Varnish is a website accelerator platform, which caches data for quicker response times. It is occasionally called a caching HTTP reverse proxy too and it interacts between a web server and its users. When a visitor accesses a given webpage, its content is requested by the Internet browser, and then the server processes this request and delivers the needed info. If Varnish is activated for a particular site, it will cache its pages at the very first request and if the visitor accesses a cached page once again, the information will be delivered by the caching platform instead of the server. The boosted load speed is a result of the much faster response speed that Varnish offers as compared to any server software. At the same time, this does not mean that the users will continue seeing the very same content again and again, since any change on any of the pages is reflected in the content that Varnish saves in its memory.
Varnish in Website Hosting
In case you host your websites in a website hosting account with our company, you’ll be able to activate Varnish with a few clicks from your hosting Control Panel. The content caching platform comes as an upgrade with all our web hosting packages and you can select how many sites will use it and the total amount of system memory that will be available for the cached content. The two upgradeable features in the Upgrades section of the Control Panel are the number of instances and the amount of memory and they’re not directly tied to each other, so you can decide whether you need plenty of memory for a single large-scale website or less memory for multiple smaller ones. You can take advantage of the full potential of the Varnish caching platform if the sites use a dedicated IP. With the Control Panel, you can quickly start/restart/terminate an instance, delete the cached data individually for each site which uses Varnish or view an exhaustive system log file.