Varnish is a website accelerator platform, which caches content for quicker response times. It is sometimes referred to as an HTTP reverse proxy too and it works between a web server and a web browser. When a website visitor loads a certain page, the content is requested by the Internet browser, and then the web server handles this request and returns the necessary information. If Varnish is enabled for a specific site, it will cache its pages on the very first visit and if the user visits a cached page once again, the data will be delivered by the accelerator platform and not by the web server. The increased loading speed is an end result of the considerably faster response time that the Varnish platform offers as compared to any server software. At the same time, this does not mean that the site visitors will keep being served the exact same content again and again, since any change on any of the web pages is reflected in the content that the Varnish platform caches in its system memory.
Varnish in Cloud Hosting
You can unleash Varnish’s potential and increase your sites’ speed regardless of the cloud hosting plan that you’ve picked and you can enable and set up the content caching platform with a few mouse clicks through the easy-to-use GUI offered by our innovative Hepsia Control Panel. In the meantime, you’ll be able to select two different things – how many websites will use the Varnish platform, i.e. the number of instances, and how much info will be cached, in other words – the amount of memory. The latter is offered in increments of 32 MB and is not bound to the number of instances, so you can use more instances with less memory and the other way around. In case you have lots of content on a given site and you gain plenty of website visitors, more memory will give you better results. You may also consider using a dedicated IP for the websites that will use Varnish. The Hepsia Control Panel will offer you simple one-click buttons for shutting down or rebooting any instance, for deleting the cache associated with any website and for viewing elaborate logs.