Capability 08 · &
Before we were a studio, we were a hosting company. Hosting Seva was three engineering students in Mumbai answering support calls themselves. Today we design, move and look after cloud infrastructure for platforms that cannot afford a bad night, and we still pick up the phone.
3x
faster page loads for Ekeeda after its cloud move
38%
lower infrastructure cost on the new platform
Zero
downtime over the cutover weekend
Where it usually starts
They show up as a slow checkout, a certificate that lapsed or a bill that doubled. These are the briefs we see most often.
Admissions week, a festive sale, a campaign that finally worked. Traffic arrives and the server that coped on a quiet Tuesday gives up.
Servers sized for a launch and never shrunk, forgotten test environments, data transfer nobody modelled. Most estates we audit pay for capacity they do not use.
The domain sits in a former employee's account, SSL renews by hope and the last backup was never restored to prove it works. It all holds, until the day it does not.
A legacy .NET or PHP estate on ageing servers, with real users and real data, and no appetite for a weekend of downtime.
What we do
One accountable team for the product and the environment it runs in, so a slow page is never somebody else's problem.
Right sized environments on AWS, Google Cloud, Azure or DigitalOcean, designed around your traffic, your data and your budget rather than a vendor's reference diagram.
Moves from shared hosting, ageing servers or another cloud, rehearsed until the cutover is dull. We moved Ekeeda over one weekend and learners never noticed.
Automated builds, tests and deployments, so shipping a change is routine rather than brave, even on a Friday.
Fast, patched and backed up hosting for content sites and stores, with caching, a CDN and updates tested on staging before they reach customers.
Firewalls, least privilege access, encrypted backups and restores we actually test, so an incident becomes an inconvenience rather than a crisis.
Monitoring, support with agreed response times, performance budgets and a quarterly review of cost and capacity. This is phase six of our method, and most clients stay in it for years.
The Ampersand Method, applied
Suraj Pawar, who ran Hosting Seva's servers in its first year, still reviews every migration plan. His rule is ours: launch day should be boring.
How the method worksWe inventory everything: servers, domains, certificates, scheduled jobs, and the email that quietly relies on the old box. Surprises live in whatever nobody wrote down.
A baseline of speed, uptime and monthly cost, then a target architecture with its running cost shown before anyone signs.
The architecture is drawn with the application engineers in the room, so caching, queues and databases suit how the code actually behaves.
Infrastructure as code, load tests at several times your busiest day, and a server switched off on purpose to prove recovery works.
A rehearsed cutover at a quiet hour, with DNS prepared days in advance, both environments live and a rollback we have already practised.
Monitoring, patching, backups and a quarterly review of cost and capacity, from the same team that built it.
Proof
An education platform moved to the cloud over one weekend, and a co-operative credit society whose members now reach their accounts 24x7.
All workA unique online presence, reliable and fast web hosting, secure transactions using SSL and simple SEO services from Hosting Seva have all been key to Ekeeda's early success.
Tools we trust
How we engage
Cloud work usually starts with an audit of your current setup, then a migration or build project, then a monthly care plan. Your cloud provider bills you directly, so you always own the account and see the real cost.
We did not start as a studio. We started as a hosting company. In October 2018, three engineering students in Mumbai looked at what they were paying for domains and servers, decided it should be simpler and fairer, and started Hosting Seva with plans from ₹49 a month. It broke even in six months and grew past 100 clients.
In that first year Suraj Pawar ran the servers and the support desk, which meant learning DNS, backups and SSL at two in the morning while a customer waited on the line. It is not a glamorous origin, but it is a useful one. It taught the whole studio that a website’s real life begins after launch: renewals, certificates, slow pages, the panicked call on a Sunday. Suraj now leads engineering and delivery, and Hosting Seva’s infrastructure still reports to him. You can read the rest of that story on our studio page.
Our best migrations are the ones nobody remembers. Ekeeda, an education platform that had trusted us since its Hosting Seva days, needed to move a legacy .NET estate to the cloud without interrupting a single learner. We ran old and new side by side, rehearsed the cutover and moved over one weekend. Learners never noticed. Pages now load in 1.9 seconds instead of 6.2, and infrastructure costs are 38% lower.
For the NABARD Employees’ Co-operative Credit Society, the brief was the opposite. The Society’s core system sat on a server with no connection to the public internet, and it was trusted. So we did not move it. We built a secure cloud service layer around it, and more than 3,000 members can now check balances and renew fixed deposits online, at any hour.
A care plan is phase six of the Ampersand Method, Care & Grow, and it is where most of our clients choose to stay. A typical plan includes:
You own every account. The cloud provider bills you directly, the domain sits in your name and the keys are documented. If you ever leave, the handover is a document, not a negotiation.
Not every website needs a cloud architect. If you want a domain, business email and a simple shared or VPS plan for a small site, Hosting Seva remains the right home, and we will tell you so rather than sell you a studio engagement. D&C Studios takes on the work where hosting and product meet: platforms, stores, apps and portals where speed, security and uptime are part of what your customers pay for.
If a rebuild or a move is on the horizon, our website rebuild checklist covers the redirects, DNS changes and post-launch checks that stop a migration from costing you traffic. And if you would like a second opinion on your current setup, tell us what you run today. A hosting audit is often the quickest way to find both the money and the risk.
FAQ
Shared hosting suits a small brochure site with modest traffic. A VPS gives a growing site its own resources at a predictable price. Cloud is right when traffic spikes, when the product is an application rather than a website, or when downtime costs real money. We recommend the smallest option that will cope with your busiest day, not the most impressive one.
Managed hosting means someone else handles updates, security, backups, caching and speed, and answers when something breaks. For a WordPress site that brings in leads or a WooCommerce store that takes orders, it usually pays for itself the first time a plugin update fails on staging instead of in front of your customers.
For most early products, DigitalOcean or a lean AWS setup costs least and is simplest to run. AWS and Google Cloud earn their complexity when you need managed databases at scale, serverless workloads or credits from a start-up programme. Before recommending one, we model your first year's bill on two providers so you can compare real numbers.
A small web app or API often runs on ₹3,000 to ₹15,000 a month of cloud spend. A busy platform with managed databases, a CDN and a separate staging environment usually sits between ₹40,000 and ₹2,00,000. Care plans are priced separately and explained in our engagement models. You see both numbers before you commit.
For most Indian businesses, we host customer data in Indian cloud regions such as Mumbai. That keeps pages fast for local users and simplifies your obligations under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act. Regulated sectors such as financial services can carry stricter rules, so we confirm requirements with your compliance team before designing anything.
Usually, yes. We run the old and new environments side by side, keep the data in sync, lower DNS timings in advance and cut over at a quiet hour with a rollback ready. Ekeeda moved over one weekend with zero downtime, and its pages now load in 1.9 seconds instead of 6.2.
Hosting Seva, our sister company since 2018, looks after domains and straightforward hosting plans for small businesses, and that is where plan and price questions belong. D&C Studios handles cloud architecture, migrations, DevOps and managed care for products we build or take over. If a domain and a simple plan are all you need, we will say so.
List what runs where, or simply tell us what worries you. A partner replies within one working day, and a hosting audit is often the quickest way to find both the risk and the savings.
