Varnish is a data caching platform, which is sometimes called a caching HTTP reverse proxy. It is a web accelerator tool that can accelerate the speed of a site by up to 1000%, depending on the content itself. Whenever a visitor opens any page on a site that uses Varnish, the platform caches the page and delivers it instead of the web server in case the visitor loads it again. Thus, the web browser request from the visitor is not handled by the web server and the page will load considerably faster, since the Varnish caching platform can serve content many times faster than any server software. The end result is a much faster loading website, which means an immensely improved visitor experience. In case any of the cached pages is updated on the actual website, the data that Varnish saves in its system memory is updated as well, so the visitors won’t see out-of-date information.
Varnish in Cloud Web Hosting
If you host your websites in a cloud web hosting account with us, you will be able to activate Varnish with a couple of clicks of the mouse via your hosting Control Panel. The content caching platform comes as an optional upgrade with all our web hosting packages and you can select the number of the sites that 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 system memory and the number of instances and they’re not linked directly to each other, so you can choose if you need lots of memory for a single large-sized site or less memory for several smaller ones. You can unleash the full potential of Varnish if the websites use a dedicated IP address. With the hosting Control Panel, you can effortlessly start/reboot/discontinue an instance, clear the cached content independently for each site that employs Varnish or view a detailed system log file.