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Danielle Holmes had put a hypothetical to the back of her mind for years. She ran Black Nova, a UK web agency built on a foundation of people as much as hardware, and she knew it. “I used to wonder, even before everything happened, if he got run over by a bus, what would happen next?”

She was talking about her business partner and ex-husband, who had managed the company’s physical server infrastructure since Black Nova’s founding 11 years earlier. She got her answer in November 2025, when their marriage and business partnership ended abruptly. Overnight, Danielle was the sole director of a company managing nearly 700 client websites on hardware she now had no one to run.

“I had to put my big girl pants on,” she said. “I was the only one on the directorship now. I had to make a decision that was good for the business.”

What happened next is, improbably, a story about a Christmas miracle arriving in the form of a LinkedIn message, and about what it looks like when managed hosting works the way it’s supposed to.

A gift horse

The message came from Tyrese Johnson-Fisher at Automattic, who reached out about the Automattic for Agencies program just as her marriage breakdown, business woes, and end of year chaos was setting in. Danielle was skeptical. “When I was dealing with something so negative personally, I thought: how can something so positive come to me?” She almost dismissed it as a paid accreditation scheme.

But she took the call, and she didn’t mince words — Black Nova owned its own hardware, ran its own firewall, and had no interest in giving any of that up. “We make a lot of money out of owning our own stuff,” she told them.

Then the reality of her situation caught up with her. The person who had maintained those servers was gone. A replacement would need to be hired, and specialist server talent isn’t easy to find or cheap to retain. Black Nova had also been approaching the limits of its current infrastructure; another server would need to be purchased, at a minimum outlay of £15,000 to £20,000. And that was before ongoing costs like cPanel licensing, DDoS protection, IP address management, and data center internet lines.

“I had to really think about the future of the business,” Danielle said. She went back to Johnson-Fisher.

Black Nova is not a small operation. Danielle runs a team of five, including herself, serving around 2,500 active clients across website and IT support, with a portfolio spanning one-person WooCommerce shops to corporate clients turning over millions of pounds a year through their sites. The agency has built a strong reputation in its community west of London, picking up industry awards and supporting local charities along the way. It was exactly the kind of agency Baden Fowler had in mind when he joined Automattic for Agencies.

Originally from South Africa and now based in Manchester, Baden had spent more than 12 years in partnership roles in tech before joining Automattic in 2024 to help shape the A4A program. He recognized immediately what Danielle had built.

“You could really see the care she had for both the work and the clients they support,” Baden said. “That combination — agencies that have built something strong and are now thinking strategically about what comes next — is exactly what we look for.”

What Danielle needed most “was confidence that the move could be done safely and in a structured way,” Baden said. “When you’re talking about hundreds of client websites, trust becomes incredibly important. Those are relationships an agency like Black Nova has built over many years.”

Slowing down, no assumptions

When the opportunity moved to James Riach, Sr. Account Executive at Pressable, his first instinct was to do something counterintuitive: slow down.

James joined Pressable a little over a year ago, working from a standing desk in his living room in Montana. He’d spent a decade in technology sales before a stint as a full-time parent. He is methodical by nature, and he knew that with a portfolio this size, moving fast without thinking was exactly the wrong move.

“I wanted to start from ground zero and give Danielle the entire solution. No assumptions, good questions, get to the heart of the issue,” he said. “It’s not just that we’re servicing Black Nova, we’re really servicing Black Nova’s 700 clients. There’s this huge downstream effect that I really wanted to understand, because if anything goes wrong, those surprises have a pretty major impact.”

One of the things that struck him, and that he’s seen catch out other salespeople, was how easy it is to assume people already know what managed hosting handles automatically. “Who’s updating the PHP and the WordPress core for all these sites? Is there someone doing that manually all day?” For a portfolio of 700, these aren’t small questions.

James and Baden stayed on calls together rather than doing a clean handoff — Baden as the A4A advocate across the broader Automattic ecosystem, James as the Pressable specialist. “If I forgot something, Baden could pick up the slack and vice versa,” James said. It also told Danielle: “You’re not just signing on with Pressable, you’re really signing on with an entire ecosystem that’s here to support you.”

Johnson-Fisher had first spoken with Danielle in November; by January 30, Black Nova was officially on Pressable.

One site at a time

“Show me,” Danielle had told them when they first pitched Pressable. So they did — a handful of test sites, then a few more, until she was sold on Pressable’s not-so-secret weapon: the migration plugin.

