Varnish is a website accelerator, which has been gaining a lot of popularity lately, because it can increase the load speed of any Internet site, sometimes even by one hundred percent, depending on the content. This tool is occasionally called a caching HTTP reverse proxy as well and is used to reduce the overall server load and to increase the access speed for the site visitors. Every time a visitor opens a page on a certain website, the browser request is processed by the web server and the requested information is sent as a reply. If the Varnish accelerator is enabled, it caches the pages that the website visitor browses and if any of them is loaded once again, it is fetched by Varnish and not by the web server directly. The increase in the overall performance comes from the fact that the accelerator handles the web requests considerably faster than any web server, which leads to much faster browsing speeds for the website visitors. If any content is changed in the meantime, the cached webpages will also be ‘refreshed’ the next time somebody opens them.

Varnish in Shared Website Hosting

If you host your sites under a shared website hosting account with us, you’ll be able to add Varnish with a couple of clicks of the mouse from your hosting Control Panel. The platform is offered as an upgrade with all our shared web hosting plans and you can select how many sites will use it and the maximum amount of system memory that will be used for the cached content. The two upgradeable features in the Control Panel’s Upgrades section are the number of instances and the amount of memory and they aren’t directly linked to each other, so you can decide whether you need lots of memory for a single large-scale website or less memory for several smaller ones. You can unlock the full potential of the Varnish caching platform if the sites use a dedicated IP. Using the Control Panel, you can effortlessly start/reboot/remove an instance, clear the cached files individually for each site which employs the Varnish platform or view a comprehensive log file.