Cursor

Cursor, a digital agency founded by Daniel Westlake, has grown from spare bedroom start-up to a team of 7 designers and developers working with some of Lincolnshire’s leading companies.

Using a mix of dedicated servers and managed hosting; Cursor selected Bytemark to host many of their client websites and applications. We caught up with Daniel to find out more about their work and why they chose us to support it!

What makes Cursor unique as an agency?

The web moves very fast, and we’ve changed with it. We have to continually refresh our skills to be able to provide our Customers with the results they need online. A great looking website isn’t enough, you’ve got to use technology to solve problems, work smarter and more efficiently. This focus, I believe, sets us apart as an agency and brings our customers return on their investment and competitive advantage online.

Do you find businesses are becoming more ambitious with technology?

It does vary – it’s very much down to making the right steps for each business. We are especially interested in working with people who have an open mind and a culture that is ready to accept change. If you have this in place, then you can make great strides with technology.

I love working with people that ask questions like “I have an idea Dan, it would be terrific if instead of having to do X, we could do Y” or “I think there could be an opportunity to improve Z”. We can then come up with creative problems to help the business change and grow.

Cursor is quite unusual as an agency, I guess. I’m a developer myself and many firms, at least locally, are led by marketers or designers, whereas we’re in a different space. We see technology as our primary strength and using it to build solutions to our customer’s problems.

Why did you start hosting with Bytemark?

We used to host with a number of independent providers, but they all eventually got bought out and service levels dropped. This trend continued for a while until we found Bytemark.

We were looking for a UK based-host – one which was large enough to do things properly, but small enough to have that one-to-one business relationship. I think we found that with Bytemark, as you know what you’re doing on a technical level but manage to maintain that personal relationship with our developers. We’ve gradually migrated the majority of our customer sites to Bytemark, and now we operate three dedicated servers at the York data centre.

Why do you use Bytemark’s managed hosting services?

Initially, we didn’t start off with managed services from Bytemark, mainly because we were using many different platforms and providers. We started with a single dedicated server and gradually consolidated our hosting portfolio with Bytemark.

We now use Bytemark for things beyond the public websites we host, and at the moment we are delivering a lot of APIs which are much more system based. Bytemark has been helpful in setting up technical configurations, managing firewalls and monitoring services so we can deliver high levels of service to our customers.

The support has been excellent. You can ring up and have a chat and speak to people that know what they’re doing straight away, rather than having to go through the different tiers of support which is common with many big providers. These personal relationships are key really. Even though both Cursor and Bytemark are technology businesses, it’s not about the technology; it’s about people.

That’s the ethos Cursor is built on and it goes all the way through everything we do. Great technology is about helping people; Helping them to do their jobs in a more engaging, productive and efficient way. That’s what Cursor is all about and that personal relationship is also what we’re looking for in a hosting partner. We’ve found it with Bytemark.