Varnish is a website accelerator platform, which caches content for the sake of faster access. It’s occasionally called an HTTP reverse proxy too and it works between a web server and a web browser. When a site visitor loads a given webpage, its content is requested by the Internet browser, and then the server handles this request and returns the necessary information. If Varnish is activated for a site, it will cache its pages on the first visit and if the user accesses a cached page for a second time, the info will be delivered by the accelerator platform instead of the server. The increased loading speed is an end result of the substantially faster response time that the Varnish platform offers compared to any server software. At the same time, this doesn’t mean that the site visitors will continue seeing the exact same content again and again, since any modification on any of the web pages is reflected in the content that Varnish saves in its memory.

Varnish in Web Hosting

If you host your sites under a web hosting account with our company, you’ll be able to activate Varnish with a couple of clicks of the mouse from your hosting Control Panel. The data caching platform comes as an 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 content. The two features that can be upgraded in the Control Panel’s Upgrades section are the number of instances and the amount of system memory and they aren’t directly tied to each other, so you can choose whether you want plenty of memory for one single large-size site or less memory for several smaller ones. You can make use of the full potential of Varnish if the websites use a dedicated IP address. With the hosting Control Panel, you can easily start/restart/cancel an instance, delete the cached contents individually for each website which employs the Varnish platform or check an in-depth system log file.