Varnish is a web app accelerator platform, which caches information for the sake of faster access. It’s occasionally called a caching HTTP reverse proxy too and it works between a web server and a browser. When a website visitor accesses a specific webpage, its content is requested by the Internet browser, and then the server handles this browser request and sends back the requested content. If Varnish is enabled for a certain site, it will cache its pages at the first request and in case the user opens a cached page for a second time, the information will be delivered by the accelerator platform instead of the web server. The accelerated speed is an end result of the much faster response time that the Varnish platform offers compared with any web server software. At the same time, this does not mean that the site visitors will keep being served the very same content again and again, because any modification on any of the web pages is reflected in the content that Varnish caches in its system memory.

Varnish in Shared Hosting

You can unlock Varnish’s full potential and improve the speed of your websites regardless of the shared hosting package that you have picked and you can add and configure the content caching platform with a couple of clicks through the intuitive interface offered by our avant-garde Hepsia hosting Control Panel. During the process, you’ll be able to select two different things – how many sites will employ the Varnish caching platform, i.e. the number of instances, and how much data will be cached, i.e. the amount of system memory. The latter is available in increments of 32 MB and is not bound to the number of instances, so you can order more instances with less memory and the other way around. If you have a lot of content on a given website and you gain plenty of site visitors, more system memory will guarantee you a better result. You may also consider using a dedicated IP for the sites that will use Varnish. Hepsia will provide you with simple 1-click buttons for shutting down or restarting any instance, for deleting the cache associated with each website and for seeing elaborate system logs.