Varnish is a web application accelerator, which has been gaining a lot in popularity in recent years, because it can increase the speed of any site, sometimes even by one hundred percent, based on the content. This tool is occasionally called an HTTP reverse proxy too and is used to decrease the overall load on the server and to enhance the access speed for the site visitors. Every time a visitor loads a page on a particular site, the web browser request is handled by the web server and the requested information is sent as a reply. If Varnish is enabled, it caches the web pages that the website visitor browses and if any of them is accessed once again, it is fetched by Varnish and not by the server directly. The improvement in the overall performance comes from the fact that the accelerator processes the browser requests significantly faster than any web server, which results in much faster browsing speeds for the users. In case any data is changed in the meantime, the cached pages will also be updated the next time somebody attempts to access them.
Varnish in Shared Hosting
In case you host your websites under a shared hosting account with us, you’ll be able to activate Varnish with a few clicks from your Control Panel. The data caching platform is available as an optional upgrade with all our shared web hosting packages and you can choose the number of the sites that will use it and the maximum amount of system memory that will be available for the cached data. 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 aren’t tied directly to each other, so you can choose if you need plenty of memory for a single large website or less memory for multiple smaller ones. You can make use of the full potential of the Varnish platform if the websites use a dedicated IP. With the Control Panel, you can quickly start/restart/remove an instance, clear the cached content individually for each site that employs Varnish or check an exhaustive system log file.