Varnish is a web app accelerator, which has been gaining a lot of popularity in recent years, because it can increase the load speed of any site, sometimes even by one hundred percent, based on the content itself. This tool is sometimes called an HTTP reverse proxy as well and is used to lower the overall server load and to accelerate the browsing speed for the site visitors. Each time a visitor loads a page on a given site, the browser request is processed by the web server and the requested content is served as a response. If Varnish is activated, it caches the pages that the visitor browses and in case any of them is accessed again, it is delivered by Varnish and not by the web server directly. The improvement in the performance comes from the fact that the accelerator handles the web requests significantly quicker than any web server, which leads to much faster browsing speeds for the visitors. In case any data is modified meanwhile, the cached webpages will also be updated the next time someone attempts to open them.

Varnish in Shared Web Hosting

If you host your Internet sites under a shared web hosting account with us, you will be able to add Varnish with a few clicks through your Control Panel. The platform is available as an upgrade with all our hosting plans and you can choose how many sites will use it and the maximum storage space that will be used for the cached content. The two features that can be upgraded in the Upgrades section of the Control Panel are the amount of memory and the number of instances and they are not linked directly to each other, so you can decide whether you need lots of memory for one large-sized site or less memory for several smaller ones. You can make use of the full potential of the Varnish platform in case the websites use a dedicated IP address. Using the Control Panel, you can quickly start/reboot/disable an instance, delete the cached contents independently for each site that employs the Varnish platform or view a detailed system log file.