Case Study: 9GAG achieves scale to 150 million users and 30% CDN cost savings with Cloudflare

How 9GAG Scaled Fun to 150 Million Users with Cloudflare

9GAG, a leading short-form entertainment site serving memes, GIFs and viral content to about 150 million unique visitors monthly, faced growing infrastructure pain as its previous CDN struggled to keep up. Users frequently reported slow loads, engineering teams ran repeated fire‑drills to diagnose bottlenecks, and a sophisticated botnet once knocked the site offline for a day—making reliability and regional performance (especially in Southeast Asia) existential priorities.

After directing 5% of traffic to several CDNs for testing, 9GAG selected Cloudflare. The switch delivered faster, more reliable delivery—notably in Thailand, the Philippines and other Asia Pacific markets—leveraging 165+ points of presence, and eliminated downtime from DDoS attacks. 9GAG also realized roughly 30% CDN cost savings, gained strong, responsive support, and has expanded use of Cloudflare services, with user complaint emails about performance essentially disappearing.

9GAG

Derek Chan

Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer