Cotton Creek Farms evolved from a small family-run alpaca farm into a thriving e-commerce business, but rapid growth exposed serious WooCommerce performance and operational challenges. By migrating to hosting.com, powered by Rocket.net managed WordPress hosting, they improved site speed, search visibility, and operational efficiency while removing technical friction. With stable, high-performance hosting and responsive support, the team can now focus on expanding product lines and scaling with confidence.
Websites Alpaca Farm and Store: https://cottoncreekfarms.com
Nonprofit Project: https://ilovealpacas.com
Industry: Agriculture / Ecommerce
Headquarters: Northern Michigan, USA
Background
Founded in 2017, Cotton Creek Farms began as a lifestyle shift away from corporate life. What started as a small alpaca farm evolved into a focused ecommerce and manufacturing business built around premium alpaca fibre products.
Over the last 5 years, online sales have become the core revenue driver for the business. With more than 1,000 SKUs and an image-heavy WooCommerce store, website performance became directly tied to revenue, visibility, and customer experience.
For a small, family-run business, hosting needed to support their incredible growth, without requiring constant developer involvement or technical overhead.
Challenges and Requirements
Before moving to Rocket s managed WordPress hosting, Cotton Creek Farms had worked with multiple providers and experienced the following issues:
Performance & Crawlability Issues
The WooCommerce store experienced:
Slow front-end performance
Sluggish WordPress admin performance
Google struggling to crawl and index product pages
For an SEO-driven ecommerce site, this was highly disruptive to their business. If products weren't crawled properly, they weren't discoverable or visible and if they weren't discoverable, they couldn't convert.
When performance concerns were raised, the proposed solution was a move to a higher cost dedicated environment, which felt excessive for the traffic level and the business at the time.
Complexity & Developer Dependency
A move to highly technical provider improved raw performance, but introduced new challenges:
Additional tools required for server access
Ongoing developer costs to maintain infrastructure
Increased technical burden for a small business
While the infrastructure was more fitting, it required constant oversight and developer resource which impacted the business financially.
These situations became frustrating as Cotton Creek Farms needed a provider who reliably met their performance needs, without heavy costs and developer resources. the right product fit for their business.
They looked for a provider who could provide:
Reliable WooCommerce performance
Strong crawlability and indexing support
Migration assistance
Responsive technical support
Reduced operational overhead
A managed environment that didn’t remove control
The decision-making was methodical, and they approached the hosting.com powered by Rocket.net team to understand solutions.
Technical requirements, storage needs - critical for image-heavy e-commerce, multi-site capabilities, and pricing were all evaluated carefully.
Hosting.com Powered by Rocket.net stood out for:
Clear documentation of features
Ecommerce ready features
Multi-site capability
Transparent packaging
Strong pre-sales and post-sales support
Importantly, the hosting.com team validated that a higher-tier plan was unnecessary, and would produce unnecessary burden to an already scarred customer, reinforcing trust from the start.
A test migration was conducted before full commitment. The migration was smooth, performance improved immediately, and the support experience exceeded expectations. That test removed the uncertainty and provided the necessary reassurance that this was the right product fit for their business.
The Solution
Cotton Creek Farms migrated its WooCommerce store to Rocket.net’s managed WordPress hosting platform under a multi-site plan.
The solution included:
Fully managed WordPress environment
Optimised WooCommerce performance
Complete migration handled by Rocket
Zero downtime during go-live
Responsive post-launch support
Because transactions were ongoing and the goal was minimal downtime, the migration required both a test and final live transfer, both completed without operational disruption.
Since launch, the environment has required minimal intervention. The site runs efficiently, performance remains stable, and deep technical support is available when needed and as the site grows.
