Varnish is a web app accelerator platform, which caches info for quicker response times. It’s sometimes referred to as an HTTP reverse proxy as well and it works between a web server and its users. When a website visitor accesses a specific page, the content is requested by the Internet browser, and then the web server handles this request and returns the necessary info. If Varnish is activated for a given website, it will cache its pages at the first request and if the user accesses a cached page once more, the content will be delivered by the caching platform and not by the web server. The improved speed is a result of the significantly faster response speed that Varnish offers compared to any web server software. At the same time, this does not mean that the website visitors will continue seeing the same content over and over again, because any change on any of the web pages is reflected in the content that Varnish saves in its memory.

Varnish in Shared Web Hosting

If you host your websites in a shared web hosting account with our company, you’ll be able to activate Varnish with several clicks via your Control Panel. The platform is available as an upgrade with all our web hosting plans and you can select how many sites will use it and the total amount of system memory that will be used for the cached content. The two upgradeable features in the Control Panel’s Upgrades section are the amount of memory and the number of instances and they’re not directly linked to each other, so you can choose whether you need lots of memory for a single large website or less memory for multiple smaller ones. You can unleash the full potential of the Varnish caching platform in case the websites use a dedicated IP address. With the hosting Control Panel, you can easily start/restart/cancel an instance, delete the cached data individually for each site which employs the Varnish platform or check an elaborate log file.