James describes it as close to a one-button experience, though the engineering underneath it is anything but simple.

Sr. Front-End Engineer Wayne McWilliams, who’s been with Pressable for eight years and leads product from his hometown of San Antonio — the same city where Pressable was founded — described what actually happens when the plugin runs. It’s a four-step automated pipeline that handles everything from spinning up a fresh site on Pressable’s infrastructure to the full data transfer of database, files, and media — with each task running independently, complete with its own retry logic, encrypted SSH credentials, and Slack alerts so the team can monitor progress in real time.

For Danielle, the experience was simpler than the engineering — she migrates a few sites each day, working from a spreadsheet. Each migration takes 5 to 30 minutes depending on site size. She time-shifts her ecommerce clients to midday, knowing their customers tend to shop in the evenings. “My graphics designer could probably do hosting moves now,” she said, “because the migration plugin is just so simple.”

She had declined Pressable’s offer to handle all 700 migrations for free, reasoning that it would have taken longer to compile all the credentials into a spreadsheet than it would to simply do it herself.

James had gently tried to talk her out of it. “I was maybe a little annoying just making sure everything was working well,” he said. “She considered herself mostly not technical — she certainly is — and she was just stoked to see how easy it was. She didn’t feel like she needed the support team to continue with it. That speaks to the tool for sure.”

The Saturday morning

A few weeks into the migration, a local business owner Danielle didn’t know posted on Instagram that her WordPress site had been hacked and flagged as malicious by Google. Followers tagged Black Nova. It was a Saturday and Danielle’s team doesn’t work weekends. But she offered to help anyway and used the migration plugin.

“It moved the site to us, cleaned it and had it up and live within an hour,” Danielle said. Google had delisted the site as a security threat; once it was clean and on Pressable’s infrastructure, they reapplied. “Within an hour, her website was clean, available, and being used again.”

The client told Danielle she had been “mentally unwell” from the stress the site had been causing her. For context: a previous hosting company had charged her £500 to handle infected files, and hadn’t resolved the problem.

This kind of outcome is exactly what Support Engineer Enrico Tuttobene, who works from his home office in Italy, describes as the goal. Enrico has been with Pressable for six years and helped develop the structured migration processes the team uses today. His view of the role is straightforward: Pressable isn’t a hosting vendor but an extension of Black Nova’s technical expertise.

“It’s vital to understand the customer’s perspective and the high stakes involved,” he said. For a migration of this scale, that means being proactive about compatibility issues, highly responsive on tickets, and oriented toward the kind of technical reliability that gives agencies business confidence.

What freeing feels like

Danielle is saving around £2,000 a month against her previous infrastructure costs — and that doesn’t count what it would have cost to bring in a contractor to maintain the physical servers. cPanel licensing alone had been nearly £900 a month. DDoS protection, IP addresses, internet lines to the data center, spam filtering, hardware maintenance — all of it gone.

She’s also gained something harder to quantify.

“It’s freeing! It’s like a weight lifted off my shoulders. I can sleep at night. I’m not worrying that at 2am I’m going to get a bunch of emails from clients saying all of their sites are down.”

She talks about scalability now, a vocabulary she had to grow into. A business that relies on one person to keep its infrastructure running isn’t really a scalable business. “If I got run over by a bus, what would happen? You have to have some sort of contingency plan. That’s what Pressable and Automattic have given us.”

McWilliams, reflecting on what he’s most proud of about Pressable’s engineering culture, has similar thoughts. Every customer feature request goes directly to his engineering team. In many cases, requests are implemented within days to weeks. The pipeline from customer feedback to shipped code is unusually short. 

“It is so important for us to preserve the humanity in technology, especially at a time when AI feels like it is taking over. AI is an option, not a requirement,” he said.

In Montana, James keeps an eye on the migration queue, watching the site count tick up and planning a quarterly check-in once the last of the 700 sites is across. He said he’s not hovering, just making sure everything’s happening as it should. “I don’t want to get too much in their way,” he said. “As long as they know I’m here.”

Danielle, meanwhile, has started thinking about what she’ll do with her time once the migration is finally complete. It’s a question she couldn’t have imagined asking back in November, when her personal and professional world was in disarray. Now, with the infrastructure taken care of and the business on stable footing, the answer she keeps coming back to is a simple one: More time with her kids.