Case Study: Daily Racing Form achieves a scalable, high-performance paywall with Varnish Software

Daily Racing Form - Customer Case Study

Daily Racing Form (DRF), America's leading horse-racing media authority, needed a faster, more scalable paywall. Their existing third‑party Drupal/Apache solution forced every subscriber sign‑in to hit the Drupal server (running uncached PHP and brittle cookie logic), causing slow response times, overload during big events, and many customer complaints.

DRF implemented a metered paywall with Varnish in under two weeks, moving entitlement checks into a caching layer and reducing load on the Drupal VM. The result was sub‑second page responses in load tests, virtually no support calls during major events, and steady operational and customer‑service improvements.

Daily Racing Form

Greg Wiley

Director