About Black Nova

Black Nova is a tight-knit, full-service digital agency based in the UK, specializing in custom Figma-to-WordPress development, IT support, and domain registration. Over a decade in the industry, the team built up a massive portfolio of more than 700 client accounts, maintaining a highly personalized approach to managing their clients’ digital footprints from the ground up.

When the technical expertise behind their internal infrastructure suddenly became unavailable, the agency needed a managed hosting partner that could support the scale and complexity of moving their entire portfolio – without disrupting daily operations.

The Challenge: 700+ Sites and No Room for Compromise

For years, Black Nova ran its own hardware. From servers and firewalls to DDoS protection and load balancing, the agency managed the full stack internally. It was a genuine competitive differentiator that offered total control, but it came with a catch: it required highly specialized expertise to maintain.

When that key technical expertise suddenly left the business, Founder Danielle Holmes was left responsible for over 700 live client sites with a critical skills gap she couldn’t fill overnight.

“I could not let the business go down,” Holmes says. The agency needed an immediate, robust alternative that could reliably absorb a massive portfolio of sites, but standard retail hosting options couldn’t offer the depth of infrastructure they required.

Why Pressable

When the Automattic for Agencies team reached out, Holmes was initially skeptical due to past industry experiences where smaller agencies were locked out of enterprise programs. What changed this time was a transparent, welcoming partnership model that evaluated Black Nova on the true value and depth of their 700+ site portfolio.

The turning point came down to math and a guarantee. When Holmes factored in hardware lifecycles, software licensing, and the cost of hiring a dedicated systems engineer to maintain an equivalent internal setup, Pressable emerged as the financially superior choice. Combined with Pressable’s 100% uptime SLA, the agency found an infrastructure foundation they could confidently stand behind.

To protect client data and maintain total oversight, Holmes chose to execute the massive undertaking herself, migrating a batch of clients daily. Instead of the typical friction of manual database exports, broken media libraries, and e-commerce timing issues, Pressable’s migration toolkit turned what is usually a chore into a seamless, predictable routine taking just 5 to 30 minutes per site.

The Results:

• • Seamless Portfolio Transition: Moving steadily through a 700+ site portfolio with hundreds of sites already successfully transferred and zero database or media library gaps.

• • Lower True Cost: Eliminated the financial burden of hardware maintenance and specialized internal infrastructure salaries.

• • 100% Uptime Guarantee: Replaced the anxiety of server management with a rock-solid SLA they can market directly to clients from day one.

Beyond the operational relief, centralizing on Pressable is sharpening how Black Nova competes for new business. As one of the few agencies in their region backed by the Automattic for Agencies program, the partnership provides instant, institutional credibility that separates them from standard freelancers.

As the migration queue continues to move, the day-to-day pressure of infrastructure management has been replaced by 24/7 expert support, allowing the Black Nova team to focus entirely on client success and agency growth.