Evolve Edits · case study

A decade-old, revenue-critical platform was modernized while the business kept operating: 90% fewer downtime incidents and 80% lower infrastructure cost.

A photo post-production company’s decade-old client portal funneled terabytes a month through a single on-premise machine. We rebuilt it as a cloud platform and released it by canary rollout, no big-bang cutover.

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infrastructure cost · per month
$1,700 $300 −80%
Provisioned storage priced for peak was replaced with object storage; costs fell while the platform stored more data for longer.
AWS provisioned storage → DigitalOcean object storage (Spaces); monthly figures as recorded at the time.
downtime incidents · per quarter
125 12 −90%
downtime incidents per quarter
Incidents collapsed once the revenue-critical upload flow stopped depending on a single on-premise machine.
Same quarter, a year apart, and the baseline quarter is the one the new platform shipped in; figures as recorded at the time.
on parallel uploads · every client at full speed
No cap
every client uploads at full speed, however many at once
Uploads used to run through one AWS instance: a single client could upload at their connection’s full speed, but clients uploading at the same time shared that server’s roughly 300–400 Mbit/s. Now each client uploads straight to object storage, so many upload at full speed at once.
The instance figure is as recalled by the delivery team, not instrumented. The speed-up grows with the number of simultaneous uploads: a lone client sees no change, ten clients on 100 Mbit/s connections each get about 3×, thirty-five get about 10×. DigitalOcean Spaces publishes request-rate limits for standard buckets, not a bandwidth cap.

Evolve Edits’ decade-old WordPress client portal moved terabytes of photos a month through a single Mac Mini at company HQ. We rebuilt it as a cloud platform on a fixed price and released it by canary rollout while the business kept operating. Downtime incidents fell 90%; infrastructure cost fell 80%.

The Situation

Evolve Edits is a post-production company for photography: photographers worldwide send their photos in for editing, with software sold as part of the service. Their client portal had grown for over a decade inside a WordPress marketing site fueled by outdated plugins. Client uploads ran through a single AWS instance and landed on a Mac Mini at company HQ, which suffered frequent downtime and kept running out of storage while the business moved terabytes per month. Uploads were throttled by that one instance’s network throughput and the Mac Mini’s disk write speed; file transfers ran over FTP with no alerts, synchronization, or automation, though international clients needed 24-hour self-service. And the AWS storage that backed it was provisioned for peak and paid for always.

What We Did

Consulting first: we assessed the existing solution, identified the improvement areas, and presented the project plan. Then a fixed-price rebuild, delivered over roughly nine months. We built a React + Material UI client portal, a Django backend, and a FastAPI file-transfer microservice. The decision that mattered most was architectural: direct-to-object-storage uploads, which removed the single-instance bottleneck entirely instead of buying a bigger instance. We migrated from AWS to DigitalOcean, replacing provisioned storage with object storage, integrated two-way with Podio via webhooks on task changes, exposed data to Looker Studio and automation platforms, and wired Authorize.net payments. Release was a canary rollout, gradual exposure to a small subset of users, because the portal is a revenue-critical flow and a big-bang cutover would have bet the entire client base on day one. That made the release slower than it could have been, deliberately.

What Moved

Downtime incidents fell from 125 to 12 per quarter, a −90% change, after the on-premise dependency was removed. The comparison is the same quarter a year apart, the baseline being the quarter the new platform shipped in, and both figures are as recorded at the time, not products of the standardized definitions our current proof loop uses. Infrastructure cost fell from $1,700 to $300 per month, −80%, while the platform stored more data for longer. Clients now upload in parallel, each at their own connection’s full speed, instead of sharing one server’s roughly 300–400 Mbit/s, and reported the difference unprompted. We record that as an architectural result, not a measured multiple: the gain grows with how many clients upload at once. The human element left the transfer pipeline: Podio integration and automated workflows replaced manual FTP handling.

Where It Went

After launch the engagement transitioned to ongoing maintenance and monitoring, with our PM and tech lead working directly with their production manager and in-house technical role.
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