One flat bill instead of 40+ — and about $300K a year saved across 520+ sites.

The Challenge

A growth-equity firm's web presence isn't one website — it's the firm's own properties, plus every event and fund page a deal cycle generates, plus dozens of portfolio companies whose sites reflect on the firm. Atlas had all three, and nobody was managing it as one thing.

• Forty-plus hosting bills. Every property sat on a different host, often with its own maintenance retainer attached. The firm was effectively paying retail price forty separate times for the same commodity — with zero volume leverage.
• Nobody could see the total. There was no inventory of what the portfolio was actually spending on its web presence. When TopSyde built the first complete accounting, the number was about $740K a year — a blended $118 per site per month, much of it going to hosts and retainers nobody remembered signing up for.
• A diligence-grade security gap. Only about 15% of the portfolio had any regular security scanning. For a firm whose reputation rides on operational rigor, "we don't know if our portfolio's sites are compromised" was an uncomfortable answer.
• Quality was all over the map. Some sites sat on solid infrastructure; others were on cheap shared hosting that went down without anyone noticing. Uptime wasn't measured anywhere, so outages surfaced the worst way — via an annoyed portfolio CEO.

Atlas needed what a well-run firm wants everywhere else in its operations: one standard, one vendor relationship, one predictable number — and proof it was getting what it paid for.

The Approach

TopSyde consolidated the portfolio's entire web footprint onto one managed program, priced at a flat per-site rate.

Step 1 — Inventory every site and every bill

TopSyde mapped every property the firm and its portfolio companies were running: host, stack, traffic, security posture — and cost. For most of the organization, this was the first time anyone had seen the full footprint or the full spend in one place.

Step 2 — Consolidate onto one platform, one bill

Properties were migrated in waves onto the managed platform — same hardened core, same vetted plugin set, same SLA — with zero downtime and every site's design left intact. Forty-plus vendor relationships collapsed into one, and forty-plus invoices collapsed into a single flat monthly bill. At portfolio volume, that's $67 per site per month — 43% below the old blended $118.

Step 3 — Put the whole portfolio under Sentinel

Every property was placed under TopSyde Sentinel, scanning from outside each site daily — verifying core and plugins against official sources and sweeping for backdoors, rogue admins, and injected content. The firm finally has a single answer to "is anything compromised right now?"

Step 4 — Turn on fleet-wide monitoring

Uptime and performance monitoring now runs on every site, with fleet-level status visible in one portal. Outages page TopSyde, not the portfolio company — and the 99.99% figure is backed by an SLA instead of an assumption.

The Results

Within two quarters, the portfolio's web presence went from ungoverned sprawl to a managed line item:

• Yearly hosting and upkeep spend fell from about $740K to about $420K — just over $300K a year back, from consolidation alone.
• Cost per site dropped 43%, from a blended $118 a month to a flat $67 — while the security and performance floor went up.
• One flat bill replaced 40+ invoices, turning an unknowable expense into a single predictable number the firm can budget in one line.
• 100% of the portfolio is now under daily security scanning, up from ~15%.
• Uptime is 99.99%, SLA-backed — a number that simply didn't exist before, because nobody was measuring.

Why It Worked

1. Consolidation creates leverage. Moving from 40+ retail hosting contracts to one program bought a lower price and a higher standard — the two usually trade off, but duplicated retail spend was funding neither.
2. Flat pricing makes budgeting arithmetic. One number per site per month means the cost of the whole portfolio — or of adding ten more sites — is a multiplication, not a procurement project.
3. Visibility closes gaps money can't. One portal showing every property's uptime, security status, and cost turned "we think it's fine" into something the firm can actually stand behind in diligence.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where did the $300K in savings come from?

Deduplication. The portfolio was paying 40+ separate hosts and maintenance retainers at retail — a blended $118 per site per month. Consolidating onto one program at TopSyde's volume rate of $67 flat per site cut the blended cost 43%, while raising the security and uptime baseline at the same time.

Is the program mandatory for portfolio companies?

No. It's offered as a standard that portfolio companies can adopt — most do, because they get better hosting, security, and support than they had, at a lower cost than they were paying. The firm gets visibility and leverage; each company keeps its own brand and site.

Did consolidation require redesigning any sites?

No. Migrations moved each site onto the managed platform with its design and content untouched — only the infrastructure underneath changed. Waves were sequenced so no site had downtime, and most teams never noticed the switch.

How does the firm keep visibility across companies it doesn't operate day-to-day?

The TopSyde portal shows every enrolled property in one view — uptime, daily Sentinel security status, and cost. Portfolio-level answers that used to require emailing 40 vendors are now a dashboard.

Marcus Webb

DevOps & Security Lead

12+ years DevOps, Linux & cloud infrastructure certified

Marcus leads infrastructure and security at TopSyde, managing the server fleet and AI monitoring systems that keep client sites fast and protected. Former sysadmin turned WordPress hosting specialist.

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