Varnish is a web application accelerator tool, which has been gaining a lot in popularity in recent years, as it can increase the speed of any site, sometimes even by one hundred percent, based on the content itself. This tool is sometimes called a caching HTTP reverse proxy too and is used to reduce the overall server load and to accelerate the access speed for the website visitors. Anytime a visitor accesses a page on a particular site, the web browser request is processed by the web server and the requested info is delivered as a reply. If the Varnish accelerator is activated, it caches the pages that the site visitor opens and in case any of them is opened once again, it is served by Varnish and not by the server directly. The performance boost comes from the fact that the accelerator handles the browser requests significantly faster than any web server, which results in much faster browsing speeds for the visitors. In case any data is edited in the meantime, the cached webpages will also be ‘refreshed’ the next time somebody accesses them.
Varnish in Shared Website Hosting
If you host your sites in a shared website hosting account with our company, you’ll be able to add Varnish with a few clicks of the mouse via your Control Panel. The caching platform is available as an optional upgrade with all our shared web hosting packages and you can choose the number of the websites that will use it and the total storage space that will be used for the cached data. The two upgradeable features in the Control Panel’s Upgrades section are the number of instances and the amount of memory and they are not tied directly to each other, so you can decide if you want plenty of memory for a single large-scale website or less memory for multiple smaller ones. You can unlock the full potential of the Varnish platform in case the websites use a dedicated IP. With the hosting Control Panel, you can swiftly start/reboot/cancel an instance, delete the cached content independently for each website that employs Varnish or view an in-depth log file.