Founded in 2009, Yoko Co is a web agency dedicated to serving purpose-driven organizations. Their team specializes in digital strategy, design, engineering, marketing, branding, and production, exclusively partnering with nonprofits and for-profits focused on making a positive impact in the world—organizations that prioritize purpose over profit.

“We’re a very mission-driven organization, and our job is really about being an amplifier for the positive impacts that our clients make – whether that’s building a community as a professional association, protecting animal rights, providing life-saving healthcare, or anything else.”

The Yoko Co team

This approach is at the heart of all of the team’s engagements. Yoko Co takes great care to ensure that each team member truly understand the impact their clients are seeking to make and the challenges that might be standing in their way. 

“Basically, we do our homework, and then we very intentionally focus our efforts in the places where it counts the most.” 

“We judge our success by the success of our clients, and we’ve hosted numerous websites and applications on Kinsta for a wide variety of clients that have made significant and measurable positive impacts on the world.”

Yoko Co’s Creative Directory, Max Lollar explained how their hosting partnership with Kinsta aligned with the company’s mission and helped them deliver much faster sites to their clients.

Company overview

  • Sector: Digital agency
  • Company size: 30 team members

The problem

Over the years, Yoko Co has worked with many hosting providers, including many of the big managed WordPress hosting companies. They’ve tried running their own dedicated servers on various platforms and partnered with smaller boutique hosts for custom setups. 

In the past, we tended to use dedicated servers and then share the resources among smaller clients. For larger clients, we’d run them on their own dedicated machine.

But this kind of hosting setup came with its own set of problems:

  • Inconsistent performance. When multiple websites share resources on a dedicated server, the performance of one site can negatively impact the others. For example, if one site experiences a traffic spike or requires additional resources (like CPU or RAM), it can slow down other sites on the same server. This lack of resource isolation means that smaller clients’ sites, when hosted together, can experience inconsistent performance during high-traffic periods. 
  • Inefficient management and limited scalability. Managing dedicated servers for larger clients became inefficient as the number of clients or traffic grew. For example, if a client’s site suddenly required more resources due to growth or traffic surges, Yoko Co had to manually upgrade the server. This process demanded more time and resources to monitor, upgrade, and maintain.
  • Complex hosting setups. Performance can vary widely when using different hosting setups, like dedicated servers, smaller boutique hosts, and custom configurations. This complexity makes it harder for Yoko Co to predict performance, manage server environments, or quickly scale up when necessary.
  • Security vulnerabilities. In a shared hosting environment, a security breach, malware infection, or hacking attempt on one client’s site can put the security of others at risk. This can lead to downtime, data loss, or reputational damage for multiple clients hosted on the same server.

The solution

By partnering with a web host built to handle even the most complex WordPress installations, Yoko Co can host multiple WordPress sites without any worries about performance, security, and scalability.

Kinsta’s isolated container technology

Kinsta’s isolated container technology allows Yoko Co to provide a reliable and secure experience for every client site they host. 

Yoko Co no longer needs to manually upgrade servers or switch environments with Kinsta’s flexible hosting solutions featuring an overage notification system. It alerts users when they reach 80% to 100% of their resource consumption. 

Enable or disable overage notifications for your WordPress sites.
Enable or disable overage notifications for your WordPress sites.

Even if the resource limit is exceeded, client sites continue to perform smoothly, with only an overage fee applied. This flexible, user-friendly approach ensures Yoko Co’s sites can handle increased traffic without compromising performance or requiring manual intervention.

“It’s because a lot of the websites we build are pretty huge – we’re talking 10,000+ pieces of content, with complex filtering and search tools, and customized SSO (single sign-on) for protected content and integrations with CRMs or external databases.”

Yoko Co’s most loved Kinsta features

Coming from a complex and time-consuming infrastructure, the ease of use of the Kinsta platform has been a breath of fresh air for the Yoko Co team. When asked about the Kinsta features that empowered them the most, they answered:

  • MyKinsta dashboard. This easy-to-use dashboard gives you a quick overview of your WordPress sites, monthly visits, billing, disk and CDN usage, data transfer, unique visitors, and useful resources.

“The centralized interface for managing all of our sites. We host a lot of sites, and this helps our team keep a close eye on everything.” 

  • Google Cloud Platform. Kinsta is a high-performance hosting platform powered by Google Cloud Platform. While other hosts use Google’s infrastructure too, we’re the only one that puts customers on the fastest virtual machines in all 37 Google data centers.
  • Built-in staging environments.Kinsta’s staging gives you a flexible, safe space to build and test websites. Since it mirrors your live site, you can trust the results and make changes with confidence.
  • Cloudflare integration. The free Cloudflare integration secures all sites hosted on Kinsta, providing enterprise-level firewall and DDoS protection. Additionally Yoko Co clients have access to a high-performance HTTP/3 CDN powered by Cloudflare’s robust global network, that spans 260+ cities in more than 100 countries.
  • Automated backups. In addition to the peace of mind that the isolated containers bring, Kinsta automatically backs up clients’ sites daily and provides manual backup options. Yoko Co can rest easy knowing that client sites are in good hands. If help is needed, Kinsta’s support team is ready to help 24/7/365.

