Varnish is a website accelerator, which has been gaining a lot in popularity in recent years, as it can increase the loading speed of any site, at times even by one hundred percent, based on the content itself. This tool is occasionally called a caching HTTP reverse proxy too and is used to lower the overall load on the server and to enhance the access speed for the site visitors. Each time a visitor opens a page on a specific Internet site, the web browser request is taken care of by the web server and the requested data is sent as a response. If the Varnish accelerator is activated, it caches the pages that the site visitor browses and if any of them is loaded once more, it is delivered by Varnish and not by the server directly. The performance improvement is due to the fact that the accelerator processes the browser requests considerably quicker than any web server, which results in much faster browsing speeds for the site visitors. In case any content is modified meanwhile, the cached pages will also be updated the next time someone attempts to open them.
Varnish in Cloud Website Hosting
In case you host your websites under a cloud website hosting account with us, you’ll be able to activate Varnish with several mouse clicks from your Control Panel. The content caching platform is available as an optional upgrade with all our shared 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 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 linked to each other, so you can decide if you want a lot of memory for one large-sized site or less memory for several smaller ones. You can unlock the full potential of the Varnish caching platform if the sites use a dedicated IP. Using the Control Panel, you can effortlessly start/restart/remove an instance, clear the cached files independently for each website which uses the Varnish platform or see a detailed log.