Varnish is a web app accelerator platform, which caches data for the sake of quicker access. It’s occasionally called a caching HTTP reverse proxy too and it works between a web server and an Internet browser. When a site visitor loads a certain webpage, the content is requested by the browser, and then the server processes this request and sends back the requested content. If Varnish is enabled for a specific website, it will cache the pages at the very first visit and in case the user visits a cached page again, the content will be delivered by the accelerator platform and not by the server. The accelerated load speed is a result of the significantly faster response time that the Varnish platform offers as compared with any server software. Of course, this doesn’t mean that the users will continue seeing the very same content again and again, since any change on any of the pages is reflected in the content that the Varnish platform keeps in its memory.
Varnish in Shared Website Hosting
In case you host your websites in a shared website hosting account with us, you will be able to activate Varnish with several mouse clicks via your hosting Control Panel. The data caching platform is offered as an upgrade with all our packages and you can select the number of the websites that will use it and the total amount of system memory that will be used for the cached data. The two upgradeable features in the Upgrades section of the Control Panel are the number of instances and the amount of system memory and they aren’t linked directly to each other, so you can choose if you need a lot of memory for one single large website or less memory for several smaller ones. You can unleash the full potential of the Varnish caching platform if the websites use a dedicated IP address. With the Control Panel, you can effortlessly start/restart/stop an instance, clear the cached files individually for each site that uses Varnish or see an exhaustive system log file.