About 500 Designs

500 Designs is a full-service digital agency based in California, specializing in web development and quality assurance for clients across multiple industries. The team manages a portfolio of over 50 accounts – from growing brands to enterprise names – and handles everything from initial builds to long-term site maintenance and performance optimization.

When the agency began looking for a hosting partner that could support the scale and complexity of their client work, they turned to Automattic for Agencies – and found Pressable.

The Challenge: Enterprise Traffic With No Accountability

The breaking point came with Fresh Del Monte, a global produce company and one of 500 Designs‘ most demanding accounts. The site needed to hold up through heavy ad campaigns and high organic traffic without flinching – and their previous setup on WP Engine couldn’t keep pace.

Downtime during traffic spikes was a recurring problem. Staging environments were limited. And every time the team needed more server resources, the answer was an expensive upgrade. The hardest part wasn’t finding a faster server. It was finding a provider willing to take real responsibility for a site of that size.

Why Pressable 

500 Designs came to Pressable through Automattic for Agencies looking for two things above everything else: support they could rely on and scalability that didn’t require a technical deep-dive every time a client needed more resources.

Both boxes got checked immediately. Carrera describes Pressable’s support as strictly professional, with SLAs that held up in practice. Scaling server memory or processing power turned out to be straightforward enough that it required no technical knowledge – a meaningful operational win for a team managing a wide mix of clients and site types.

The migration off WP Engine was equally smooth. The Pressable migration tool handled the complexity of Fresh Del Monte’s custom tech stack without issue, and the Pressable team worked directly with 500 Designs to adjust server-level variables that matched their specific setup.

The Results

• • 50% cost reduction: Hosting costs cut in half after moving from WP Engine.

• • Rock-solid uptime: Campaign spikes that used to cause downtime no longer threaten site stability.

• • Zero migration issues: Fresh Del Monte migrated without limitations using the Pressable toolkit.

For Fresh Del Monte, the most visible win was stability under pressure. Before Pressable, ad campaigns were a source of anxiety – the kind of traffic spikes that should drive results were the same ones that could take the site down. That problem is gone.

The cost story is just as significant. The team was on a treadmill with WP Engine, regularly pushed toward more expensive plans to handle growth. With Pressable, 500 Designs cut their hosting costs in half – a difference that matters for any agency managing client budgets with real constraints.

Looking Ahead: The MCP Advantage

500 Designs was among the first agencies to start exploring Pressable MCP, the Model Context Protocol integration that lets teams manage hosting through AI. For a team running 50+ accounts, the potential is immediate: creating backups, restoring sites, and connecting to WordPress holdings – all from a single prompt.

Carrera sees it as a natural extension of where the agency is already headed. 500 Designs is building toward a fully AI-integrated development workflow, and Pressable’s continued investment in that direction gives them the confidence to move forward.