How websites worth 10 million rubles are created - This is a question that owners of large businesses often ask when they are told such an estimate. The reaction is standard: “Are you crazy? For the site? Are the buttons made of gold?”
No, the buttons are not made of gold. And it's not about design at all. In the world of Enterprise (large corporate segment), a website ceases to be a “showcase”. It becomes the core of the company's entire ecosystem, integrating dozens of third-party services, processing terabytes of data and providing trouble-free operation for hundreds of thousands of users simultaneously.
So that you understand the scale: the difference between a site for 300 thousand and a site for 10 million is the difference between a bicycle and a modern passenger plane. Both travel/fly. But the engineering complexity behind the scenes varies dramatically. At the DOM-Marketing agency, we regularly encounter tasks of such architectural complexity. Let's lift the curtain and show where this money really goes, why it's justified, and what the process of creating a digital leviathan looks like.
Stage 1: In-Depth Consulting and System Architecture (Time taken: 15-20% of budget)
Most cheap studios start by drawing a layout. How websites worth 10 million rubles are created? They start with the fact that no code is written at all for the next 1-2 months.
At this stage, it is not programmers who come into play, but business architects and systems analysts. Their task is to unravel the tangle of internal processes of the corporation.
- Integration with Legacy systems: A large bank, factory or holding company has old accounting systems written 15 years ago (written in Delphi, old versions of 1C or home-written in C++). The site must be able to communicate securely with these “dinosaurs” without upgrading them (which costs hundreds of millions).
- Microservices Design: The architect decides how to divide the monolith. For example, the product catalog module works independently of the authorization module and the payment module. If the payment gateway goes down for maintenance (or due to a failure at the acquiring bank), the rest of the site will continue to work and customers will be able to view products.
- Security at the bank level: Development of data encryption (End-to-End), protection against DDoS attacks at 1 Terabit/s, compliance with PCI DSS standards (if cards pass).
It is for this invisible “dirty” intellectual work that the first millions are paid. An architectural error at this stage will cost tens of millions during the support phase.
Stage 2: Directing a digital product (UX/UI and CJM)
Cheap projects have a designer. In projects worth 10 million there are User Experience Director (UX Director).
This is a person who doesn't draw pixels. It constructs the logic of user behavior based on a colossal array of data. In large corporations, the customer journey (Customer Journey Map) can consist of dozens of touch points and complex B2B transaction approval scenarios.
- Neuropsychology of interfaces: Design is not just “beautiful”, it controls the subconscious. Colors, spacing, and typography are tested in specialized laboratories using eye trackers (devices that track the movement of the pupil).
- Complex dashboards: If this corporate portal for a holding, there will be dozens of roles inside (director, middle manager, line employee, partners). Each role has its own unique interface with different levels of access to analytics and documents.
- Design System: A unified library of UI components is created. It's not just style, it's code. Future developers will assemble new site pages as if from Lego, using these certified components. This saves millions on scaling the product in the future.
Stage 3: Enterprise development (Engineering foundation)
This is where the fun begins. If for a regular website they use WordPress, Bitrix or website builders, then how websites worth 10 million rubles are created from a technical point of view? They are written from scratch or based on heavy Enterprise frameworks (Java/Spring, .NET Core, Node.js, Go).
- Headless architecture (Headless CMS): The frontend (Frontend) is completely separate from the database (Backend). Frontend is written in React/Vue and runs lightning fast. The backend provides data via the API. This allows you to create a mobile application or even a voice assistant in the future without redoing the backend.
- Highload and fault tolerance: The server infrastructure is designed with geo-distribution. Data is duplicated in real time in different data centers (for example, in Moscow and St. Petersburg). If one data center sinks or loses power, traffic is automatically switched to the second in a millisecond. The client won't even notice the failure.
- Complex search engine (Elasticsearch): A regular database search will die if there are 5 million items in the catalog with hundreds of characteristics. Elasticsearch is being integrated - a system that processes requests in milliseconds, can search with typos, declensions, and suggest products even before the user has completed the phrase.
