The slow demise of a million dollar website

The project that I was working on at this particular company was a high-valued project. It generated millions of monthly page views and the click-rate was insanely high. And by high-value, I do mean financially high-value. It generated a substantial amount of revenue every year well into the millions.

Our department was very hands on with this project and we took any changes to it very seriously. A website as this stage is very volatile typically, mainly because you can’t stop it from running even for a minute without substantial financial loss. Any changes were normally double and triple checked before anything was made concrete and pushed live.

I was one of two developers on this project and was brought on very early in the acquisition of it in order to help with the migration. I was there day 1 with the original owner going over the many intricacies that made the whole thing work. And believe me, there were alot of things to keep track of. You don’t get into the millions by simply wishing it so it appears.

Dozens of web services, hundreds of scrips, endless accounts to various websites and several servers scattered in various places around the globe made this entire business run. And surprisingly, this website also came with a small team of 12 remote employees that manually validated all of the data on on a daily…