Shape Works is a WordPress agency that provides custom WordPress design, development, and support services to clients looking to optimize their websites. Their ultimate goal is to help businesses exceed the average lifespan of their websites while minimizing costs and streamlining processes.
To achieve this, Shape Works decided to sign up for Kinsta’s Affiliate Program and Agency Hosting, which allowed them to leverage a mixed model solution to select the most appropriate hosting options for their clients. By utilizing Kinsta’s platform, Shape Works improves efficiency and reduces support requests, ultimately allowing them to focus on their core mission of building excellent, long-lasting websites.
For more insight into Shape Works’ experience with Kinsta, check our interview with Szymon Sporysz, which highlights the positive impact Kinsta has had on their operations, helping them take their business to the next level.
Snapshot
- Industry: WordPress Design and Development
- Number of Employees: 12
The Problem
Shape Works was seeking a hosting provider that could provide a level of service that suited all their clients, and a subscription model that was able to adapt to diverse maintenance and support needs.
To entrepreneurs and business leaders, Shape Works serves as a digital partner that improves business effectiveness by implementing digital strategy. Regardless of the projects, they want to ensure that their clients find the best hosting option with a high level of support.
Shape Works needed an expert, managed solution to be able to accommodate their clients’ hosting and maintenance needs, and at the same time, be able to focus on their WordPress development workflow.
Researching hosting providers, they found that the majority of competitors did not offer certain technical perks which are required for automatic deployments and full codebase version control. Shape Works uses these features to publish code updates without any downtime, simplify their development workflow, and harden the security of their sites.
The Solution
Shape Works use Kinsta’s Affiliate Program to refer larger clients needing direct support access. In parallel, they resell Kinsta’s hosting through their Agency Plan for simpler site setups.
Kinsta proved to be a perfect match for Shape Works. They are able to accommodate their agency’s technical needs and provide flexible subscription solutions to their clients through a mixed model of an Agency Plan and the Affiliate Program.
With the Affiliate Program, agencies and solution providers have their clients individually sign up for Kinsta’s services to fully own their hosting accounts. What’s great about it? Agencies earn commissions for each client subscription.
On the other hand, the Agency Partner Program allows agencies to host and fully manage the maintenance and billing of client sites under one account, an easy and efficient solution for those looking to resell Kinsta.
“The flexibility of being able to offer direct ownership of hosting and direct support access to our larger clients, or resell the agency package for simpler site setups, means that we can spend our time focusing on our core offerings and be much more efficient. Some prefer the ease of one supplier billing for both hosting and development, and others want to have direct control over their plan with Kinsta.
However, one important factor is the amount of traffic. For bigger sites, we always recommend signing up directly via our affiliate link. This is because mixing sites with vastly different needs would increase the amount of administrative work needed to work out the usage and billing for each site.”
Furthermore, with Kinsta, Shape Works is able to utilize automatic deployments and full version control on their sites.
The Result
By alternating the Affiliate and Agency Programs, Shape Works streamlined hosting management for ther clients, and significantly reduced the number of support queries. Their team could focus on delivering the best web experience.
“As a WordPress agency, we know that our clients require a high level of support when hosting their websites. We felt as though, with the expertise that Kinsta offers, introducing clients as part of the Affiliate Program would ensure that the client would be getting the highest level of service across hosting security, reliability, and speed, meaning that we can focus on what we do best, and leave the DevOps to Kinsta.
The Agency plan allows us to quickly and simply host smaller sites whilst still offering the same level of top level support, and we’re happy to do so for customers who are unlikely to see significant spikes in their usage levels.“
Joining both Kinsta’s Affiliate and Agency Programs helped Shape Works decrease the number of WordPress support queries from their clients and increased the efficiency of their team.
The flexibility of taking advantage of both programs allows Shape Works to choose the best hosting solution for its clients without having to worry about the level of the service.
Kinsta’s services bring peace of mind for both Shape Works and their clients, with Shape Works being able to focus on delivering excellent web experiences for their clients and clients getting the best-in-class hosting and expert support for their projects.
