One DMCA notice took down 200 client sites
Advanced Integrated Marketing is a marketing agency in Arlington, Texas, run by President and CEO Brig Serman. Like most agencies of its size, it hosts its clients’ websites itself, which means roughly a hundred businesses, and the 200 websites between them, depend on decisions the agency makes about infrastructure.
The agency had been with A2 Hosting for years and was content. Then A2 Hosting was acquired and rebranded as Hosting.com, and Brig noticed the service change.
“My company used A2 Hosting for years. When they were purchased by Hosting.com, we noticed a significant drop in service levels.”
What ended the relationship was not a gradual decline. It was a single incident. One client website received a DMCA takedown warning, and rather than dealing with that one site, the response was to disable the entire server.
“They grossly overreacted and disabled the entire server for 12 hours. That took down the websites of 100 clients. Even worse, they were completely non-responsive to providing support. It appeared that the support rep that disabled the server was 8 hours ahead and went home for the night, leaving the situation unresolved.”
A hundred businesses offline for half a day, and nobody at the other end of the ticket. The agency was left explaining an outage it had not caused and could not fix.
The worry before moving
Moving 200 live client sites is not a decision an agency takes lightly, and Brig’s concern was the obvious one.
“Disruption to business operations and the risk of client impact if website problems surfaced during the transition.”
Our engineers moved every site by hand, rebuilt each one on a private URL for the agency to check, and left the DNS change until Brig was satisfied. His account of how it went is one word long.
“Flawlessly!”
What actually changed
We ask every customer for numbers, because a case study without them is a testimonial wearing a suit. On this one the honest answer is that the biggest change resists measurement.
“Support has been the biggest improvement and the improvement is so good, I couldn’t even begin to measure it with a quantifiable number. We went from being ignored to having a direct line to the CEO!”
Day to day, the difference shows up in what no longer lands on his desk.
“Support tickets get handled promptly and correctly 100% of the time. Previously, support tickets were falling through the cracks and I was the one that had to address the poor support with our paying clients.”
Asked how much time the agency gets back in a month, Brig reframed the question, and his answer is a better description of what good hosting does than anything we would have written.
“The support capabilities and strength of the hosting environment has allowed us to get more productive work done, faster, and with better client outcomes. I don’t view that as a time savings, more as an enabler of business growth.”
Would he recommend it
We asked what he would say to another agency weighing up the move. The answer came back as a question.
“Why haven’t they already done it?”
What he told us to fix
We ask every customer what we could do better, and we publish the answer. Brig gave us two things, and the first is a fair warning rather than a complaint.
“Continue to grow your team so that customers like me don’t burn out your team.”
The second was a push to go further than hosting: to look for the incremental places where our engineers’ technical depth could add value to his clients’ businesses, and revenue to his. Both are on the table internally, and we would rather say that here than pretend the feedback was all compliments.
About Advanced Integrated Marketing
Advanced Integrated Marketing Inc. is a full-service marketing agency based in Arlington, Texas, led by President and CEO Brig Serman. The agency builds and manages websites for around a hundred clients, all now hosted on FastCow agency hosting.