Success Story – Pixelstart

Haarlem, Netherlands

WooCommerce Success Story / Pixelstart

Pixelstart describe themselves as a ‘Rockstar internet agency, specialized in web design, branding and development’.

Based in Haarlem, in the Netherlands they specialize in delivering pixel-perfect WooCommerce websites that show enormous attention to detail. Keeping at the forefront of the newest trends in design and development is extremely important to them and has resulted in them working for a number of high-profile clients including Colourful Rebel, Knolpower and Dancefair.


We spoke with Mischa Sigtermans, founder of Pixelstart to find out the challenges of running a Digital Agency delivering WooCommerce websites and why Pressidium offers the optimal hosting solution for his clients.

How many clients do you host and manage websites for?

We have experienced rapid growth over the last few months… the last time I checked, we had just over 80 clients who’s sites we designed, host and manage. I’m pleased that demand is so high for our services and we already have more on the horizon.

Which were your last two web hosting providers?

When we first launched the business we ran our own server but this quickly proved to be hard to maintain as the business grew. We looked at managed WordPress hosting providers, especially ones that could handle WooCommerce sites and initially went with Presslabs. Their service was good but we were unable to make changes to our own databases and their control panel lacked certain features. Although we were happy with them in principle, we decided to look at alternate providers. Pressidium and Kinsta were shortlisted and we initially decided to try out Kinsta in late 2019. They are one of the premium providers in the industry and rightfully so. Unfortunately though every business is different and has different requirements, after a few months with them we realised that they couldn’t meet our business’s exact needs.

What problems have you previously experienced with hosting providers?

Despite using hosting providers described as ‘fully managed WordPress’ we found the opposite to be true. Previously, migrations have been very difficult. A whole raft of issues occurred which were hard to sort through. With one provider, once we had fully migrated, things went downhill when one of our large WooCommerce clients had their store go down as the server couldn’t handle the load. We feel strongly that a managed WordPress host should be on top of their game and help clients by monitoring sites for downtime and taking proactive action in these instances. Because of this we decided to look for a host that could deliver both the support and systems we needed.

When did you make the move to Pressidium?

We made the decision to move to Pressidium in early 2020 and have enjoyed hosting our sites with you ever since! Pressidium has not only met, but exceeded our expectations, and we only wished that we had made this decision sooner.

Mischa Sigtermans
Founder, Pixelstart

What convinced you to choose Pressidium?

Because our Agency has so many WooCommerce sites that we host on behalf of clients, it was important that your platform could handle these. WooCommerce can be tricky to host and caching can be a particular nightmare. Your engineering team did a great job of explaining how you optimize for WooCommerce which was really helpful.

Pressidium has not only met, but exceeded our expectations, and we only wished that we had made this decision sooner.

Pressidium migrated your websites – how did the migration process go?

Pressidium made the move seriously easy. We provided your team with a list of priority websites and these were moved first. We changed our DNS to Cloudflare which meant Pressidium could clone our sites and then flick the switch to point to these when they had been tested and we were happy everything was working well. I think downtime was precisely zero, important when you consider that our clients would begin to lose sales if there was any extended downtime.

What has your experience with our support team been like?

Fantastic. Really good. It feels like they are part of our team which is really reassuring. One thing we were worried about was the lack of live chat with support. We’ve since realized that this is totally unnecessary as your support response times are so quick. It does actually make everything easier to communicate via email as no-one loses the thread and to be honest, it feels like we’re on live chat anyway because you always get back to us so fast.

Mischa Sigtermans
Founder, Pixelstart

Our experience with your support team is has been fantastic. Really good. It feels like they are part of our team which is really reassuring.

Are there any features of our platform you particularly like?

The Dashboard is great and, with so many websites to manage, it makes it a lot simpler having complete control over these from one panel. The search and replace function for url’s in the database is also brilliant… we like the way it is built in and runs automatically whenever we clone a site or use your staging.

  • Great Dashboard
  • Database Search & Replace function

Have there been any standout ‘wow’ moments you’ve experienced since hosting with us?

Yes actually. We were using the CDN service for most of our sites and, as anyone who uses a CDN will know, this can get expensive quite quickly. Your account exec, Lefteris, got in touch and pointed out that most of our website traffic was actually based in Europe (we are using your European datacentre). He suggested that because of this there was no need to use the CDN for these sites so we could turn it off and not see any reduction in load times. We followed his advice and saved ourselves $$$ in the process. How many businesses would actually try and save you money this way? The honesty really impressed us. Moving to Pressidium is the best thing we’ve done. Keep it up!

Moving to Pressidium is the best thing we’ve done. Keep it up!


Want to talk to Pixelstart about a new WooCommerce website for your business?

Visit their website