Varnish is a web app accelerator, which has been gaining a lot in popularity lately, because it can increase the speed of any site, at times even by 100%, depending on the content. This tool is occasionally called an HTTP reverse proxy too and is used to reduce the overall load on the physical server and to enhance the access speed for the site visitors. Anytime a visitor accesses a page on a particular site, the browser request is taken care of by the web server and the requested info is returned as a reply. If Varnish is activated, it caches the web pages that the visitor opens and if any of them is loaded once again, it’s delivered by Varnish and not by the web server directly. The improvement in the performance is due to the fact that the accelerator handles the web requests considerably quicker than any web server, which leads to much faster browsing speeds for the users. If any data is edited in the meantime, the cached pages will also be updated the next time somebody tries to open them.

Varnish in Hosting

In case you host your websites in a hosting account with our company, you’ll be able to add Varnish with a few clicks via your hosting Control Panel. The content caching platform is offered as an upgrade with all our shared packages and you can select the number of the websites that will use it and the maximum amount of system memory that will be available for the cached content. The two upgradeable features in the Upgrades section of the Control Panel are the amount of memory and the number of instances and they’re not directly tied to each other, so you can decide if you want lots of memory for one single large-scale site or less memory for several smaller ones. You can unleash the full potential of the Varnish platform if the websites use a dedicated IP address. Using the Control Panel, you can swiftly start/reboot/deactivate an instance, clear the cached content individually for each site which uses the Varnish platform or check a detailed log file.