The Food Connector is a 14-person agency serving food service, supply, distribution, and production companies. It provides social media, website, and documentation services, and hosts around 40 client websites while managing nearly 60. Tech Ops Manager Ron Richardson uses hosting.com’s Managed cPanel VPS alongside Claude AI to automate technical work via SSH and to accelerate website development. For one recent project, an AI-assisted workflow cut the build from an estimated month or more to about five days.
Website: thefoodconnector.com
Industry: Marketing and web agency for the food industry (food service, supply, production, and distribution companies)
Headquarters: San Rafael CA, USA
Background:
Ron Richardson spent 25 years in Silicon Valley before retiring and running a couple of businesses. He later met the owner of The Food Connector, who needed someone with technical expertise. Fourteen years later, Ron remains closely involved as Tech Ops Manager, working as a full-time contractor.
The Food Connector represents companies in food service, supply, distribution, and production, providing social media, website, and documentation services. The team has grown to about 14 people, including a developer, a designer, and three project managers. It hosts around 40 client websites and manages nearly 60, with 53 on a monthly maintenance and reporting program built on MainWP.
A Data Center Outage
The agency’s biggest hosting-related disruption of 2026 was an outage at hosting.com’s Arizona data center. Ron estimated that the agency’s services were down for roughly 10 to 12 hours, possibly longer. He had heard speculation about facilities issues but did not know the confirmed cause. He said he did not believe any clients complained, and they understood that disruptions can occur.
Third-Party Software Issues, Not Hosting-Related
Separately, the agency encountered a Wordfence security issue and problems associated with WordPress 7.0.1, which Ron said were resolved after WordPress released version 7.0.2. He was clear that these issues were not caused by hosting.com, although they added to the year’s technical workload.
Scaling Support and Infrastructure Flexibility
As the agency shifted from referring clients to hosting providers to running its own paid hosting service on VPS servers, Ron needed infrastructure that could support dozens of client sites. He also wanted a more flexible way to increase memory or disk space without jumping to a much more expensive plan.
The Food Connector was looking for:
Hosting suitable for dozens of client sites and its own paid hosting service
Responsive support for diagnosing and resolving server-side issues
More flexible, incremental options for scaling server resources
The Solution:
The Food Connector hosts client sites on hosting.com’s Managed cPanel VPS infrastructure, although Ron still calls the company “A2” out of habit. The team also migrated a client’s sites from HostGator to hosting.com using cPanel. In that separate migration, they initially chose a plan that did not support all the client’s domains, then upgraded to a higher tier. Ron said hosting.com’s AI support agent, Orbi, helped him work through the billing question.
The biggest change to Ron’s day-to-day workflow has come from using Claude AI over SSH to work directly with the VPS environment. He uses it to investigate server issues, draft support tickets, write custom reporting scripts that extend MainWP, and build WordPress sites in Elementor. One recent site that would normally have taken at least a month took about five days, with Ron doing some final cleanup. The agency also uses Formidable Forms’ MCP integration to make routine configuration changes across multiple sites and uses UpdraftPlus to send daily backups to AWS S3.
Impact:
Faster Support
Ron said recent support tickets have been handled within hours, compared with waits of up to a day in the past. One recent request for a server-side change was completed in about an hour.
Faster Builds
For one recent project, Ron’s AI-assisted workflow reduced the build time from an estimated month or more to about five days. He attributed the time savings to using Claude over SSH to work with WordPress and Elementor, rather than to hosting infrastructure alone.
Time to First Byte: Agency Monitoring Results
The agency’s custom dashboard initially showed time to first byte around 500 milliseconds across its sites; on a subsequent check, results were usually below 100 milliseconds. These are the agency’s own monitoring observations, not a published guarantee.
A Long-Term Hosting Relationship
Ron said his experience with A2/hosting.com had generally been excellent and that he would recommend the service. He also noted that the relationship had not been flawless, citing the Arizona data center outage and other technical issues during 2026.
“My experience with hosting.com has been excellent. I would recommend it to anybody.”
-Ron Richardson, Tech Ops Manager, The Food Connector
