Varnish is a data caching platform, which is occasionally called a caching HTTP reverse proxy. It’s a web application accelerator that can improve the load speed of a site by up to 1000%, depending on its content. Every time a visitor opens any page on a website that uses Varnish, the platform caches the page and delivers it instead of the web server when the visitor loads it again. In this way, the browser request from the visitor is not handled by the web server and the page will open much faster, since the Varnish platform can serve information many times faster than any server software. The result is a considerably faster loading site, which means an improved website browsing experience. If any of the cached pages is updated on the live Internet site, the info that Varnish stores in its system memory is ‘refreshed’ too, so the website visitors won’t end up seeing outdated information.

Varnish in Web Hosting

If you host your websites under a web hosting account with us, you’ll be able to activate Varnish with several mouse clicks via your hosting Control Panel. The caching platform is offered as an optional upgrade with all our plans and you can select the number of the websites that will use it and the total storage space that will be used for the cached content. The two features that can be upgraded in the Control Panel’s Upgrades section are the amount of system memory and the number of instances and they’re not directly linked to each other, so you can choose if you want lots of memory for a single large site or less memory for several smaller ones. You can unlock the full potential of Varnish if the sites use a dedicated IP. With the hosting Control Panel, you can quickly start/reboot/delete an instance, clear the cached contents independently for each website which employs the Varnish platform or see a comprehensive system log.