Varnish is a web accelerator platform, which caches content for the sake of quicker response times. It’s occasionally called a caching HTTP reverse proxy too and it works between a web server and a browser. When a website visitor opens a particular webpage, its content is requested by the Internet browser, and then the server processes this browser request and sends back the needed content. If Varnish is activated for a site, it will cache the pages on the very first visit and if the visitor visits a cached page for a second time, the info will be delivered by the caching platform instead of the server. The improved load speed is an end result of the substantially faster response speed that Varnish offers as compared to any web server software. At the same time, this doesn’t mean that the visitors will keep seeing the very same content over and over again, as any modification on any of the web pages is reflected in the content that Varnish keeps in its memory.

Varnish in Cloud Website Hosting

If you host your websites in a cloud website hosting account with us, you will be able to add Varnish with several mouse clicks through your Control Panel. The data caching platform comes as an optional upgrade with all our shared web hosting packages and you can select the number of the websites that will use it and the maximum storage space that will be available for the cached data. 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’re not tied directly to each other, so you can choose if you need lots of memory for one large-scale website or less memory for multiple smaller ones. You can use the full potential of the Varnish caching platform in case the websites use a dedicated IP address. With the Control Panel, you can effortlessly start/reboot/stop an instance, clear the cached content independently for each website which uses Varnish or view an exhaustive system log file.