Varnish is a web accelerator tool, which has been gaining a lot of popularity in recent years, as it can increase the load speed of any Internet site, sometimes even by one hundred percent, based on the content itself. This tool is sometimes referred to as an HTTP reverse proxy as well and is used to lower the overall server load and to accelerate the access speed for the website visitors. Each time a visitor loads a page on a certain site, the web browser request is taken care of by the web server and the requested content is delivered as a reply. If Varnish is activated, it caches the web pages that the website visitor browses and in case any of them is opened once again, it’s served by Varnish and not by the web server directly. The performance increase is due to the fact that the accelerator handles the browser requests considerably quicker than any web server, which results in much faster browsing speeds for the users. In case any content is edited in the meantime, the cached pages will also be ‘refreshed’ the next time someone tries to access them.

Varnish in Shared Website Hosting

If you host your websites under a shared website hosting account with our company, you will be able to activate Varnish with a couple of mouse clicks through your hosting Control Panel. The platform is offered as an optional upgrade with all our shared plans and you can select the number of the websites that will use it and the total amount of system memory that will be used for the cached data. The two upgradeable features in the Control Panel’s Upgrades section are the amount of memory and the number of instances and they are not directly linked to each other, so you can decide whether you need lots of memory for one large-scale website or less memory for several smaller ones. You can use the full potential of Varnish in case the websites use a dedicated IP address. With the hosting Control Panel, you can quickly start/reboot/deactivate an instance, clear the cached data independently for each site which employs Varnish or view an elaborate log.