Varnish is a web application accelerator, which has been gaining a lot in popularity in recent years, as it can increase the load speed of any site, at times even by 100%, based on the content. This tool is occasionally called a caching HTTP reverse proxy too and is used to decrease the overall load on the physical machine and to boost the access speed for the site visitors. Anytime a visitor loads a page on a particular Internet site, the web browser request is processed by the web server and the requested data is sent as a response. If Varnish is activated, it caches the pages that the visitor opens and in case any of them is loaded again, it is served by Varnish and not by the web server directly. The increase in the performance comes from the fact that the accelerator processes the web requests significantly quicker than any web server, which leads to much faster browsing speeds for the visitors. If any data is updated in the meantime, the cached pages will also be ‘refreshed’ the next time someone attempts to access them.

Varnish in Cloud Hosting

If you host your websites under a cloud hosting account with our company, you will be able to activate Varnish with a few clicks of the mouse via your hosting Control Panel. The caching platform is available as an upgrade with all our shared hosting plans and you can select the number of the sites that will use it and the total amount of system memory that will be available for the cached data. The two upgradeable features in the Upgrades section of the Control Panel are the amount of system memory and the number of instances and they are not directly tied to each other, so you can choose if you need a lot of memory for one single large-size site or less memory for several smaller ones. You can make use of the full potential of the Varnish platform if the sites use a dedicated IP address. Using the Control Panel, you can effortlessly start/reboot/cancel an instance, clear the cached content independently for each website that uses Varnish or see a comprehensive log.