Varnish is a web application accelerator platform, which caches info for the sake of quicker access. It’s sometimes called an HTTP reverse proxy as well and it interacts between a web server and a web browser. When a visitor opens a certain webpage, its content is requested by the web browser, and then the web server processes this request and delivers the requested information. If Varnish is enabled for a certain website, it will cache the pages at the very first request and if the visitor opens a cached page once more, the info will be delivered by the accelerator platform and not by the web server. The improved load speed is a result of the much faster response time that the Varnish platform offers as compared to any web server software. Of course, this doesn’t mean that the site visitors will continue being served the exact same content over and over again, since any modification on any of the pages is reflected in the content that Varnish stores in its memory.

Varnish in Shared Web Hosting

In case you host your Internet sites under a shared web hosting account with our company, you’ll be able to activate Varnish with a couple of clicks via your hosting Control Panel. The data caching platform is offered as an upgrade with all our web hosting plans and you can choose how many sites will use it and the total storage space that will be available for the cached content. The two upgradeable features in the Control Panel’s Upgrades section are the amount of memory and the number of instances and they’re not directly tied to each other, so you can choose if you need lots of memory for one single large-sized site or less memory for several smaller ones. You can use the full potential of Varnish if the sites use a dedicated IP. With the hosting Control Panel, you can quickly start/restart/disable an instance, delete the cached contents individually for each site that employs Varnish or see an exhaustive log.