Varnish is a web accelerator platform, which caches data for quicker response times. It is sometimes referred to as an HTTP reverse proxy as well and it works between a web server and a web browser. When a website visitor accesses a particular page, its content is requested by the web browser, and then the server processes this request and delivers the needed info. If Varnish is enabled for a given website, it will cache its pages on the very first request and in case the user visits a cached page again, the data will be delivered by the caching platform and not by the server. The boosted loading speed is an end result of the substantially faster response speed that the Varnish platform offers as compared to any server software. At the same time, this does not mean that the visitors will continue being served the very same content over and over again, since any change on any of the web pages is reflected in the content that Varnish saves in its memory.

Varnish in Hosting

If you host your websites in a hosting account with us, you’ll be able to add Varnish with a couple of clicks through your Control Panel. The platform is available as an upgrade with all our hosting packages and you can select how many websites will use it and the total amount of system memory that will be available for the cached data. The two features that can be upgraded in the Control Panel’s Upgrades section are the number of instances and the amount of system memory and they aren’t directly tied to each other, so you can decide if you want a lot of memory for one single large-size site or less memory for multiple smaller ones. You can make use of the full potential of the Varnish caching platform in case the websites use a dedicated IP address. With the Control Panel, you can quickly start/reboot/stop an instance, clear the cached content independently for each site which employs Varnish or check an exhaustive log file.