Coalmarch Ditched DIY Hosting and Now Supports Faster Website Delivery
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Coalmarch is a full-service growth marketing agency built exclusively for pest control and lawn care companies, providing SEO, digital advertising, and website development that drive lead generation for an industry it knows deeply. They manage a diverse portfolio of ~300 Drupal and WordPress client websites, ranging from single-page sites to multi-page builds.
After many years as a Pantheon customer, Coalmarch explored a DIY hosting approach to reduce costs. As the agency grew, the team realized that security and stability were more important than managing hosting in-house and returned to Pantheon.
To continue scaling their business, Coalmarch partnered with Pantheon to remove the agency's reliance on a single employee's knowledge, address technical debt, and put its engineering team back to work on client outcomes.
"With the tooling we have available now, we'll be able to level up our front-end Drupal developers using Pantheon to handle these kinds of details, while we focus on what we do: marketing, client satisfaction, and proven SEO results."
— ANTONIO ESTEVEZ, FULL STACK DEVELOPER, COALMARCH
Challenge: A hosting infrastructure built for scale
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Coalmarch’s legacy hosting environment had been designed and maintained by a single engineer who had since left the company. The system covered a broad technical footprint, with limited documentation and no clear internal owner.
While the setup had worked well for Coalmarch earlier in its growth, the agency eventually needed to level up its technology to support new requirements for security, stability, and scale.
Leadership considered spending months reverse-engineering the existing setup. They concluded that managing servers would continue to pull attention away from client work.
Coalmarch needed a platform partner that could support its full range of sites, from landing page builds to 500+ page custom websites.
Approach: True partnership over transactional vendor support
"We met with a legacy hosting provider, and they gave us a checklist and said to come back to them. Then, we met Pantheon. We had six people in the room – they gave us advice from the beginning. So there was a lot of goodwill established before we even started our build, which took a lot of pressure off the whole project."
— BRAD KING, VP OF ENGINEERING, COALMARCH
When Coalmarch began evaluating platform partners to support its transition, legacy providers treated the engagement as a transactional task. Instead of forcing Coalmarch to work through a self-service migration checklist alone, Pantheon brought a team into the room from day one and established a collaborative foundation well before any contract was signed.
Rather than launching a risky, standalone refactoring project, Coalmarch modernized its application layer directly during the move.
"We’re resolving our technical debt as a byproduct of moving to Pantheon. And we get to work with other architects, which is always nice, so you’re not always working in a bubble."
— ANTONIO ESTEVEZ, FULL STACK DEVELOPER, COALMARCH
Results: From server mechanics to sales acceleration
By offloading platform upkeep to Pantheon, Coalmarch’s developers gained time to expand their frontend skills. They refocused on core agency priorities: application development, lead generation, client satisfaction, and search engine performance.
Beyond backend reliability and developer workflow improvements, Pantheon’s testing environments helped Coalmarch’s nontechnical team become more autonomous. With fewer handoffs, the agency can shorten its overall website timeline and provide value to clients earlier in the engagement.
Testing environments also give Coalmarch a more transparent and open way to discuss website updates with clients. The agency values transparency throughout the process, and its clients expect to understand what is changing every step of the way.
By transitioning its fleet of Drupal and WordPress sites to Pantheon, Coalmarch eliminated the risk of single-person infrastructure management while establishing a predictable WebOps foundation.
