Varnish is a website accelerator tool, which has been gaining a lot of popularity lately, as it can increase the loading speed of any website, sometimes even by 100%, depending on the content. This tool is sometimes referred to as an HTTP reverse proxy too and is used to decrease the overall server load and to accelerate the browsing speed for the site visitors. Whenever a visitor loads a page on a specific Internet site, the browser request is handled by the web server and the requested data is returned as a response. If Varnish is enabled, it caches the pages that the website visitor opens and in case any of them is opened again, it is served by Varnish and not by the server directly. The increase in the performance is due to the fact that the accelerator processes the browser requests significantly quicker than any web server, which leads to much faster browsing speeds for the visitors. In case any data is edited meanwhile, the cached webpages will also be ‘refreshed’ the next time somebody attempts to access them.

Varnish in Cloud Hosting

In case you host your sites in a cloud hosting account with us, you’ll be able to add Varnish with a few clicks through your hosting Control Panel. The caching platform is available as an upgrade with all our shared web hosting packages and you can select how many sites will use it and the maximum amount of system memory that will be available for the cached content. The two features that can be upgraded in the Upgrades section of the Control Panel are the amount of memory and the number of instances and they are not directly linked to each other, so you can choose whether you want plenty of memory for a single large site or less memory for multiple smaller ones. You can make use of the full potential of the Varnish platform in case the websites use a dedicated IP address. Using the Control Panel, you can effortlessly start/restart/delete an instance, delete the cached content independently for each website that employs Varnish or check an exhaustive log file.