Varnish is a web app accelerator tool, which has been gaining a lot of popularity in recent years, because it can increase the loading speed of any site, at times even by 100%, based on the content. This tool is occasionally called an HTTP reverse proxy as well and is used to decrease the overall load on the physical server and to increase the access speed for the site visitors. Every time a visitor accesses a page on a given site, the web browser request is processed by the web server and the requested information is served as a response. If the Varnish accelerator is enabled, it caches the web pages that the visitor browses and in case any of them is accessed again, it’s delivered by Varnish and not by the server directly. The boost in the overall performance comes from the fact that the accelerator processes the web requests considerably quicker than any web server, which results in much faster browsing speeds for the visitors. In case any content is modified meanwhile, the cached pages will also be ‘refreshed’ the next time someone accesses them.

Varnish in Shared Hosting

You can unleash Varnish’s potential and boost your sites’ loading speed irrespective of the shared hosting plan that you’ve chosen and you can activate and configure the data caching platform with a couple of mouse clicks from the user-friendly GUI offered by our next-generation Hepsia hosting Control Panel. During the procedure, you’ll be able to choose two different things – how many sites will use Varnish, i.e. the number of instances, and how much content will be cached, i.e. the amount of memory. The latter comes in increments of 32 MB and is not tied to the number of instances, so you can use more instances and less memory and vice versa. In case you’ve got a lot of content on a given Internet site and you attract lots of site visitors, more system memory will give you better results. You may also consider employing a dedicated IP for the sites that will use the Varnish platform. The Hepsia Control Panel will offer you easy 1-click controls for terminating or rebooting any instance, for clearing the cache associated with any Internet site and for checking in-depth logs.