Varnish is a website accelerator, which has been gaining a lot of popularity in recent years, because it can increase the loading speed of any site, sometimes even by 100%, based on the content itself. This tool is occasionally referred to as an HTTP reverse proxy too and is used to lower the overall server load and to improve the browsing speed for the website visitors. Each time a visitor accesses a page on a given Internet site, the web browser request is handled by the web server and the requested data is returned as a response. If Varnish is activated, it caches the pages that the website visitor opens and in case any of them is loaded again, it’s delivered by Varnish and not by the server directly. The increase in the overall performance is due to the fact that the accelerator handles the web requests substantially faster than any web server, which leads to much faster browsing speeds for the site visitors. If any content is modified in the meantime, the cached web pages will also be ‘refreshed’ the next time somebody tries to access them.

Varnish in Website Hosting

In case you host your Internet sites in a website hosting account with our company, you will be able to add Varnish with several clicks through your hosting Control Panel. The data caching platform is offered as an optional upgrade with all our shared packages and you can select the number of the websites that will use it and the maximum amount of system memory that will be used for the cached data. The two upgradeable features in the Upgrades section of the Control Panel are the number of instances and the amount of system memory and they’re not linked directly to each other, so you can choose whether you need a lot of memory for one single large website or less memory for several smaller ones. You can unlock the full potential of the Varnish caching platform if the sites use a dedicated IP. With the Control Panel, you can easily start/reboot/cancel an instance, clear the cached data individually for each website that employs Varnish or check a detailed system log.