Varnish is a content caching platform, which is occasionally called an HTTP reverse proxy. It’s a web accelerator tool that can improve the speed of a site by up to one thousand percent, depending on its content. Every time a visitor accesses any page on a website that uses Varnish, the platform caches the page and delivers it instead of the web server if the visitor opens it again. Thus, the browser request from the visitor is not handled by the web server and the page will open much faster, since the Varnish caching platform can deliver content many times faster than any server software. The result is a substantially faster loading site, which leads to an immensely improved browsing experience. In case any of the cached pages is updated on the live website, the info that Varnish saves in its system memory is ‘refreshed’ too, so the site visitors won’t see old data.

Varnish in Web Hosting

If you host your sites in a web hosting account with us, you will be able to activate Varnish with a few clicks of the mouse through your hosting Control Panel. The data caching platform is offered as an upgrade with all our hosting plans and you can select how many sites 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 memory and they’re not directly tied to each other, so you can choose whether you want lots of memory for one single large-size site or less memory for several smaller ones. You can make use of the full potential of the Varnish platform if the sites use a dedicated IP. With the Control Panel, you can swiftly start/reboot/delete an instance, clear the cached content independently for each website that uses the Varnish platform or check a comprehensive log file.