How Varnish Cache make Cloud Hosted Websites Blazing Fast.

If your website makes people wait to load or process requests, you tend lose business from potential customers and at the same time, stand a chance to lose out on valuable search engine visibility. This is because website speed is an important ranking factor for all top search engines like Google and Bing. About 50% of the internet users expect a site to load within 2 seconds or less, and they tend to abandon a site that isn’t loaded within 4 seconds (Source). And if you have an eCommerce website, approximately 44% of online shoppers confess that they get anxious and may exit the transaction if the website is too slow (Source).

The big question however remains, how to have really fast website speed? And the journey to answer this should always start with the hosting of your website. It is a fact that if the hosting and the servers where your website data is stored is not fast enough, the overall speed tends to be slow. This is one of the top reasons why website owners and webmasters are making more informed choices about selecting website hosting packages.

That being said, many webmasters and website owners are moving towards Cloud Hosting. This is because the way Cloud Hosting works, tends to be more effective for website load time. Instead of having a single server take care of all tasks, Cloud Hosting platforms distribute the workload between several servers joined together in a cluster. This array increases performance and stability significantly compared to conventional Shared Hosting solutions. However, just migrating to Cloud Hosting is not enough. Industry leaders of the hosting industry such as ResellerClub are taking Cloud Hosting to the next level by providing advanced caching mechanisms within their Cloud Hosting packages. One such advanced caching technology is Varnish Caching.

Varnish Caching can increase the speed of your website by 1000%. And it is the preferred caching technique adopted by many high traffic websites like Wikipedia and even leading news websites like New York Times. Let’s try and understand what Varnish Cache is and how it helps your website.

Usually when a user requests any information from your website, the usual request-response procedure takes place between the user’s browser and the server where your website data is hosted. When the browser’s request is received by the server, it decodes the request, then assembles the data, converts the data in the requested format and finally begins transmitting the information to the browser. This is done for each and every request, and as the requests and users increase, the server resources get overwhelmed and become slow.

Now that we understand this, let’s see where Varnish Cache comes into the picture. Varnish Cache sits in the middle of the browser and the server. Every time there is a browser request, Varnish Cache saves a copy of the requested data and information, so that the next time there is a request for the same information, it is served from Varnish directly without having to go through the server and perform the entire Request-Response procedure. Gradually as more and more information gets saved (cached, in technical terms) in Varnish, it becomes that much faster for the users to access that information. This means that your web server can handle the incoming traffic more efficiently and your website’s performance and scalability greatly increases. In fact Varnish Cache is often the single most critical piece of software in a web based business when it comes to speed.

So there you have it, if you are looking to unleash the true power of Cloud Hosting for your website, you should definitely check with your Cloud Hosting provider if he can integrate Varnish Cache for your site. Most of the providers will add it on for an extra price, but I would suggest looking for someone who has Varnish Cache as an existing feature in the Cloud Hosting package like ResellerClub. Hope this helps, and feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section below.