Varnish is a data caching platform, which is sometimes referred to as a caching HTTP reverse proxy. It is a web accelerator tool that can accelerate the speed of a website by up to one thousand percent, depending on the content itself. Whenever a visitor opens any page on a website that uses Varnish, the platform caches the page and delivers it instead of the web server if the visitor accesses it again. Thus, the browser request from the visitor is not handled by the server and the web page will open tremendously faster, since the Varnish platform can serve information many times faster than any server software. The result is a substantially faster loading website, which means an improved visitor experience. In case any of the cached webpages is updated on the live website, the info that Varnish saves in its system memory is updated too, so the site visitors will not see old content.
Varnish in Shared Hosting
You can unlock Varnish’s potential and optimize your sites’ load speed regardless of the shared hosting plan that you’ve selected and you can add and set up the content caching platform with a few clicks via the intuitive GUI offered by our next-generation Hepsia hosting Control Panel. During the process, you will be able to select two separate things – how many websites will use the Varnish caching platform, i.e. the number of instances, and how much info will be cached, i.e. the amount of system memory. The latter is available in increments of 32 megabytes and is not linked to the number of instances, so you can order more instances with less memory and vice versa. In case you’ve got lots of content on a particular Internet site and you get plenty of visitors, more memory will guarantee you better results. You may also consider using a dedicated IP for the sites that will use the Varnish platform. Hepsia will provide you with simple one-click controls for discontinuing or restarting any instance, for clearing the cache for each website and for viewing comprehensive logs.