Varnish is a web application accelerator platform, which caches data for faster response times. It’s sometimes called an HTTP reverse proxy as well and it interacts between a web server and an Internet browser. When a website visitor accesses a given page, the content is requested by the browser, and then the web server processes this request and returns the requested data. If Varnish is enabled for a certain website, it will cache its pages on the first request and in case the visitor opens a cached page for a second time, the data will be delivered by the caching platform instead of the web server. The accelerated load speed is an end result of the substantially faster response speed that Varnish offers compared to any server software. At the same time, this does not mean that the website visitors will continue being served the same content over and over again, because any modification on any of the pages is reflected in the content that Varnish keeps in its system memory.

Varnish in Website Hosting

In case you host your sites under a website hosting account with us, you’ll be able to activate Varnish with several clicks via your hosting Control Panel. The caching platform is available as an upgrade with all our packages and you can choose the number of the sites that will use it and the maximum storage space that will be used for the cached data. The two upgradeable features in the Control Panel’s Upgrades section are the number of instances and the amount of memory and they are not linked directly to each other, so you can decide if you want lots of memory for a single large site or less memory for multiple smaller ones. You can unleash the full potential of Varnish in case the sites use a dedicated IP. Using the Control Panel, you can effortlessly start/reboot/cancel an instance, delete the cached data independently for each website that uses the Varnish platform or check an elaborate system log file.