Varnish is a content caching platform, which is sometimes called a caching HTTP reverse proxy. It is a website accelerator that can improve the speed of a site by up to 1000 percent, based on the content itself. Every 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 loads it again. Thus, the web browser request from the visitor is not handled by the server and the web page will load much faster, as the Varnish platform can serve content many times faster than any web server software. The result will be a considerably faster loading website, which means an immensely improved browsing experience. When any of the cached pages is updated on the live site, the information that Varnish saves in its system memory is updated as well, so the visitors will never end up seeing old information.

Varnish in Hosting

If you host your websites in a hosting account with our company, you will be able to add Varnish with a couple of clicks through your hosting Control Panel. The content caching platform is offered as an upgrade with all our shared hosting plans and you can select how many websites will use it and the total amount of system memory that will be used for the cached data. 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 tied directly to each other, so you can choose if you need plenty of memory for one large-sized website or less memory for multiple smaller ones. You can take advantage of the full potential of the Varnish caching platform if the websites use a dedicated IP address. Using the hosting Control Panel, you can swiftly start/reboot/discontinue an instance, delete the cached contents individually for each site which uses the Varnish platform or view an in-depth log file.