Breaking Free from Limitations to Provide More for Customers

"Not one second of downtime or outage in seven months…" 

As a digital creative agency, Taoti Creative relies on two key things to keep its clients happy: speed and flexibility. Today and always, their main goal is to meet client needs, helping clients do precisely what they want without constraints. This is an essential part of their ethos—in their own words, "delivering meaningful and measurable results." 

Taoti Creative was hosting most of its clients' sites and applications with a large Drupal-focused hosting provider. Some things were working well, but they frequently ran into issues where there wasn't enough platform flexibility to do more specific things customers needed. 

Clients with special needs, unique resources, and specific integrations weren't working well with this hosting provider - Taoti needed an alternative because the structure was starting to chafe. Customers began noticing the limitations, and Taoti was strongly required to continue providing the best service. 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, which is used for Drupal builds. The provider used an ancient 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of Solr for a while, and as a result, it took Taoti a long time to build out websites because they were working with an outdated version.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, 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 was familiar with amazee.io from conferences and knew about the Drupal hosting community, so they decided it was finally time to contact us and see if we could help.

Choosing a more flexible solution

Ultimately, the team at amazee.io 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. 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, a standard CMS, but Taoti recently started hosting some new React-based sites, and they needed a particular feature called Federated Search. amazee.io could 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: The client's website updates constantly every 4 minutes, except for a particular 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 devise 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 

Today, Taoti enjoys constant stability and much less chaos in its 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" daily. 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 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 seven 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 are needed, Taoti now reaches for amazee.io's platform. This way, how 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 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. We’re betting we can help you solve your issues.

Published: April 5, 2023