Varnish is a website accelerator tool, which has been gaining a lot of popularity lately, because it can increase the loading speed of any Internet site, sometimes even by one hundred percent, depending 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 boost the browsing speed for the website visitors. Each time a visitor loads a page on a particular website, the browser request is taken care of by the web server and the requested data is served as a reply. If the Varnish accelerator is enabled, it caches the pages that the visitor browses and in case any of them is opened once again, it is delivered by Varnish and not by the server directly. The performance increase is due to the fact that the accelerator processes the browser requests substantially faster than any web server, which results in much faster browsing speeds for the visitors. If any content is edited in the meantime, the cached webpages will also be ‘refreshed’ the next time somebody attempts to open them.

Varnish in Hosting

In case you host your websites under a hosting account with us, you’ll be able to add Varnish with several clicks from your Control Panel. The data caching platform is available as an upgrade with all our hosting plans and you can choose how many websites will use it and the total amount of system memory that will be available for the cached content. The two features that can be upgraded in the Control Panel’s Upgrades section are the number of instances and the amount of system memory and they’re not linked directly to each other, so you can decide if you want lots of memory for one large-sized website or less memory for several smaller ones. You can take advantage of the full potential of the Varnish caching platform in case the websites use a dedicated IP. With the hosting Control Panel, you can quickly start/reboot/cancel an instance, delete the cached data independently for each website which uses Varnish or view an exhaustive log file.