Varnish is a data caching platform, which is occasionally referred to as an HTTP reverse proxy. It is a web application accelerator that can improve the speed of a website by up to one thousand percent, depending on its content. Whenever a visitor opens any page on a website that uses Varnish, the platform caches the page and delivers it instead of the web server if the visitor loads it again. In this way, the web browser request from the visitor is not processed by the web server and the page will load tremendously faster, as Varnish can deliver data many times faster than any server software. The end result will be a much faster loading site, which leads to a much-improved browsing experience. If any of the cached pages is updated on the live site, the data that Varnish keeps in its memory is ‘refreshed’ too, so the website visitors won’t see out-of-date data.

Varnish in Website Hosting

If you host your websites in a website hosting account with us, you’ll be able to add Varnish with a couple of clicks via your Control Panel. The content caching platform comes as an upgrade with all our shared hosting plans 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 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 tied directly to each other, so you can decide if you want lots of memory for one single large-size website or less memory for several smaller ones. You can unlock the full potential of the Varnish platform in case the websites use a dedicated IP. Using the Control Panel, you can easily start/reboot/cancel an instance, clear the cached contents individually for each site that uses the Varnish platform or check an in-depth system log.