ONE18MEDIA is a full-service digital marketing agency in Long Island, New York. Headed by CEO AJ Sonnick, the team has ten employees spread across the tri-state area — from Long Island to New Jersey.
With a focus on growing businesses no matter their size, ONE18MEDIA has brought tangible results and bolstered profits for clients across a multitude of industries.
Whether it is HVAC, non-profit organizations, healthcare, or the tech industry, ONE18MEDIA has become a trusted name in digital marketing through its near-decade of hard work and dedication.
Read on to discover how Kinsta has supported ONE18MEDIA’s mission to deliver exceptional digital marketing solutions to its clients.
Snapshot
- Industry: Digital Marketing Agency
- Number of Employees: 10
The Problem
ONE18MEDIA experienced challenges with their previous web service provider, including escalating costs, slow website speeds, and inadequate support, which negatively impacted client satisfaction and business performance.
ONE18MEDIA was using another web service provider for their hosting platform needs — however, they found that the cost was becoming increasingly expensive. They were also having frequent issues with website speed, which was making it difficult for customers to access client sites and their content.
The slow loading speeds cost clients, potential customers, and revenue. Additionally, ONE18MEDIA had numerous issues with support and downtime, meaning sites would go down without warning or explanation. This caused further frustration for customers and site visitors, potentially leading to even more loss of business.
“We have been providing website and now full digital marketing services to customers across the United States since 2014. We have worked with small hosting companies, shared hosting providers, and dedicated enterprise-level hosts,” said ONE18MEDIA CEO AJ Sonnick.
“At our previous host, we had been with them for a long time. They were extremely secretive about their server environments and extremely deceptive. It had come to a point where they just wanted more money for unnecessary upgrades, which didn’t even fix the issues as promised.”
“Sites were taking seconds [to load], which is not good. More than a second, and you’re done,” said ONE18MEDIA web developer Tom Bove. “They were telling us we were having all these errors, but they were nondescript. It was very non-transparent.”
Bove added that ONE18MEDIA had reached their “resource limit” despite being unaware of what said resources were. “They kept pushing us [to] upgrade,” which entailed massive monthly fees around the ballpark of at least an additional $500-$1000 a month.
The Solution
With a wide range of clients across multiple industries, ONE18MEDIA was looking for a hosting solution that could handle all the technical details while they focus on delivering exceptional service. Kinsta’s cost-effective hosting solutions, transparent resources, and reliable support proved to be the ideal choice for the agency.
ONE18MEDIA decided to switch to Kinsta for its superior hosting performance and reliability compared to other platforms at a lower cost. Kinsta is powered by the Google Cloud Platform, which provides increased scalability and improved website performance compared to other web hosts. Furthermore, customer support is outstanding, and they offer 24/7 live chat support, so any queries we have can be dealt with quickly and efficiently. Take it from the digital marketing experts themselves!
“Kinsta stood out for obvious reasons… cost, very transparent resources available… and the support as well. Giving us the leeway and tools to do what we need to do — while also being there to support us when necessary,” said Bove.
“After interviewing several other premium, dedicated WordPress website hosting providers, we picked Kinsta because of their transparency and, honestly, the confidence they gave us. We heard about Kinsta from Google and being in the industry. What stood out was [their] quick proposal turnaround time and initial responsiveness. [Their] team was willing and ready to get us going and always available to answer all of our questions,” Sonnick noted.
It makes all the sense in the world that speed, transparency, and responsiveness mattered to ONE18MEDIA’s web development team. Consider the fact that they have over 30 clients (and an employee base of just 10!) spread across multiple industries — all with varying requirements. With ONE18MEDIA’s full-service offerings — providing clients with copywriting, social media, web development, and personalized growth strategies — it is imperative that a prominent digital presence be maintained. But how does a company go about that when its web service providers engage in shady business practices and offer minimal support?
