Mwave improves website performance by 15% with Amazon CloudFront

For more than 20 years, Mwave has supported gamers, PC builders, creators, and businesses with custom computers and office technology. As demand grew, its digital infrastructure became difficult to scale. Its incumbent CDN provider introduced rising annual renewal fees without added value, and the platform became increasingly complex to operate.

Security concerns escalated at the same time. More than half of Mwave’s traffic consisted of bots attempting to scrape pricing or overwhelm the platform. “Even with firewalls, attackers found ways around them,” says Brendan Armstrong, senior engineer at Mwave. Volumetric attacks intensified during major sales or product launches, placing revenue at risk.

A further challenge emerged as Mwave reviewed the cost and flexibility of its existing CDN arrangement. The company needed a more cost-effective and scalable content delivery approach that could improve performance, strengthen protection against attacks, and support both static content and dynamic APIs at scale.

Mwave turned to AWS for a more resilient content delivery approach and engaged AWS Partner Red Bear to guide the transition. “Our previous service was costly and didn’t offer the capabilities we needed. AWS gave us the technology and support to keep our platform running reliably,” says Amy Guo, research and development manager at Mwave.

With a short delivery timeline, Red Bear, worked closely with Mvave’s technical team and AWS Solutions Architects to plan and execute the cutover, adopting Amazon CloudFront, a global content delivery network, to securely deliver content with low latency and high transfer speeds. The partner adopted a phased approach—moving one site at a time to minimize disruption—and scheduled after-hours cutovers during quieter periods. “This was an important project for us. Red Bear helped us move forward with confidence,” says Armstrong.

The migration was completed in five days, followed by targeted optimizations over the next two weeks to refine caching, fine-tune rules, and resolve edge cases. The teams also implemented Amazon Route 53 for DNS management, along with AWS WAF Bot Control and additional protections such as SQL injection, account takeover, and fraud prevention rules. AWS Shield Advanced was deployed to help protect against large-scale DDoS events. The move also introduced the option to run web servers in private subnets, strengthening Mwave’s overall security posture.

Mwave completed the migration with zero downtime. “If we hadn’t moved to Amazon CloudFront, our website might have gone down during a recent attack. AWS and Red Bear helped us stay online and secure,” says Armstrong. Since moving, the company has recorded a 15 percent improvement in website performance, particularly on image-heavy pages—a boost that also strengthens its search engine ranking.

Security incidents have also decreased. A recent attempted attack was blocked within minutes once protections were fully activated. “We don’t think about it anymore—it just works,” Armstrong adds, noting that the team no longer needs to respond to volumetric events outside of business hours. Bot traffic has decreased, and backend systems experience less load due to improved filtering at the edge.

Mwave also achieved 60 percent savings on content delivery costs and reinvests part of this into ongoing AWS training for its technical team. The migration strengthened internal capabilities and contributed to Mwave’s readiness for future projects within its broader group. The company is exploring Amazon OpenSearch Service, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon QuickSight to enhance analytics and search experiences. “Working with AWS gave us confidence for what’s ahead. As part of a larger group, we know AWS is where we’ll look for new opportunities,” says Guo.