Breaking Free From Limitations To Provide More For Customers: How Taoti Creative Did It

“Not one second of downtime or outage in seven months…” 

As a digital creative agency, Taoti Creative relies on two key things to keep their clients happy: Speed and flexibility. Their main goal, today and always, is to meet client needs, helping clients do exactly what they wanted to do with no constraints. This is an important part of their ethos - in their own words, “delivering meaningful and measurable results.” 

Taoti Creative was doing most of their clients’ site and app hosting with a large Drupal-focused hosting provider. Some things were working well, but they would run into frequent issues wherein there wasn’t enough platform flexibility to do more specific things customers needed. 

Clients with special needs, unique resources, and certain integrations weren’t working well with this hosting provider - Taoti needed an alternative because the structure was starting to chafe. Customers were beginning to notice the limitations, and Taoti had a strongly vested need to continue providing the very best service for them. Their current solution wasn’t going to allow them to do that.

Taoti relied on their hosting provider at the time for a search technology called Solr that’s used for Drupal builds. The provider used a really old version of Solr for a while, and as a result, it took Taoti a long time to build out websites because they were working with an outdated version. Solr was the straw that broke the camel’s back - it was causing them too many problems. 

“We found this unacceptable. We really needed an alternative - we were just wasting time and limiting our clients,” said Taoti’s Vice President of Technology. “Timelines were not being held up, we were limited, and clients weren’t getting the best version of our services. It made us look really bad to our more technically-minded clients.” 

Taoti had familiarity with amazee.io from conferences and knowledge about the Drupal hosting community, and they decided it was finally time to reach out and see if we could help.

Choosing a more flexible solution

Ultimately, it was the team at amazee.io that helped Taoti make the final decision to move. 

“Our contact at amazee.io helped us through the entire process,” said the company’s VP of technology. “Everything was so flexible, so solutions-oriented, and so positive. He did so much of the work and held our hand through it as we figured everything out.” 

Flexibility and customization were absolutely essential to Taoti when approaching a new solution. One of their biggest clients, an entertainment company in the USA, needed a static IP for secure communications, and because of the infrastructure of their previous hosting provider, this wasn’t always available. However, once they moved this account to amazee.io, the secure IP was constantly available and consistently reliable. 

In addition, their other provider hosts only Drupal, which is a common CMS, but Taoti recently started hosting some new React-based sites, and they needed a very specific feature called Federated Search. amazee.io was able to easily host React and provide the Federated Search feature, removing another barrier for Taoti in providing their clients with exactly what they needed. 

To adopt the platform, Taoti had to build a business case for their CEO to request moving sites over. They wanted to move over one of their largest customers so the risks were enormous. 

When moving over this client, they had a challenging situation to face: The client website updates constantly every 4 minutes, except for a very specific 4-hour window. This was the only time frame they’d have to move it over, and if anything went wrong, the entire site could go down. amazee.io’s team helped them coordinate and orchestrate the move, and we worked together to come up with a plan “B” in case something went wrong. Nobody likes tight timelines with nasty surprises and no alternatives. 

Constant flexibility and customization, and 0% downtime 

Now, Taoti enjoys constant stability and much less chaos in their day-to-day operations with the client. In their opinion, many companies take peace for granted - because they’ve gotten used to accepting chaos. But since amazee.io took over, Taoti has celebrated the “silent successes” every day. One thing they don’t have to deal with anymore? Constant outages - historically at least an hour per month on the previous platform. And since the client’s site updates every 4 minutes, an outage is highly noticeable and unsavory, and causes very unhappy end users.

“Every time the site of a high-profile client goes down, we have to do an incident report. It’s really not good,” said Rolando. “Now, with amazee.io, we didn’t have a single moment of downtime in the first 7 months since switching over the client site. Most platform providers can’t offer that.” 

The flexibility offered by amazee.io’s team is unparalleled, according to Rolando. Taoti’s other provider locks their clients into specific workflows, which can be helpful with simple requirements. But when more customization and flexibility is needed, Taoti now reaches for amazee.io’s platform. This way, the way they manage environments, branches, features, and supporting services is entirely up to them. These new freedoms have allowed Taoti to integrate new workflows and change the way they add value to their customer’s sites  - which in turn changes the game for their own clients. 

This flexibility is inherent to amazee.io’s ZeroOps application delivery platform, which allows companies of all types to run the latest technologies and frameworks on the platform so they’re never limited. Our goal is to provide the most performant ZeroOps Application Delivery Hub for development, deployment, and end-user experiences possible paired with outstanding customer-centric support and service, which is consistently reliable and reliably human.

We encourage you to contact us for a chat if any part of Taoti’s story looks familiar to you. We’re betting we can help you solve your issues, whatever they may be.

Published: April 5, 2023