Big City Life — a performance fix and a hosting migration

When Big City Life was referred to us in 2026, its website was running very slowly. The client is a photographer, so the site is image-heavy, and the whole site came to roughly 85GB. Another provider was hosting it, and Big City Life chose to move to us.

We took the site over. We reduced it to about 4.5GB, less than a tenth of its old size, moved it onto our hosting and added security.

It is one of a number of sites we have taken over; Xscape4u, referred to us after a compromise, is another. We have also moved many clients’ sites to us from other providers, and moves like this one are part of our website rebuilds and migrations work.

Three pieces of work brought the site down to about 4.5GB. We optimised the database, and we fixed a caching fault that had stopped the cache clearing. We also resized the site’s images. This is a photographer’s site, it displays a large number of images, and they were all very large: we scaled them down to sensible sizes and saved them again as JPEGs under the same file names, so nothing else on the site had to change.