Coalmarch Ditched DIY Hosting and Now Wins Clients with a 5-Minute Site Preview

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.

To continue scaling their business, Coalmarch had to reassess their custom hosting. Coalmarch partnered with Pantheon to address technical debt and free up their engineering team. They turned to Pantheon to remove Coalmarch’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: DIY infrastructure is a business continuity risk

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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.

The sites were running, but the infrastructure supporting them was fragile. That exposed Coalmarch and its clients to a direct business continuity risk.

"We had a risk where things were working, but they were fragile."

— ANTONIO ESTEVEZ, FULL STACK DEVELOPER, COALMARCH

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 single-page builds to full 15- to 20-page 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, the move gave Coalmarch’s sales process a concrete advantage. With global dev environment provisioning, engineers can spin up a functional proof-of-concept site for a prospective client in roughly five minutes.

"Just being able to spin up a dev environment and showcase a website to someone and say, ‘This is my idea of your site,’ and you can show people what they could get in five minutes."

— ANTONIO ESTEVEZ, FULL STACK DEVELOPER, COALMARCH

This rapid prototyping capability allows Coalmarch to show prospects a live preview before signing a contract, shortening sales cycles and winning new accounts faster.

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.