Varnish is a data caching platform, which is sometimes called an HTTP reverse proxy. It is a website accelerator that can boost the speed of a site by up to 1000 percent, depending on the content itself. Every time a visitor accesses any page on a site that uses Varnish, the platform caches the page and delivers it instead of the web server if the visitor opens it again. In this way, the web browser request from the visitor is not handled by the web server and the page will open substantially faster, since the Varnish caching platform can serve data many times faster than any web server software. The end result will be a much faster loading page, which leads to an immensely improved visitor experience. In case any of the cached web pages is updated on the live site, the info that Varnish caches in its system memory is updated too, so the visitors will not end up seeing out-of-date content.
Varnish in Shared Web Hosting
In case you host your sites under a shared web hosting account with us, you will be able to add Varnish with a couple of clicks from your Control Panel. The content caching platform is offered as an upgrade with all our packages and you can choose the number of the websites that will use it and the maximum storage space that will be used for the cached content. The two upgradeable features in the Upgrades section of the Control Panel are the amount of system memory and the number of instances and they are not directly linked to each other, so you can choose whether you want plenty of memory for one large-size website or less memory for several smaller ones. You can use the full potential of Varnish in case the websites use a dedicated IP. With the hosting Control Panel, you can effortlessly start/reboot/cancel an instance, delete the cached data individually for each site that uses Varnish or view an in-depth log.