Varnish is a web app accelerator platform, which caches content for faster response times. It is sometimes called a caching HTTP reverse proxy as well and it interacts between a web server and an Internet browser. When a website visitor loads a certain web page, the content is requested by the web browser, and then the server handles this browser request and returns the requested info. If Varnish is activated for a site, it will cache its pages at the first visit and if the user visits a cached page once again, the information will be delivered by the caching platform and not by the web server. The boosted load speed is an end result of the considerably faster response speed that the Varnish platform offers compared to any web server software. At the same time, this doesn’t mean that the site visitors will keep seeing the very same content again and again, as any change on any of the web pages is reflected in the content that Varnish stores in its memory.

Varnish in Cloud Website Hosting

If you host your sites in a cloud website hosting account with us, you’ll be able to add Varnish with several mouse clicks from your Control Panel. The caching platform comes as an upgrade with all our web hosting plans and you can select the number of the websites that will use it and the maximum storage space that will be available for the cached content. The two upgradeable features in the Upgrades section of the Control Panel are the number of instances and the amount of system memory and they are not linked directly to each other, so you can choose if you need plenty of memory for one 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 address. With the hosting Control Panel, you can effortlessly start/restart/stop an instance, delete the cached files individually for each website which uses Varnish or see an exhaustive system log file.