Varnish is a web application accelerator tool, which has been gaining a lot in popularity lately, because it can increase the load speed of any Internet site, sometimes even by 100 percent, based on the content itself. This tool is occasionally called a caching HTTP reverse proxy too and is used to lower the overall load on the physical machine and to boost the browsing speed for the site visitors. Anytime a visitor accesses a page on a given website, the web browser request is handled by the web server and the requested content is delivered as a response. If Varnish is enabled, it caches the pages that the website visitor browses and in case any of them is accessed once again, it is delivered by Varnish and not by the server directly. The improvement in the overall performance comes from the fact that the accelerator processes the web requests substantially faster than any web server, which leads to much faster browsing speeds for the site visitors. If any content is changed meanwhile, the cached web pages will also be ‘refreshed’ the next time somebody tries to access them.

Varnish in Shared Website Hosting

If you host your sites in a shared website hosting account with us, you will be able to activate Varnish with a few clicks of the mouse from your Control Panel. The data caching platform comes as an optional upgrade with all our shared web hosting packages and you can choose how many websites will use it and the maximum amount of system memory that will be used for the cached content. The two features that can be upgraded in the Upgrades section of the Control Panel are the amount of system memory and the number of instances and they’re not linked directly to each other, so you can choose if you need plenty of memory for one single large-sized site or less memory for multiple smaller ones. You can take advantage of the full potential of the Varnish platform if the sites use a dedicated IP address. With the hosting Control Panel, you can swiftly start/restart/stop an instance, delete the cached content individually for each website which employs Varnish or view an exhaustive log file.