The Challenge
Merrick Creative, a brand management and technology consultancy based in Greenbelt, Maryland, was hosting their growing portfolio of client websites on infrastructure they were managing themselves. As the portfolio expanded to roughly 50 websites across real estate, hospitality, and consumer brands, the work of managing servers, security, SSL certificates, and performance was pulling the agency away from its actual business of creating brand experiences. They needed a hosting partner who could take over all of that while staying completely invisible to their clients. Merrick Creative needed to remain the face of everything.
Our Solution
FatLab became Merrick Creative's behind-the-scenes hosting partner, migrating their entire client portfolio from self-managed infrastructure to fully managed hosting across multiple data centers. The partnership covers everything an agency needs: professional security with firewall protection and real-time malware scanning, automated SSL certificates and daily backups, staging and development environments so their developers can build and test before going live, and full server access so their team can work independently. FatLab handles all hosting operations behind the scenes while Merrick Creative maintains every client relationship directly.
What We Built
- Managed hosting for roughly 50 client websites with complete behind-the-scenes operation
- Migration from self-managed infrastructure to fully managed hosting across multiple data centers
- Staging and development environments provisioned on demand for Merrick's team
- Professional security across the full portfolio with firewall protection and malware scanning
- Full developer access so Merrick's team can work independently without waiting on anyone
- On-call support and proactive maintenance freeing Merrick to focus on creative work
Project Overview
Merrick Creative is a brand management and technology consultancy based in Greenbelt, Maryland. The agency builds and manages brand experiences for clients across industries such as real estate, hospitality, and consumer products. Their work spans branding, marketing, public relations, and digital strategy, and they have a portfolio of approximately 50 WordPress websites serving their diverse client base.
FatLab serves as Merrick Creative's white-label managed hosting partner. The relationship is straightforward: FatLab handles all hosting infrastructure, security, maintenance, and technical support behind the scenes, while Merrick Creative maintains its direct relationships with every client. No FatLab branding is visible to end clients. Merrick Creative's team and their clients interact with their websites the same way they always have. The only difference is that a dedicated hosting partner is managing everything underneath.
The partnership began in 2024 when Merrick Creative needed to move away from unmanaged AWS infrastructure. Managing servers, applying security patches, renewing SSL certificates, and tuning performance across a growing portfolio of sites were consuming time and attention that should have been devoted to creative work. FatLab took over all of those responsibilities in a single migration.
How the Partnership Works
What FatLab Provides
FatLab manages the full hosting stack for every site in Merrick Creative's portfolio. This includes managed WordPress hosting with enterprise security, ongoing maintenance, performance optimization, and on-call support.
On the security side, every site is protected by Cloudflare's Web Application Firewall and Imunify360's real-time malware scanning with automatic cleanup. SSL certificates are automatically provisioned and renewed. Daily backups run across the full portfolio.
For maintenance, FatLab handles WordPress core, plugin, and theme updates. Performance optimization includes server-level caching through Breeze, CDN delivery through Cloudflare Enterprise, and compression across all assets. When something breaks or a site needs attention, Merrick Creative has direct on-call support from FatLab's team.
Developer Access
Merrick Creative's developers have the access they need to work independently. FatLab provides SFTP, SSH, and MySQL access for every site so their team can develop, debug, and deploy without waiting on anyone.
When Merrick's team is building a new site or making changes to an existing one, FatLab provisions staging sites for client review and development sites for new builds. This gives their developers a place to work and test before pushing anything live. Deployment workflows between development, staging, and production environments keep the process clean and predictable.
The White-Label Model
The defining feature of this partnership is that FatLab operates entirely behind the scenes. Merrick Creative maintains all client relationships. Their clients see Merrick Creative as their hosting provider, their support contact, and their technical team. FatLab's role is invisible to the end client by design.
This model lets Merrick Creative offer enterprise-grade hosting and support as part of its service offering without building or maintaining its own hosting infrastructure. They get the capability without the overhead.
Infrastructure
Merrick Creative's client sites are distributed across multiple data centers rather than consolidated on a single server. This is a core component of FatLab's white-label hosting services, providing both performance benefits through geographic distribution and redundancy in the event of infrastructure issues at any one location.
Every site in the portfolio runs behind Cloudflare Enterprise, which provides CDN edge caching and WAF protection globally. Imunify360 runs real-time malware scanning with automatic cleanup at the server level as part of FatLab's managed security stack. SSL certificates are provisioned automatically for every domain. Daily automated backups run across all sites with straightforward recovery options. Each site has isolated resources, so traffic spikes or issues on one site do not affect the rest of the portfolio.
The Migration
Before partnering with FatLab, Merrick Creative hosted its client portfolio on unmanaged AWS infrastructure. That meant their team was responsible for server management, security patching, SSL certificate provisioning and renewal, performance tuning, and troubleshooting server-level issues on their own. For an agency whose core work is brand strategy and creative execution, that overhead was a poor use of their time and expertise.
The migration to FatLab's managed hosting eliminated all of that. Server management, security, SSL, backups, updates, and performance optimization all became FatLab's responsibility. Merrick Creative's team went from managing infrastructure to simply using it, with better security, better performance, and dedicated support backing every site in the portfolio.
Results and Impact
The partnership gives Merrick Creative something difficult to quantify but easy to feel: operational peace of mind across their entire client portfolio. Approximately 50 WordPress sites are managed under a hosting plan with enterprise security, proactive maintenance, and on-call support. Their developers have the access and environments they need to work efficiently. Their clients experience reliable, fast, secure websites without knowing or caring who manages the servers.
For Merrick Creative, the value is in what they no longer have to think about. Server management, security patching, SSL renewals, performance tuning, and backup verification: all handled. That frees their team to focus entirely on the work their clients hire them for: building and managing brand experiences.
White-label hosting partnerships like this one represent a practical model for agencies managing client website portfolios. Rather than building internal hosting expertise or leaving clients on commodity shared hosting, agencies can offer enterprise-grade infrastructure and support services as part of their offering, backed by a dedicated white-label WordPress hosting partner who stays out of sight. For Merrick Creative, that partner is FatLab.
Results
- Approximately 50 WordPress client websites under managed hosting
- Complete migration from unmanaged AWS to fully managed multi-datacenter infrastructure
- Staging and development environments provisioned on demand for Merrick's team
- Enterprise-grade security across the full portfolio with Cloudflare WAF and malware scanning
- On-call support and proactive maintenance freeing Merrick to focus on creative work
- White-label partnership preserving Merrick Creative's brand relationships with clients