Case Study: Auto Trader achieves successful cloud migration, 50% faster DNS and stronger security with Cloudflare

Why Auto Trader UK Chose Cloudflare For Its Cloud Migration

Auto Trader UK, the largest automobile classifieds service in the UK and Ireland (hosting over 3,000 dealer sites, ~55 million visits monthly and £330M in revenue), faced a risky, high‑stakes migration from on‑premises, multi‑vendor infrastructure—PowerDNS, Verisign DNS, Arbor DDoS protection and F5 load‑balancing/WAF—to a cloud model. The fragmented stack created operational complexity, limited API automation, repetitive work and ongoing hardware overhead, so the company needed a unified, automated, cost‑effective platform that preserved performance and security.

Auto Trader chose Cloudflare for a single integrated dashboard with extensive API support and Workers for custom functionality, plus interconnects that cut egress costs. The move eliminated hardware, improved operational efficiency, and boosted security with Cloudflare’s WAF (blocking malicious activity). DNS latency fell from ~20–25 ms to 10–13 ms (about a 50% improvement), and Auto Trader realized significant cost and management savings while maintaining high performance and protection.

Auto Trader

Mark Bell

Systems Engineer