Meet Showit, an Arizona-based, no-code, drag-and-drop website builder designed for creative professionals.
Todd Watson, the CEO and Founder at Showit, has always had a knack for capturing a story, and he turned that natural ability into a way to help others display their creative work.
Todd began his career as a wedding videographer, where his experiences taught him the value of visual storytelling. Todd went on to lead the team that developed Showit, a drag-and-drop website design platform that gives creators full visual control without needing to know any code.
Showit was designed to solve a real problem in the market. Photographers struggled to find website templates and layouts that truly reflected their artistic style and brand identity. Instead, most platforms limited how photographers could showcase their work by forcing them into rigid themes or cookie-cutter designs.
Recognizing this gap, the team set out to build an intuitive, flexible design tool that functions more like a creative canvas than a traditional website builder. With Showit, users can freely move, layer, and customize elements, like images, text, or graphics, anywhere on the page to create a site that feels completely bespoke.
Showit empowered photographers and other creatives to tell their stories online by displaying their art exactly the way they envisioned it.
Showit grew quickly, evolving into a website builder for creatives, small business owners, and others who value a highly customized, unique online presence beyond basic templates. Showit enabled these clients to build high-impact, custom websites quickly and without code. Needless to say, word spread fast.
Growing Pains
Growth often comes with growing pains. Showit’s development was no exception. As the business scaled quickly, Showit began experiencing the friction that can happen when needs evolve. These issues included:
- Performance Pressures. As Showit scaled, the platform grew to tens of thousands of installations running across hundreds of servers. It quickly became one of the most resource-intensive environments operating on WordPress. As a result, Showit saw increasing backend lag, intermittent downtime, and increasing alerts from their internal Canary monitors.
- Capacity and Onboarding Adjustments. Capacity limits made it necessary for Showit to overhaul its onboarding processes, rethink how it provisioned servers, and devote more effort to supporting its highest-traffic sites. Single-site servers were capped at 150 installs, and multisite servers at 500 subsites, which didn’t keep up with Showit’s growth scale.
- Strained Systems. With 130+ servers to manage, Showit’s team found themselves spending more time troubleshooting and less time innovating. They wanted to devote less time to managing issues.
Showit was proud of the platform they’d built and grateful for the partnership that got them to where they were. At the same time, it was clear that it was time to explore a new hosting partner built for their next stage of business.
The Turning Point: Finding BigScoots
Todd had made an early connection with BigScoots Co-Founder, Scott Stapley, which resurfaced at a critical moment when Showit needed the contact most.
A few high-traffic Showit users were already hosting their WordPress blogs with BigScoots. Their success prompted a test run. Could BigScoots deliver the performance and support that Showit needed at scale?
The answer came quickly. BigScoots saw an opportunity to engineer a solution to their challenges.
Senior engineers from the BigScoots team set up a test environment, enabling Showit to validate key technical requirements, like SSH access and WP-CLI functionality. Ten high-volume test sites were migrated, and the results were clear.
BigScoots could handle the load.
A Technical and Strategic Partnership
What began as a test evolved into a full-scale partnership. Showit migrated thousands of sites to BigScoots’ infrastructure, supported by a custom integration layer tailored to their platform.
BigScoots delivered:
- Custom API Endpoints. BigScoots built the automation tools Showit needed for bulk updates and site management.
- Slack-Based Support. There was no more waiting around for solutions. BigScoots provided direct access to engineers for real-time collaboration and rapid troubleshooting.
- Responsive Development. Showit no longer felt unheard. Feature requests were often completed within days, not months or years.
This hands-on approach created a strategic partnership built on mutual growth.
Real Results for Creators
The partnership with BigScoots dramatically improved Showit’s overall efficiency and ability to scale. Within days, BigScoots built the automation tools Showit needed for bulk updates and site management “at extreme scale” to keep up with their explosive business growth.
The following key results show how the collaboration elevated Showit’s infrastructure for its creator community.
Operational Efficiency
By working directly with the BigScoots team, Showit benefits from expert-level service that feels more like an extension of their internal staff than a third-party vendor, Todd said.
“The level of service… the speed… the understanding… the expertise you bring… it’s critical for us,” said Todd Watson, CEO and Founder at Showit
This level of collaboration has removed the daily technical bottlenecks that once weighed down Showit’s support team.
Scalable and Predictable Growth
With BigScoots, Showit scaled its infrastructure and dramatically improved performance without breaking its budget. Server efficiency increased significantly, going from:
- 150 to over 500 sites per standalone server – a 233% increase in sites per server.
- 500 to over 1,600 sub-sites per multisite installation – a 320% increase in sub-sites per multi-site.
Even large-scale traffic spikes, such as a single site hitting 1.9 million visits, no longer impact server stability.
Greater Speed Performance
In addition, to scalability, the performance on the the new infrastructure increased significantly. When comparing the server speeds of their previous hosting vendor infrastructure to the new BigScoots infrastructure, Showit saw a 2.5X faster server response speed (as shown in screenshot below) , while still supporting the following increase workloads:
- 1.8x the number of sites,
- 6x the disc utilization ,
- 28x more total server visits
- 5.3x more billable visits
- ~2.8x the DB size
Greater Cost Efficiency
Showit is not only able to scale its infrastructure, support, speed, and management more effectively, it is also becoming more cost-efficient, reducing their cost per site by approximately 36%.
Rock-Solid Infrastructure
From improved backend speed to strong security protocols, BigScoots delivers the high-performance hosting environment Showit needs to serve thousands of users reliably.
“The quality of the product is great,” Todd said of BigScoots. “The load times, the security, all of the things that come along with that are fantastic.”
A True Partnership
Beyond the technical, financial, and performance advantages, Showit values the personalized support, management, and experience that BigScoots brings to collaboration with their team. The partnership’s offerings are robust enough to support enterprise infrastructure, yet still human and approachable.
“BigScoots is a big enough company to run high-level WordPress infrastructure, but not so big that you’re lost in the crowd,” Todd said.
Why Showit Recommends BigScoots
Showit’s partnership with BigScoots is an excellent example of how they can help businesses. BigScoots’ superior support, custom engineering, and scalable infrastructure helped Showit empower their fast-growing storytelling audience.
The difference in how our business runs with BigScoots is “night and day,” said Kylen Downs, PHP + WordPress Developer at Showit.
“I would 100% recommend BigScoots,” said Kylen Downs, PHP + WordPress Developer at Showit. “The backend loads like lightning, and we can host big whale sites on the main platform now.”
Partner with BigScoots
If you are a tech platform provider or agency that is struggling with similar issues, start a live chat with our team or visit our Agency Partner page to learn how you can work closely with BigScoots to deliver success for your organization.
Partner with Showit
For any creative business or agency that has struggled to find a visual builder that offers true design freedom, consider this an invitation to stop fighting with code and start creating with freedom. Whether you are building for yourself or for clients, Showit allows you to craft an online presence that feels like a genuine extension of you who are. You can explore the platform risk-free with a 14-day free trial.
