Varnish is a web accelerator platform, which caches data for faster response times. It is sometimes called a caching HTTP reverse proxy as well and it interacts between a web server and its users. When a visitor opens a specific web page, its content is requested by the browser, and then the server handles this request and returns the requested content. If Varnish is activated for a certain website, it will cache the pages at the very first request and if the visitor opens a cached page once more, the information will be delivered by the accelerator platform instead of the server. The improved loading speed is a result of the substantially faster response time that Varnish offers compared with any web server software. Of course, this does not mean that the visitors will keep seeing the exact same content over and over again, because any change on any of the pages is reflected in the content that Varnish saves in its system memory.

Varnish in Cloud Hosting

In case you host your websites in a cloud hosting account with our company, you will be able to add Varnish with a couple of clicks of the mouse via your Control Panel. The data caching platform is available as an upgrade with all our shared web hosting packages and you can choose how many websites will use it and the maximum amount of system memory that will be available for the cached content. The two features that can be upgraded in the Upgrades section of the Control Panel are the number of instances and the amount of system memory and they aren’t tied directly to each other, so you can decide if you need a lot of memory for a single large website or less memory for several smaller ones. You can use the full potential of the Varnish platform in case the sites use a dedicated IP address. Using the hosting Control Panel, you can easily start/reboot/stop an instance, clear the cached data independently for each website that employs the Varnish platform or see an in-depth log file.