Etienne V. Labelle
Before working with Crafty Penguins, our servers were running — but it sometimes felt like we had to say a little prayer to keep them that way. I used to sleep with my phone on full volume, ready for the inevitable 3 a.m. alert. When it came, I’d be frantically Googling fixes, hoping I wouldn’t accidentally delete everything by following a 12-year-old Stack Overflow post.
Now, things couldn’t be more different. If something breaks, 99% of the time, someone from the Crafty Penguins team has already spotted it and is working on a fix before I can even log in (just like last night!). These days, if an issue happens at 3 a.m., I just sleep through it and catch up on the details in the morning.
In the past, we avoided rebooting or updating servers out of fear something would go wrong. Now, I regularly get a friendly Slack message asking if it’s a good time to update or reboot — and everything just works.
What I appreciate most about Crafty Penguins (aside from the great name) is how effortless it is to work with them. If I need a change, I just send a message on Slack, and someone knowledgeable takes care of it. I don’t have to learn HAProxy or figure out how to migrate to Kubernetes myself — I know it’ll be handled properly and reliably.
I can’t recommend Crafty Penguins highly enough. They’ve completely changed how we manage our systems, and I finally get a good night’s sleep.
Paul Linenberg
We came to Crafty Penguins when it became evident that we didn’t have a solid infrastructure to guarantee our users reliable performance and data security. We relied on their team to be the experts, and they didn’t disappoint. They helped us build a new, reliable architecture that gives us a comfortable sense of security. We now stopped worrying about our system crashing and can concentrate on running our business.
Herman van Rhijn
Having Crafty Penguins manage our systems saves us time so that we can focus on our core business. At the moment, we serve 25,000+ customers with only two of our own staff members. The team of Crafty Penguins has very in-depth knowledge, is capable of investigating the issues a lot deeper than an average IT provider and is always there for us when we need them.
Brent Bawel
Crafty Penguins helped us cut our server rack monthly rental in half. Also, our prior consultants recommended us purchasing more servers, but the assessment of Crafty Penguins showed us that we had enough space with what was already there. We value honesty and trust of their team, which is a pretty big deal when IT is not familiar territory for anyone working in the company.
Clint Bounds
After connecting with Crafty Penguins through DigitalOcean’s customer service, Clint immediately felt the difference. “My initial conversation with them was amazing — it felt like 15 years of sleepless nights just melted away,” he says.
The Crafty Penguins team managed the migration with virtually zero downtime, enabling Clint to step away from day-to-day server management. Today, Plan to Eat runs staging and production environments powered by DigitalOcean Droplets, intentionally overpowered for peak reliability and speed. Backups are handled through Volumes detachable block storage, ensuring data integrity and quick recovery.
Crafty Penguins also developed a robust deployment process with seamless rollback capabilities, while DigitalOcean provides a dependable infrastructure backbone. In over two years since the migration, Plan to Eat has not experienced a single major outage — a marked improvement over previous AWS operations.
“There’s no single point of failure,” Clint notes. “When large companies on AWS face issues, our website keeps running smoothly — and that feels great.”
Clifford Long
Crafty Penguins was an incredible partner for our growing SaaS company, Station Automation. As Co-Founder, I was impressed by how seamlessly they managed our infrastructure, monitored systems, and guided our migration to AWS. From optimizing our database performance and streamlining our Rackspace platform to handling incident response, their team of specialists delivered consistently excellent results. What stood out most was their culture fit and shared values—they felt like part of our team rather than an outside vendor. Always responsive, professional, and personable, Crafty Penguins helped us move smoothly through a major transition and set us up for scalable success.