“Kinsta’s hosting has helped us deliver these things in a way that performs well. It’s also critical that we are able to run automated backups for our clients and sync them to offsite servers for redundancy.”

devkinsta
DevKinsta is a free local environment packed with features.

“Our engineers particularly appreciate DevKinsta which helps them work locally in a pretty seamless way.”

Results

Yoko Co measures success through the achievements of its clients and their positive impact on society. Their key milestones with Kinsta include:

  • Connecting more than 30k individuals a month with EMDR therapists can help them process their trauma. (EMDRIA’s Find an EMDR Therapist Directory)
  • Helping over 30k professional researchers, clinicians, and individuals studying pain to sort through the mountains of research to find the most valuable research to follow out of a database of more than 55k recommended research papers so they can alleviate pain in their patients and society. (IASP’s Papers of the Week)
  • Building and launching a website for the American Historical Association with more than 25k pieces of content representing history going all the way back to 1884 which is enabling teachers and academics to improve how they teach history.
  • Building a class scheduling and registration system for a cancer support organization that is used by tens of thousands of people who are personally impacted by cancer. Launched a WordPress multisite with 64 separate subsites that are individually managed, for the regional chapters of a public works association that serves professionals who are dedicated to improving all aspects of public works.

Up to 75% faster WordPress site performance

Switching to Kinsta has given Yoko Co the ability to provide each website they manage with its own dedicated hosting environment. This is a huge improvement, as many of their new clients come from slow and unreliable hosting setups. Once these sites are moved to Kinsta, there’s always a “night and day difference.”

Powering WordPress beyond limitations

Yoko Co relies on Kinsta’s advanced features to manage websites with high traffic or complex setups. 

“Our primary platform is WordPress, but we’re keenly aware of its strengths and weaknesses, so being able to go beyond the limitations of using WordPress as a traditional CMS without having to change hosting providers has been crucial for some of our projects.” 

For instance, they use standalone databases and static site hosting to handle sudden spikes in visitors and ensure smooth performance. The following are also critical in managing more demanding projects:

“Additionally, we frequently make use of the built-in Application Performance Monitoring and logs to quickly diagnose and resolve issues. These tools help save our team hours of effort every month.”

Global boost for client sites

Kinsta uses the global Google Cloud network as its infrastructure, which gives Yoko Co a big advantage for clients with international audiences. With this setup, Yoko Co can choose data centers that are closer to their clients’ users based on their location. 

A glimpse of Yoko Co's vast client portfolio
A glimpse of Yoko Co’s vast client portfolio

“Additionally, being able to rely on the worldwide Google Cloud network as the underlying infrastructure and having the ability to strategically select a data center based on geolocation has been a significant performance boost for our clients. Most of them have global audiences and run events and campaigns that are targeted to specific regions of the world.”

With Kinsta, Yoko Co can ensure that users experience faster performance and a better overall experience no matter where they are located.

99.9% uptime with strong security and expert support

Kinsta offers a 99.9% SLA-backed uptime guarantee that ensures all websites in the platform are up and running at all times. When an unexpected issue arises, Kinsta’s expert support team is ready to diagnose and resolve it quickly.

“By working closely with Kinsta support and using the automated backup system, we can recover quickly when issues arise—often restoring the site and getting it back online in under an hour after identifying a critical problem.”

Save time and resources with Kinsta tools and features

With Kinsta, Yoko Co now saves a couple of hours per site launch, and because troubleshooting is easier, it also reduces the time needed for ongoing maintenance. For a company managing many Kinsta-powered sites, these time savings really add up.

The Yoko Co team
The Yoko Co team

“Kinsta’s seamless integration with Cloudflare’s CDN has made our clients’ sites more resilient to DDOS and brute force attacks. With other hosts, we usually have to configure Cloudflare manually, which takes time and can cause confusion due to multiple caching layers.” 

“Between the easy setup and the simpler maintenance, having CloudFlare built-in like this can save us a couple of hours per site launch, not to mention the ongoing time savings for troubleshooting (and when you have a large number of Kinsta-powered sites like us, that adds up to a lot).”

Conclusion

Kinsta empowers Yoko Co to go beyond just traditional WordPress hosting. They can host static sites, applications, and standalone databases which gives their team flexibility to meet the unique needs of their clients.