Synco

Synco is a legacy Ruby on Rails billing and customer management system used by Site5 (a brand of World Wide Web Hosting, rebranded ~2013-2014). It served as both the customer-facing portal (order forms, service management, support tickets) and the staff admin interface (customer management, provisioning, mass mailing, billing). I joined this project after its initial development and worked on it for 4+ years (2011–2015). I was responsible for performance optimization, security hardening, VPS provisioning features, and maintaining the application through end of life as customers were migrated to our new billing system, Helix.

Architecture

Synco was a monolithic Rails application backed by MySQL. It managed shared hosting, managed and unmanaged VPS, reseller hosting, dedicated servers, and domain registration services. The customer-facing side (“Backstage”) handled sign-ups, service management, billing, and support. The staff side handled provisioning, customer management, mass communications, and reporting. The app integrated with cPanel, SolusVM, OpenSRS, and Enom APIs for service lifecycle management.

Key Contributions

Performance: VPS Order Form Optimization

The VPS order form page was critically slow, taking roughly 10 minutes to load. Over a concentrated 3-day effort in January 2015, I identified and eliminated the root causes through a series of targeted fixes:

• Added missing database indexes on order_forms_plans and cart_entries join tables
• Refactored OrderForm#valid_plans to use a single batch query instead of loading all plans and filtering with Ruby
• Eliminated N+1 queries by caching valid_plans in a local variable instead of calling @order.valid_plans repeatedly in the view (which re-executed the query each time)
• Replaced object comparisons with ID comparisons (server_location_id instead of loading full ServerLocation instances)
• Batch-loaded plan specs with all_plan_specs — a single query for all plan values instead of per-plan queries in a loop
• Cached plan prices and value descriptions in instance variables to avoid redundant lookups
• Used raw attribute reads (read_attribute(:free_memory)) to skip ActiveRecord callbacks on hot paths

These changes brought page load time from ~10 minutes down to under 1 minute.

Performance: Mass Mail Wizard

The staff mass mail wizard pages were also extremely slow due to ActiveRecord loading full model graphs (Service with :include => [:customer, :plan]) for thousands of records. I replaced these with targeted raw SQL joins that selected only the columns needed for display, dramatically reducing load times.

Security Hardening

I led multiple security efforts across the application:

• XSS prevention: Systematic HTML escaping across order forms, domain management, and admin views to close cross-site scripting vulnerabilities
• CryptoBismol: Contributed to the encryption library used to store sensitive customer data, adding tests and improving the encryption scheme storage format
• Input sanitization: Patched HTML::WhiteListSanitizer, added security question requirements, restricted sensitive pages to master contacts

VPS Provisioning & APIs

• Built and maintained VPS provisioning and deprovisioning workflows for both managed and unmanaged VPS products
• Implemented VpsApiCache to store VPS state in the database, eliminating redundant API calls to SolusVM
• Added server APIs for integration with internal monitoring and automation tools
• Integrated with the SolusVM and cPanel APIs for service lifecycle management

Helix Migration Preparation

As the team built Helix (our replacement billing system), I prepared Synco for the customer migration:

• Added helix_id and helix_imported_at columns to customers, contacts, and services tables
• Built redirect logic so imported customers attempting to log in or reset passwords in Synco were directed to the new system
• Displayed banners for imported customers explaining the transition

The Synco-to-Helix migration was in progress but never completed — the company was acquired before it could be finalized.