We are pleased to announce Varnish which is now integrated with some of our shared hosting servers. Varnish is a web accelerator which allows websites to sustain very high traffic and load pages exponentially faster by caching static and dynamic content (Images, CSS, plain HTML, etc). It can speed up a website by up to 1000%. Varnish is pre-activated on all new websites added on our Linux Shared Hosting as well as certain servers.
You can easily toggle the option of caching on and off as per your requirement. Just log in to your control panel to learn how to manage Varnish. Older accounts and more granular customization of caching will be available very soon. Learn more about Varnish Cache.
We tested the loading performance for a few popular PHP – mySQL apps on one of our shared servers and were able to draw out a few comparisons. You could have a look at the graph below for more details:
The time shown is the total time taken in seconds for serving 100 requests with 10 concurrent threads. The network from where the test was run had an average latency of 236 ms to the destination server.
If your site serves dynamic content, caching might result in wrong data being shown on your website. In such a scenario, just log into your cPanel and disable Varnish for the affected domain name. We will soon be enabling Varnish cache life value and an option of manually flushing your Varnish cache. Sites running on https will not be served via Varnish. They will continue getting served by Apache directly.