Escalada fitness club

Escalada fitness club is a long-standing client: at first Pavel helped them with small, ad-hoc tasks.

At some point the club’s website was hacked — it started misbehaving or not working at all and showed outdated information. That’s the problem the club came to us with.

Our investigation found the root cause: the site lived on a single local host, on a VPS with a stripped-down OS where a proper upgrade was impossible. It ran an outdated Bitrix that refused to update — it required PHP 8.2+, while the server had PHP 7.4.33.

We proposed several options for a new infrastructure — with an up-to-date Bitrix, a fresh PHP and a migration of the existing database from the old server to the new one. The club chose a three-VPS setup, and we deployed it on a new host.

Three separate Linux servers:

• GitLab + GitLab Runner (Shell) — the site codebase, CI/CD pipelines and scripts that auto-tune SEO after each deploy.
• Dev/Stage — two environments on one server. Dev (dev.example.ru) for live development; after a commit to the develop branch the pipeline ships changes to Stage (stage.example.ru), where the developers and the club’s managers review what’s new.
• Prod — the production server running the live site.

Once checked on Stage, we merge develop → master and the pipeline rolls the update out to production and tunes SEO for prod (search indexing is deliberately disabled on Dev/Stage).

As a result, development never interferes with production: the team works at its own pace while the live site stays stable.

The site moved to a modern infrastructure and works correctly and securely again. Development, testing and production are split into separate environments.

At the club’s request we ran a full SEO audit, found a lot of errors and inconsistencies, and have been fixing them steadily for 1–2 months — cleaning the site up and optimising search indexing.

After the latest tuning and caching update, page response and rendering got roughly 15–30% faster. Escalada is now a permanent client: we run and grow their site on an ongoing basis.