Varnish is a web application accelerator, which has been gaining a lot in popularity lately, because it can increase the speed of any website, at times even by 100%, based on the content. This tool is occasionally called an HTTP reverse proxy too and is used to reduce the overall load on the physical machine and to improve the browsing speed for the website visitors. Each time a visitor opens a page on a certain site, the web browser request is taken care of by the web server and the requested information is sent as a response. If Varnish is enabled, it caches the pages that the website visitor browses and if any of them is accessed for a second time, it’s fetched by Varnish and not by the server directly. The boost in the performance is due to the fact that the accelerator processes the browser requests tremendously faster than any web server, which results in much faster browsing speeds for the site visitors. In case any content is modified in the meantime, the cached pages will also be updated the next time someone tries to access them.
Varnish in Semi-dedicated Servers
All our semi-dedicated servers include Varnish by default, so you can take full advantage of the web accelerator and improve the load speed of any site that you host on our semi-dedicated servers. You’ll get 64 megabytes of system memory exclusively for the Varnish accelerator at no additional fee and you can activate an instance with no more than a couple of clicks from the Hepsia Control Panel, which comes with the semi-dedicated server plans. If you want more memory, the latter is offered in increments of 32 MB through the Control Panel’s Upgrades section and it will be at your disposal instantly. You can also order more instances as an upgrade, so you can decide whether lots of content will be cached for a single website or if the memory will be used by different Internet sites. The Hepsia Control Panel will enable you to restart or to terminate any instance, to see the system log for it or to clear the cached content using 1-click buttons. To get the most out of Varnish, you can set a dedicated IP for the Internet sites which will employ it.