Varnish is a content caching platform, which is occasionally called an HTTP reverse proxy. It is a web accelerator that can boost the speed of a website by up to one thousand percent, based on its content. Every time a visitor opens any page on a website that uses Varnish, the platform caches the page and delivers it instead of the web server in case the visitor loads it again. Thus, the web browser request from the visitor is not processed by the server and the web page will load considerably faster, as Varnish can deliver data many times faster than any server software. The result will be a significantly faster loading site, which means a greatly improved visitor experience. When any of the cached web pages is updated on the live site, the information that Varnish stores in its memory is ‘refreshed’ too, so the users won’t end up seeing out-of-date content.
Varnish in Shared Web Hosting
If you host your sites in a shared web hosting account with our company, you will be able to activate Varnish with a couple of clicks of the mouse through your hosting Control Panel. The platform comes as an upgrade with all our shared web hosting plans and you can choose how many websites will use it and the total storage space 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 number of instances and the amount of system memory and they aren’t linked directly to each other, so you can decide if you want lots of memory for a single large website or less memory for several smaller ones. You can use the full potential of the Varnish platform if the websites use a dedicated IP address. With the hosting Control Panel, you can easily start/restart/cancel an instance, clear the cached data individually for each site that uses the Varnish platform or see an in-depth log file.