I was able to save a small, niche web hosting company with it's own proprietary CRM around $112k annually. I also greatly improved security in their shared host

I was able to save a small, niche web hosting company with it's own proprietary CRM around $112k annually. I also greatly improved security in their shared hosting setup and automated code deployments and new customer onboarding. I was able to do this by using Edgecast CDN as a caching proxy for all anonymous traffic. This reduced the load on their servers greatly and we were able to decimate the number of servers required. Rackspace servers are incredibly expensive and this represented a big savings. We could have cached the pages in other ways, but this had the added benefit of serving anonymous requests from edge nodes and this reduced page load time by a great bit. It was a big migration with sometimes maddening constraints imposed by business necessities and technical debt, but in the end we were able to eliminate a good bit of that debt. The most frustrating part of the process was having to deal with sales reps that kept trying to push "cloud" solutions as panacea to all scaling challenges. The bandwidth and storage costs from using something like S3 would have been atrocious. The rackspace "cloud" solutions all would have had unacceptable latency problems. And it would have required impossible code rewrites. One of the requirements for the project that was incredibly frustrating was that we could not force updates of the PHP CRM to any particular client. We offered an upgrade path, but we had dozens of different versions of the software running on the servers, along with Wordpress and other PHP/MySQL apps installed at customer request. Shared PHP web hosting is one of the most difficult environments to work in. Each account was a petri dish of whatever customers uploaded via their docroot FTP access. I pushed through a lot of changes to eliminate that practice and lock users down to FTP access for directories that would not execute PHP. I also had the company move all Wordpress installs to Flywheel, to eliminate all the maintenance and security implications for Wordpress to a company that focused on just that. This allowed the company to focus on it's own CRM and nothing else. All of it came at a really key time because competitive pressure from squarespace forced the company to drastically reduce prices. When I pitched the original idea for the project, the entire internal team didn't tell me about the security issues, the multitude of versions running, the full FTP docroot access or even the existence of Wordpress on the servers. When I discovered how FUBAR the entire setup was, as a contractor it would have been easy for me to bail, and probably personally healthier for my stress levels (I took off three months after it was all over to relax), but I stuck with them and brought them through the entire process to a successful conclusion. I'm pretty proud of that project. I pulled it all off under some of the most difficult and irrational conditions one could imagine. And the ROI for the company was insanely great.