Varnish is a web accelerator platform, which caches data for the sake of faster response times. It is occasionally referred to as an HTTP reverse proxy as well and it interacts between a web server and an Internet browser. When a website visitor accesses a given web page, the content is requested by the Internet browser, and then the server processes this browser request and delivers the needed information. If Varnish is activated for a certain website, it will cache its pages on the very first request and in case the visitor opens a cached page for a second time, the data will be delivered by the accelerator platform instead of the web server. The boosted loading speed is an end result of the significantly faster response time that Varnish offers compared with any server software. At the same time, this doesn’t mean that the website visitors will continue being served the exact same content over and over again, because any modification on any of the pages is reflected in the content that the Varnish platform stores in its memory.

Varnish in Website Hosting

In case you host your websites in a website hosting account with our company, you’ll be able to activate Varnish with a couple of mouse clicks via your Control Panel. The caching platform is offered as an optional upgrade with all our shared web hosting packages and you can select how many websites will use it and the total storage space that will be used 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 aren’t tied directly to each other, so you can choose if you need plenty of memory for one large-sized website or less memory for multiple smaller ones. You can take advantage of the full potential of the Varnish platform in case the sites use a dedicated IP. With the Control Panel, you can easily start/reboot/cancel an instance, delete the cached files independently for each website which employs the Varnish platform or check a detailed system log.