The Result
Since migrating to Kinsta, ONE18MEDIA’s clients have experienced up to a 1600% boost in website speed and uptime reliability, resulting in improved customer satisfaction and increased revenue opportunities. Kinsta’s competitive pricing plans have further reduced their hosting costs while maintaining top-notch performance.
Speed
As the digital world continues to evolve, website speed is becoming an increasingly important factor. Websites that are slow to load, or suffer from frequent downtime, can lead to customers losing interest and leaving the website before they’ve had a chance to explore its content. Studies have shown that people now have shorter attention spans than ever before, with most users expecting a web page to load in 2-3 seconds or less. If a website takes longer than this, potential customers will likely leave and not return. This means lost revenue and fewer conversions for businesses.
Fortunately, companies like Kinsta provide reliable infrastructure, optimized environments, and high levels of customer service so businesses can focus on what matters most: creating great content and providing excellent experiences for their customers.
“Initially, we saw a huge increase in speed without running tests. You could just tell. Kinsta customer service, we [rarely interacted] with so far — but when we have had to, it has been a great experience. Previously we had to go through multiple levels of tech support to get what we needed. There’s none of that at Kinsta,” Sonnick said in praise of the new web service providers.
One of ONE18MEDIA’s clients, a private college preparatory co-ed high school, had a notoriously long page load time of around 8 seconds to load. With Kinsta, that load time shot down to less than a second — representing a 1600% decrease!
Bove made a salient point in noting how Kinsta’s programming language is up-to-date. While this initially posed a challenge in migrating old websites, Kinsta made the process a breeze — getting the old sites up in minutes through their dedicated customer support, while assisting ONE18MEDIA’s web development team through the process.
Transparency
“The thing that made us make the switch and go through all the pain of migrating everything was the transparency. Being able to see what we’re doing, what they have available — what’s the CPU? What’s the RAM available? … You need to know what you’re running,” said Bove. Compare this to ONE18MEDIA’s former web service provider’s response. When asking for such resources, Bove noted that they would default to upgrading rather than offering help. “They simply wouldn’t answer our questions. They would go to, ‘Well, you can upgrade … you can upgrade for this fee!’ Very sales-heavy.”
Kinsta’s transparency is an invaluable asset to web developers, in stark contrast to the approach of ONE18MEDIA’s former web service provider. With Kinsta, developers can access a highly detailed dashboard with real-time data on their CPU and RAM usage, giving them more visibility into how their websites are performing. Furthermore, this commitment to transparency is highlighted by Kinsta’s 24/7 expert chat support. With this, ONE18MEDIA’s web developers sleep better at night knowing that problematic sites won’t go down and will run without a hitch — and in the off case that a site does go down, Kinsta will be there to help.
Log Files
For all you web aficionados out there, Bove even noted that Kinsta would even provide log files. “The [former web service provider] gave us little snippets that happened. Here [at Kinsta], you can actually log on to the server through Command Line and poke around [and] look at actual log files. As a developer, that’s kind of important to get around and do what you need to do.”
For those not in the know, log files are, in Bove’s words: “When someone visits a site, an entry is made — logging everything that occurs.”
Errors
Errors, however, were the real bane of the web development team’s existence. “We want to make sure that if there’s a problem, we can diagnose it properly. The big pain point was that we were having these issues, and we couldn’t get any information to solve them — other than ‘give us more money.’ Not the case with Kinsta.”
The Result
“Since switching to Kinsta, there has been an obvious increase in website speed and uptime reliability. Customers now enjoy a smooth browsing experience on ONE18MEDIA-powered sites, as pages load faster than before, and there are significantly fewer downtime instances than before the switchover.
In addition to this, customer satisfaction levels have risen due to the improved performance of the website—leading more people back onto our site and therefore increasing revenue opportunities for us. What’s more, because of their competitive pricing plans, we have seen a drop in hosting costs overall—allowing us to reduce expenses but still benefit from top-level hosting performance.”
