Varnish is a data caching platform, which is occasionally called a caching HTTP reverse proxy. It’s a web accelerator tool that can improve the loading speed of a website by up to 1000%, based on the content itself. Every time a visitor opens any page on a site that uses Varnish, the platform caches the page and delivers it instead of the web server if the visitor opens it again. Thus, the browser request from the visitor is not handled by the server and the web page will open tremendously faster, since Varnish can serve information many times faster than any server software. The end result will be a considerably faster loading site, which leads to a much-improved website browsing experience. In case any of the cached pages is updated on the live Internet site, the data that Varnish stores in its system memory is updated as well, so the website visitors will not end up seeing old info.
Varnish in Shared Hosting
If you host your websites in a shared hosting account with our company, you’ll be able to activate Varnish with a few clicks of the mouse from your hosting Control Panel. The caching platform comes as an upgrade with all our web hosting packages and you can choose how many websites will use it and the maximum storage space that will be used for the cached data. The two features that can be upgraded in the Control Panel’s Upgrades section are the number of instances and the amount of memory and they’re not directly tied to each other, so you can choose if you need lots of memory for one single large-scale site or less memory for multiple smaller ones. You can unlock the full potential of the Varnish platform if the sites use a dedicated IP. Using the hosting Control Panel, you can quickly start/reboot/terminate an instance, delete the cached data individually for each website which employs the Varnish platform or see a detailed system log.