Case Study: Ars Technica achieves lightning-fast, globally scalable page loads with CacheFly

Ars Technica Gives Readers Lightning Fast Page Loads

Ars Technica, a long-running technology news site founded in 1998 that draws about 10 million unique visitors monthly, faced growing infrastructure strain from serving static assets and dynamic CMS content from the same servers. High traffic spikes (including events that generated 15–16 million page views) consumed over half of web server network bandwidth and a quarter of CPU capacity, and risked packet loss for a globally distributed audience.

Ars implemented CacheFly’s CDN with a Reverse Proxy and token authentication, offloading static delivery and simplifying deployments. The CDN absorbed traffic surges, cut page‑load times (U.S. cached response averages ~400 ms), enabled secure premium downloads, and reduced operational complexity—delivering scalable performance and better global user experience backed by responsive support.

Ars Technica

Jason Marlin

Director of Technology