around. With a steady foundation in place, Jala Design can take on more complex work, scale at their own pace, and move toward the kind of projects that matter most to their clients. Kinsta has become a dependable part of that direction. A steady piece of their system as they take on new challenges and position themselves even more firmly in the segments where reliability, accessibility, and performance matter most.