I was brought in to Argos Risk after they launched the first version of their flagship product. The first version was a great proof of concept, but not ready for production, enterprise use and slowly started showing when it’s weaknesses were.
My original task was to build their corporate web site and help the product developer continue to improve it. We did this for many months, but eventually the other developer left, so I was in charge. Myself and the President/CEO came to the agreement that no more bandaids would do the job, it needed a rewrite to a more stable basic platform in order to scale to the size needed.
The second version of the application was built in the Yii framework with PHP, MySQL, HTML5, CSS3 and jQuery after being rebuilt from the original build that was much more convoluted, and also had some MS SQL, Cognos and other pieces that created instability and cost, but proved unnecessary. After written more cleanly uptime improved, costs went down and performance increased exponentially.
I continue to consult for them now and then when the developer that replaced me after 3 gets a little bit too much on his plate and needs a little bit of help.