Varnish is a content caching platform, which is sometimes referred to as a caching HTTP reverse proxy. It’s a website accelerator tool that can accelerate the loading speed of a site by up to 1000%, based on its content. Each time a visitor opens any page on a site that uses Varnish, the platform caches the page and delivers it instead of the web server if the visitor opens it again. In this way, the web browser request from the visitor is not handled by the server and the web page will load significantly faster, since Varnish can deliver data many times faster than any server software. The result will be a substantially faster loading site, which means a greatly improved visitor experience. In case any of the cached pages is updated on the actual site, the data that Varnish stores in its memory is updated as well, so the visitors will not end up seeing out-of-date information.

Varnish in Website Hosting

If you host your sites under a website hosting account with us, you’ll be able to activate Varnish with a couple of mouse clicks through your hosting Control Panel. The content caching platform comes as an upgrade with all our hosting packages and you can select the number of the sites that will use it and the maximum amount of system memory that will be used for the cached content. The two features that can be upgraded in the Upgrades section of the Control Panel are the amount of system memory and the number of instances and they are not tied directly to each other, so you can choose if you want lots of memory for a single large-scale site or less memory for multiple smaller ones. You can use the full potential of Varnish in case the websites use a dedicated IP address. Using the Control Panel, you can swiftly start/restart/cancel an instance, clear the cached content independently for each website which uses Varnish or see a comprehensive log file.