Case Study: Ulta Beauty achieves scalable, zero-downtime holiday e-commerce performance with Rackspace Technology

Ulta Beauty - Customer Case Study

Ulta Beauty, the largest beauty retailer in the U.S. with more than 1,000 stores and a full-service salon in every location, needed its website to mirror the ease and variety of its in‑store experience ahead of Black Friday. The retailer faced technical constraints—manual, hourly updates for sold‑out items, a single-location infrastructure, and limited scalability—that threatened performance and customer satisfaction during peak traffic.

Rackspace rebuilt Ulta’s infrastructure with geographically separated sites (production in Dallas, DR in Chicago), virtualized servers, a CDN, and an SKU‑driven offer system that automatically displays “sold out” images without caching delays. A migration and dual-site active‑active design enabled zero‑downtime deployments, near real‑time disaster recovery, on‑demand scaling, and faster change response—allowing Ulta to handle peak-season traffic, run beta tests, and deliver a smoother, more reliable online guest experience.

Ulta Beauty

Michelle Pacynski

Vice President of IT