Case Study: Big Cartel achieves faster image delivery, robust DDoS protection, and reduced bandwidth costs with Fastly

Big Cartel - Customer Case Study

Big Cartel is an ecommerce platform built by and for independent artists, serving nearly 1 million creators who sell clothing, jewelry, music and other goods. As the site grew, the team faced escalating DDoS threats (including large spikes and a shift to Layer 7 attacks) and needed faster, more efficient image delivery and reliable user experiences while keeping their engineering team lean.

Big Cartel moved core services to Fastly’s edge cloud — using Fastly’s CDN, custom VCL, Instant Purge, real‑time log streaming and DDoS mitigation — and built a script to auto-block abusive IPs via Fastly ACLs at the edge. They also adopted Fastly Image Optimizer, cutting image payloads to about one‑third of their previous size and delivering responses in under 250 ms, which reduced bandwidth costs and delivered faster, more reliable experiences for customers.

Big Cartel

Lee Jensen

Technical Director