Varnish is a website accelerator platform, which caches information for quicker access. It is sometimes called an HTTP reverse proxy too and it interacts between a web server and a browser. When a website visitor accesses a particular web page, the content is requested by the web browser, and then the server handles this request and delivers the requested data. If Varnish is enabled for a specific site, it will cache the pages on the first visit and if the user accesses a cached page once more, the info will be delivered by the accelerator platform and not by the web server. The accelerated speed is an end result of the substantially faster response speed that the Varnish platform offers compared with any server software. Of course, this doesn’t mean that the website visitors will continue being served the exact same content over and over again, as any modification on any of the pages is reflected in the content that the Varnish platform stores in its system memory.

Varnish in Cloud Website Hosting

In case you host your websites in a cloud website hosting account with us, you’ll be able to add Varnish with a few clicks of the mouse through your Control Panel. The caching platform is available as an optional upgrade with all our hosting plans and you can choose the number of the websites that will use it and the maximum amount of system memory that will be used for the cached data. The two upgradeable features in the Upgrades section of the Control Panel are the amount of system memory and the number of instances and they are not tied directly to each other, so you can decide whether you want lots of memory for one single large website or less memory for multiple smaller ones. You can unlock the full potential of Varnish if the websites use a dedicated IP. With the hosting Control Panel, you can easily start/reboot/cancel an instance, delete the cached contents individually for each site that uses Varnish or check a comprehensive log file.