Varnish is a web application accelerator platform, which caches info for the sake of quicker access. It’s occasionally called an HTTP reverse proxy too and it works between a web server and its users. When a visitor accesses a specific webpage, its content is requested by the browser, and then the web server handles this request and sends back the required content. If Varnish is enabled for a certain website, it will cache its pages on the very first visit and in case the user opens a cached page once again, the data will be delivered by the caching platform instead of the web server. The improved loading speed is a result of the considerably faster response speed that Varnish offers as compared with any server software. Of course, this doesn’t mean that the site visitors will continue seeing the same content over and over again, since any change on any of the pages is reflected in the content that Varnish keeps in its system memory.
Varnish in Shared Website Hosting
If you host your Internet sites in a shared website hosting account with our company, you will be able to activate Varnish with a few clicks via your Control Panel. The caching platform is offered as an upgrade with all our shared packages and you can choose how many websites will use it and the total storage space that will be available for the cached content. The two features that can be upgraded in the Control Panel’s Upgrades section are the number of instances and the amount of system memory and they’re not directly linked to each other, so you can choose whether you want lots of memory for one large-sized website or less memory for several smaller ones. You can make use of the full potential of Varnish in case the websites use a dedicated IP. With the Control Panel, you can quickly start/reboot/terminate an instance, delete the cached data independently for each website which uses Varnish or see an in-depth log file.