Case Study: Virtual Expo boosts CDN performance and enables cache persistence with Varnish Software's Varnish Plus Cloud

Virtual Expo, A Leader In Online B2b Exhibitions, Used Varnish Plus Cloud To Build And Enhance Their Own In-house Cdn

Virtual Expo is a leading global virtual trade show platform that attracts over 8 million unique monthly users. After building a DIY CDN in 2013 from Varnish Cache on distributed bare‑metal servers, the company faced slowing response times (especially for search engine crawlers), cache loss on daemon restarts, and backend storage fragmentation while trying to serve millions of objects with long TTLs.

Virtual Expo ran a pilot using Varnish Plus Cloud on AWS, adopting the Massive Storage Engine to provide cache persistence, better storage for ~15 million objects, and flexible per‑hour licensing. The result was a dramatic drop in Google Bot page load times (≈900 ms to ≈150 ms), sustained stability (100+ days uptime), reliable recovery after restarts, and enough confidence to keep Varnish Plus on AWS in production.

VirtualExpo