Varnish is a web app accelerator, which has been gaining a lot of popularity in recent years, because it can increase the speed of any website, sometimes even by 100 percent, based on the content itself. This tool is sometimes referred to as a caching HTTP reverse proxy too and is used to decrease the overall server load and to improve the access speed for the website visitors. Every time a visitor opens a page on a given Internet site, the browser request is taken care of by the web server and the requested information is returned as a response. If the Varnish accelerator is enabled, it caches the web pages that the site visitor opens and in case any of them is opened for a second time, it’s fetched by Varnish and not by the web server directly. The increase in the performance comes from the fact that the accelerator handles the web requests significantly quicker than any web server, which results in much faster browsing speeds for the users. If any content is updated meanwhile, the cached web pages will also be ‘refreshed’ the next time someone attempts to access them.

Varnish in Web Hosting

If you host your websites under a web hosting account with us, you’ll be able to activate Varnish with a few clicks via your hosting Control Panel. The platform is offered as an upgrade with all our hosting plans and you can select the number of the websites that will use it and the total amount of system memory that will be used for the cached data. The two features that can be upgraded in the Upgrades section of the Control Panel are the number of instances and the amount of memory and they aren’t linked directly to each other, so you can choose whether you want a lot of memory for a single large-scale site or less memory for multiple smaller ones. You can unleash the full potential of the Varnish platform in case the sites use a dedicated IP. Using the hosting Control Panel, you can quickly start/reboot/discontinue an instance, clear the cached contents individually for each site that employs Varnish or check a comprehensive log file.