"We needed a hosting provider that had fast support and fast servers. We found them with EuroVPS!”

Can you describe your business and what you do?

We are a digital design and marketing agency based in Athens, Greece. We mainly work with clients in the hotel and tourism industry and provide a range of services including website design and development, SEO optimization and paid digital campaigns in Google Ads, Facebook Ads etc.

How large is your team?

We are a small team (we like to consider ourselves a boutique agency!) consisting of my partner Paul and myself along with a team of three other people in-house and a number of external partners we work with on a consistent basis.

Kollective was formed in late 2011 but Paul and I had been working together for many years before that.

What sort of clients do you have?

We mainly focus on tourism related businesses and have many hotel and villa clients along with other tourism related firms like yacht charters, day tour operators, transfer operators and similar. We continue to work with a select group of e-shops and b2b businesses which have been with us for many years but our new clientele is pretty much exclusively in the tourism sector.

What’s your niche?

Since both Paul and I are foreigners living in Greece we feel we can offer a unique insight into the minds of travellers thinking about Greece as a holiday destination. Both of us were travellers to Greece before we moved here permanently and we are still amazed by how beautiful the country is and what it can offer to different types of tourist. We feel that this insight allows us to produce websites and marketing campaigns that really do talk to the potential visitor in a way that is both original but also honest. I believe our clients appreciate this approach and our results (if I do say so myself) back this up!

Do you work remote or at an office?

We work at an office, we feel it is important for team building. We have all worked remotely in the past and feel that being part of a team and the day-to-day conversations that occur are an important part of the creative process. It is of course also crucial to have an easy place to meet with clients when needed.

What CMS do you love most?

We work exclusively in WordPress and recommend it to all our clients. We have produced our own launch template which includes a basic package of multi language functionality, SEO best practices, security enhancements and speed optimizations which we then use to build each client’s custom website on. The fact that WordPress is open source is important to us. We do not want to lock our clients into proprietary software solutions that make future edits difficult and/or expensive.

Where were you hosted before EuroVPS?

Our previous hosting provider was in the United Kingdom and we were happy enough with them although their support sometimes took longer than we would have liked. With the Brexit process they decided to no longer accept Euro based accounts so we then started looking at other options.

Why did you switch to EuroVPS?

A colleague originally recommended EuroVPS to us and we then did our due diligence in terms of research. A big plus was the pre sales contact we had with EuroVPS which helped clearly explain the benefits and details behind their packages. We are a design and marketing agency, not an IT company and I really feel that the very technical descriptions most hosting companies use to describe their products is really confusing.

EuroVPS was very clear in their explanations about which service was best for our needs and this certainly made us feel comfortable. It goes without saying that their migration assistance saved us a lot of headaches when it came to moving our sites over to the new server and I will make a special mention of their support for Litespeed which is really crucial for our wordpress clients and makes the websites we design lightning fast!

How does our support help your day to day?

I can really say that the EuroVPS support is second to none! We had various issues with mail and/or server setup (issues of our making, not due to EuroVPS I should stress) that have usually been solved within minutes (literally!). The support team answer tickets at a speed that I think might be unheard of for any other hosting company in the world!

Do you give your customers access to the hosting?

With clients hosted on our reseller server at EuroVPS we do not usually give access to cpanel. It is not needed since we are responsible for the management of the server and the website anyway.

We also have quite a few clients who have their own hosting with EuroVPS. When a client asks us to propose a suitable hosting company it is obvious who we suggest! In this case the client has their own login to the hosting but again we are usually the ones that actually manage the account on their behalf.

How does the price compare to your previous provider?

I was surprised that the price point with EuroVPS actually came in lower than our previous hosting provider. When combined with the support level I was frankly amazed at the pricing! I think that most agencies like ours have become resigned to the fact that reliable hosting is very expensive and you should not expect too much in terms of support unless you are really paying top tier prices. I guess most hosting companies would prefer you to keep believing this!

How did your latency change?

Latency is great and further to that the server speed in general, especially in conjunction with the Litespeed support, means that most client sites are loading on average in under 2 seconds. We place a lot of importance on site loading times and make sure that from a code and design point of view the websites we build are setup for speed. We are thankful that we have found a hosting partner that upholds this dedication on the server side as well.

How do you feel about our support quality?

I think it must be obvious in what I have already said that the EuroVPS support is really out of this world. I cannot remember a ticket we have raised that was not answered within 15 minutes. We had a lot of tickets in the initial migration process and all of them were solved pretty much instantly. We feel like the EuroVPS support team are almost members of our own team! I think that is the best compliment we could possible give – how many people can say that about their current hosting company!?