Varnish is a website accelerator platform, which caches content for the sake of faster response times. It’s sometimes referred to as an HTTP reverse proxy as well and it works between a web server and a browser. When a visitor accesses a certain web page, its content is requested by the Internet browser, and then the server processes this browser request and returns the needed data. If Varnish is activated for a given website, it will cache the pages at the first visit and in case the user accesses a cached page once more, the info will be delivered by the accelerator platform and not by the server. The increased loading speed is a result of the significantly faster response speed that the Varnish platform offers as compared to any server software. Of course, this doesn’t mean that the site visitors will keep seeing the exact same content again and again, as any modification on any of the web pages is reflected in the content that Varnish stores in its memory.
Varnish in Hosting
In case you host your sites under a hosting account with us, you’ll be able to add Varnish with several clicks from your hosting Control Panel. The content caching platform is offered as an optional upgrade with all our shared packages and you can select how many sites will use it and the total amount of system memory that will be used for the cached data. The two upgradeable features in the Upgrades section of the Control Panel are the number of instances and the amount of memory and they are not tied directly to each other, so you can decide if you want a lot of memory for a single large website or less memory for several smaller ones. You can unleash the full potential of the Varnish caching platform if the websites use a dedicated IP. With the Control Panel, you can easily start/reboot/delete an instance, clear the cached files independently for each site which uses Varnish or see an elaborate log file.
Varnish in Dedicated Servers
In case you order a dedicated server with the Hepsia hosting Control Panel, you’ll acquire the Varnish platform at no additional cost and you will exert full control over it through a quite simple-to-work-with interface – you’ll be able to start, to deactivate or to restart an instance, to browse an exhaustive system log, to delete the cached data associated with any website and much, much more. Varnish will have several GB of memory at its disposal, so even if you host traffic-intensive websites with a huge number of visitors, you’ll notice the tremendously faster web page loading speeds and the lowered server load. This will become a fact shortly after you begin using the Varnish platform, as it will need a certain amount of time to cache the site content that users request. You can take full advantage of the platform’s capacity if the websites that are using it also use a dedicated IP, but owing to the fact that your server comes with a couple of IPs by default, you won’t have to pay anything on top of your monthly fee for the machine itself.