<b>The store that fought its own CDN</b>

<b>The store that fought its own CDN</b>

A homewares shop out of São Paulo had a CDN, a good one, but cache-hit ratio sat stuck at 61%. Every miss flew 9,500 km back to a Frankfurt origin. Their mistake was 38 edge locations all pulling cold from origin independently, so a popular product image got fetched 38 separate times.

We turned on tiered caching: regional parent nodes in Miami and Madrid absorbed the misses, so origin saw one request instead of dozens. Frankfurt's egress fell off a cliff.

Cache-hit ratio climbed 61% to 94% in eleven days. Origin requests per minute dropped from 4,200 to 380. São Paulo TTFB went from 540 ms to 90 ms because warm content now lived two hops away, not an ocean away.

The number that mattered: 91% fewer origin fetches.