Varnish is a website accelerator platform, which caches info for faster response times. It is occasionally called a caching HTTP reverse proxy as well and it works between a web server and its users. When a website visitor loads a given webpage, its content is requested by the web browser, and then the web server handles this browser request and returns the requested info. If Varnish is enabled for a website, it will cache its pages on the very first request and in case the visitor opens a cached page for a second time, the info will be delivered by the caching platform instead of the web server. The boosted loading speed is an end result of the much faster response speed that Varnish offers compared with any server software. Of course, this does not mean that the users will continue seeing the same content over and over again, because any change on any of the pages is reflected in the content that Varnish stores in its memory.
Varnish in Hosting
In case you host your sites under a hosting account with us, you will be able to activate Varnish with a few clicks through your hosting Control Panel. The platform is available as an upgrade with all our shared packages and you can choose how many sites will use it and the total amount of system memory that will be available for the cached content. The two features that can be upgraded in the Upgrades section of the Control Panel are the number of instances and the amount of memory and they are not tied directly to each other, so you can decide if you want plenty of memory for one single large-scale site or less memory for multiple smaller ones. You can make use of the full potential of the Varnish platform if the sites use a dedicated IP. With the hosting Control Panel, you can effortlessly start/reboot/shut down an instance, clear the cached data individually for each site that employs Varnish or see an elaborate log.