From the very beginning, we’ve managed our own hosting infrastructure – and done it well. Our experienced team has always known how to fine-tune servers for exceptional website performance. But as specialist WordPress hosting platforms have evolved, providers like Kinsta have taken optimisation even further, layering advanced caching, security, and scalability tools on top of already professional-grade server setups. To continue giving our clients peace of mind with our fully managed support, we’ve formed a direct agency partnership with Kinsta. This move isn’t about fixing a problem – it’s about scaling intelligently and serving the growing needs of our clients even better than before.
The Next Step in Our Hosting Evolution
For years, we’ve managed our own hosting infrastructure from the ground up – dedicated Linux servers and VPS environments that we configured and maintained ourselves. This approach gave us complete control and the ability to deliver finely tuned performance for every website we built. It’s never been a matter of relying on “off-the-shelf” hosting, but of crafting environments that matched our technical standards.
That experience hasn’t gone anywhere. We still run and maintain servers for Laravel and Drupal projects, using automation tools like Ansible to manage systems in world-class data centres. The difference is that our strengths lie in bespoke configurations – those tailored to individual, high-performance websites – rather than large-scale hosting.
As our client base has grown, so have the expectations around scalability, staging, and high-traffic handling. Self-managed infrastructure can only scale so far before routine maintenance, security updates, and provisioning start to consume time better spent improving other website goals.
Moving to Kinsta lets us focus on what we do best – development and innovating – while relying on their platform for the kind of elastic, global scalability that’s hard to match in-house.
Why Kinsta?
When it came to choosing a hosting partner, we weren’t looking for convenience – we were looking for excellence. We invested time in trying multiple leading options but Kinsta stood out as a premium WordPress platform built on the Google Cloud infrastructure, offering the speed, security, and reliability our clients expect. It’s a partnership that aligns perfectly with our standards: powerful technology, handled by people who know WordPress inside out.
For our clients, this means the same personal service from the eighteen73 team, now supported by a world-class hosting backbone. Every site benefits from enhanced performance, robust security, and a global delivery network – all managed seamlessly behind the scenes.
Kinsta’s hosting stack includes edge caching at the global CDN level, ensuring pages load quickly no matter where visitors are. Their built-in Web Application Firewall (WAF) adds an additional layer of protection, actively filtering malicious traffic before it ever reaches the website.
Unlike some other WordPress platforms, Kinsta allows us to run WordPress via PHP’s package manager using our in-house Nebula framework. This enables our developers to work under best practices for efficiency and safety by implementing code testing, governance and deployment workflows.
Behind the platform is a 24/7 support team made up entirely of WordPress specialists – people who understand the ecosystem as deeply as we do. It’s this combination of smart automation and human expertise that makes Kinsta such a natural fit for how we work.
What This Means for Our Clients
For our clients, this transition is about tangible improvements rather than technical change. Every website we host now runs on infrastructure designed for speed, reliability, and peace of mind. Nothing needs to change in terms of how we work together – they still have a single point of contact with us for hosting, maintenance, and support. What has changed is the scale and sophistication of what happens behind the scenes.
Kinsta’s platform automatically handles key performance and security tasks such as daily backups, Cloudflare-powered DDoS protection, and intelligent caching. Staging environments make updates safer and more efficient, while detailed analytics give us real-time visibility of site performance.
Because everything is containerised, each website runs in complete isolation – improving both security and resource efficiency. Combined with their global CDN and network edge, sites are served closer to users for lower latency and faster load times worldwide.
Freedom and Flexibility
Although most of our clients choose to host their websites with us, it’s never a requirement. We’ve always believed that businesses should have the freedom to decide where their websites live. Our hosting service exists simply because it makes sense for so many of our clients – a single, fully managed solution that keeps their site, maintenance, and support in one place.
By partnering with Kinsta, we can offer this convenience without compromise. Clients get all the advantages of a premium, professionally managed environment, while we handle the day-to-day management so they can focus on running their business rather than worrying about servers.
Our direct agency relationship with Kinsta means we can deploy, monitor, and maintain sites on behalf of clients with full administrative control. Every hosting account remains portable and can be transferred at any time if required.
This setup gives clients the best of both worlds: agency-level support from eighteen73, and enterprise-grade infrastructure from Kinsta – with no lock-in and no hidden restrictions.
Still eighteen73
From the outset it was paramount that our standards and client commitments would not be compromised. During the partner selection we disregarded any provider that couldn’t prove themselves to be secure and reliable, didn’t offer UK-based data centres, or didn’t run on green energy.
We have an incredibly good track record for the security and uptime of our websites, which any of our clients can attest to. This is due to the knowledge and care that we put into our servers, and the systematic procedures we have for deploying website code and updates. We have a reputation for not compromising and Kinsta met our needs by running the servers in a very similar way to how we do, meaning no significant workflow changes.
Kinsta offer hosting on servers worldwide using Google Cloud data centres. There’s no more secure location for websites and in order to meet all our clients’ own data policies we ensure that we only use their London data centre unless specifically requested otherwise. This means all WordPress websites are hosted not only with carbon-free energy, but with commitments to minimising water usage as well.
A Thoughtful Investment in the Future
Our decision to move to Kinsta isn’t just about faster servers or smarter caching – it’s about future-proofing the way we deliver digital experiences. As our clients’ websites become more sophisticated and their audiences grow, we want every element of their infrastructure to scale effortlessly with them.
By shifting our WordPress hosting to a managed platform built for enterprise-grade performance, we’ve freed our developers to focus on innovation rather than server administration. It allows us to spend more time building, testing, and improving client websites, and less time maintaining the systems that power them.
This isn’t a change in philosophy, but an evolution of it – taking the same care and precision we’ve always applied, and extending it through a platform that can keep pace with WordPress’ evolving needs.
To Summarise
Moving to Kinsta is part of a broader commitment to continual improvement. It reflects our belief that great websites deserve infrastructure that’s as refined and reliable as their design and content. By combining our in-house expertise with Kinsta’s world-class platform, we’re ensuring that every site we host performs brilliantly today and is ready for whatever tomorrow brings.
If you’re running a high-demand WordPress website and looking for an agency partner who can help you optimise both your site and its hosting, we’d love to talk.
