Varnish is a content caching platform, which is sometimes called a caching HTTP reverse proxy. It is a web application accelerator tool that can accelerate the speed of a site by up to 1000 percent, depending on its content. Anytime a visitor accesses any page on a website that uses Varnish, the platform caches the page and delivers it instead of the web server when the visitor opens it again. In this way, the browser request from the visitor is not processed by the web server and the page will load much faster, since Varnish can deliver data many times faster than any web server software. The end result is a substantially faster loading site, which leads to an immensely improved visitor experience. If any of the cached pages is updated on the actual site, the information that Varnish saves in its system memory is ‘refreshed’ as well, so the site visitors won’t end up seeing old information.

Varnish in Cloud Hosting

If you host your sites under a cloud hosting account with us, you’ll be able to add Varnish with a couple of clicks via your Control Panel. The platform comes as an optional upgrade with all our shared plans and you can choose how many sites will use it and the total 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’re not linked directly to each other, so you can choose if you need plenty of memory for one large website or less memory for multiple smaller ones. You can make use of the full potential of Varnish if the sites use a dedicated IP address. Using the Control Panel, you can swiftly start/restart/cancel an instance, delete the cached files individually for each website that employs the Varnish platform or see an exhaustive log.