Varnish is a web accelerator platform, which caches information for quicker access. It is occasionally referred to as an HTTP reverse proxy too and it works between a web server and a web browser. When a website visitor opens a given web page, the content is requested by the web browser, and then the web server processes this request and sends back the needed info. If Varnish is activated for a given site, it will cache the pages on the first visit and in case the user accesses a cached page once more, the information will be delivered by the accelerator platform and not by the web server. The boosted load speed is an end result of the considerably faster response speed that Varnish offers compared to any web server software. At the same time, this does not mean that the users will continue being served the same content over and over again, since any update on any of the web pages is reflected in the content that Varnish keeps in its system memory.

Varnish in Shared Web Hosting

If you host your sites in a shared web hosting account with us, you will be able to add Varnish with a few clicks of the mouse from your Control Panel. The data caching platform is available as an upgrade with all our shared packages and you can choose how many sites will use it and the total storage space that will be available for the cached data. The two upgradeable features in the Control Panel’s Upgrades section are the number of instances and the amount of memory and they are not tied directly to each other, so you can decide whether you want plenty of memory for a single large site or less memory for multiple smaller ones. You can use the full potential of the Varnish platform if the sites use a dedicated IP address. Using the Control Panel, you can easily start/reboot/cancel an instance, delete the cached data individually for each website that uses the Varnish platform or view an in-depth system log file.