Stage 4: Total testing (Preventive paranoia)
In cheap projects, the tester (if there is one) simply clicks on the buttons and checks whether a 404 error appears.
When we talk about how websites worth 10 million rubles are created, testing (QA - Quality Assurance) takes up to 20% of the time of the entire project. This is an army of dozens of testers of different specializations:
- Manual QA: They test business logic on hundreds of devices.
- Automation QA: They write scripts that automatically run thousands of tests every day, simulating user behavior so that a new code edit does not break the old function (regression testing).
- Load Testing: A botnet of hundreds of thousands of simultaneous requests is artificially sent to the site. Engineers are looking at what second the processor on the servers will start to melt and where the database bottleneck is.
- Security Auditing (Pentest): “White hat hackers” are hired and try to hack the site using any known methods (SQL injections, XSS, guessing passwords for the admin panel). Only after signing an agreement on the absence of critical vulnerabilities is the project ready to launch.
Stage 5: CI/CD and Infrastructure as Code (Seamless launch)
In ordinary studios, launching a website is stressful. “Everyone, transfer the files to the server, pray.” In Enterprise, this is a process that happens dozens of times a day, completely invisible to users, thanks to CI/CD (Continuous Integration and Delivery).
- The developer wrote the code -> Tests ran automatically -> Code was checked for style -> Prepared for release -> Distributed to servers. If there is an error at any stage, the build is canceled and the code does not get to the “production” server. This eliminates the human factor (when the programmer forgot to download the required file and “put down” the site on Friday evening). The server infrastructure is described in code (Terraform). If the server burns down, it can be restored by copying one command.
Stage 6: Analytics building and evolution (Most important)
A 10 million website doesn’t end on launch day. At this moment he begins to live.
At this stage, data-science specialists come into play. We set up end-to-end analytics of such depth that ordinary business owners are not even aware of:
- Digitization of offline conversions (when a person looked at a complex product on the website and bought it in the office, the website “recognizes” this and takes credit for it).
- Machine learning for personalization. Algorithms begin to adjust the blocks on the main page for a specific user (if he is interested in truck tires, he will not see the block with passenger cars).
- Continuous A/B testing of hypotheses.
That is why such projects are often done not for a one-time payment, but according to the Time & Material model with guaranteed SLAs (service level agreements), where the agency takes responsibility for the performance of the system 24/7/365. Our service helps us with this website technical support.
Summary: Pay with your head, not your hands.
Let's return to the main question. How websites worth 10 million rubles are created? They are not created by someone spending a long time drawing beautiful pictures. They are created by the fact that you are not buying a “site”, but IT infrastructure of the company, which:
- Won't drop on Black Friday.
- Will not give away VIP client databases to hackers.
- Can scale 100 times without rewriting the code.
- Integrates all your internal processes into a single nervous system.
Yes, this is excessive for a medium-sized business. For a local bakery, this is crazy. But for a federal network, a large bank, a factory or a holding company, this is not a waste, it is an investment in survival and market dominance. A cheap website in such a company will cost the business more due to downtime and data leaks.
IN DOM-Marketing We do not take on projects where a simple solution is sufficient. But if your business needs a highly complex architecture that can handle millions of requests and protect corporate assets, we know how to design it. Explore examples of complex implementations in our cases.
Ready to build an enterprise-level system?
Don't trust your company's infrastructure to those who learned from video tutorials. Entrust it to engineers who understand what's behind every line of code.
📞 Discuss the architecture of the Enterprise project: 89617842290 🌐 Leave a request on the website: dom-marketing.ru ✈️ Contact on Telegram: @Dkrasilnikov
Your business is too big to skimp on reliability.
Do you think that it makes no sense for a business to overpay for infrastructure, or vice versa - do you only believe in custom development? We look forward to your discussion in the comments! Subscribe to the channel - they tell the truth about the real cost of IT.
#Enterprise #website development #large business #site architecture #highload #integration1c #housemarketing #itinfrastructure #data protection #security #corporate website #b2b #webdevelopment #complexprojects #digitalagency #microservices #code quality #itbusiness