Case Studies | SaaS B2B

Modernising the hosting behind a busy media estate

AWS Hosting Modernisation and Edge Security

About

A SaaS B2B business working with Cloud Combinator on AWS. The client is anonymised at their request.

Challenge

The engagement had four focus areas, each tackling a distinct pressure on the estate.

Controlling cost

The platform was running on older storage and compute generations with no budget guardrails. Legacy gp2 volumes and T2 instances were carrying workloads that newer, cheaper families could run more efficiently, and there was no anomaly detection to catch spend drift early.

Hardening the edge

Sites were exposed to bot traffic and DDoS risk without a centralised, managed edge. Malicious and low-value automated requests were reaching the application tier directly, adding load and risk that belonged further out at the perimeter.

Separating and modernising the database

Shared MySQL workloads sat alongside the web tier, which limited reliability and made scaling and maintenance harder. The database needed its own managed home with proper backups, maintenance windows and monitoring.

Seeing into the estate

Windows memory and disk metrics were not being collected, and edge and load-balancer traffic was not being logged for analysis. Without dashboards, alarms and queryable logs, both cost and performance decisions were being made partly blind.

Solution

We ran the work in four phases across four weeks, front-loading low-risk optimisation and observability before touching the edge, database and production compute.

4 weeks

End-to-end delivery window

5 days

Focused consultant effort

$3,000

AWS Well-Architected credit toward the bill

By the numbers:

  • 4 weeks - End-to-end delivery window
  • 5 days - Focused consultant effort
  • $3,000 - AWS Well-Architected credit toward the bill
Changes

The engagement delivers a modernised, better-instrumented estate with a managed edge, a separated database and a clear cost trajectory, with every production change staged behind tested runbooks and rollback. Performance and savings figures below are targets set by the plan and will be confirmed against live measurement.

  • Lower, guarded cost — Gp2 to gp3 storage conversion, T2 to T3/T3a right-sizing, AWS Budgets and Cost Anomaly Detection, and a Savings Plan and RDS reservation proposal to sustain the savings.
  • A hardened edge — CloudFront with a centralised AWS WAF web ACL for Bot Control, rate limiting and geo-restriction, under AWS Shield Standard, moving bot and DDoS pressure off the application tier.
  • A cleaner data tier — Shared MySQL migrated to a managed RDS or Aurora database with automated backups, maintenance windows and monitoring, separated from the web tier.
  • Full observability — Windows memory and disk metrics, CloudWatch dashboards and alarms, and ALB, WAF and CloudFront logs in S3 queryable through Athena, with a weekly KPI template.
  • Handover — A recorded training session plus as-built architecture, WAF rulesets, diagrams and a RDS/Aurora migration runbook with rollback plan.

With cost under control, the edge hardened and the database on its own managed footing, the client is no longer just running its estate but is positioned to build on it, with the observability and clean architecture needed to support the future AI and reporting work the platform was prepared for.

AWS Stack

Amazon CloudFront

For a managed content-delivery edge in front of the estate.

AWS WAF

For centralised bot control, rate limiting and geo-restriction.

AWS Shield

For baseline DDoS protection at the edge.

Amazon RDS

And Amazon Aurora for a managed, separated MySQL database.

Amazon EC2

And Amazon EBS gp3 for right-sized Windows and IIS compute and storage.

Amazon CloudWatch

For Windows metrics, dashboards and alarms.

Amazon S3

And Amazon Athena for centralised logs and queryable analysis.

AWS Budgets

And Cost Anomaly Detection for spend guardrails, with AWS Compute Optimizer guiding right-sizing.

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