Varnish Configuration

Last change on 2025-10-09 • Created on 2025-09-30 • ID: KO-2883C

Varnish

Varnish is a powerful HTTP cache designed to significantly speed up the delivery of web content. By caching frequently accessed content, requests are processed more efficiently, reducing server load and noticeably improving your website's loading times. Varnish is particularly recommended when you have high visitor traffic and heavily frequented content so you can increase the performance of the web application.

Activating and configuring Varnish

You can activate Varnish for domains on managed servers and from Webhosting S. To configure Varnish, log onto the konsoleH administration interface, select the domain and then “Services; Varnish configuration.”

Preconfigured templates are available for the following CMS for easy integration:

  • Drupal
  • Magento
  • Shopware
  • Tracking
  • Typo3
  • WordPress
  • CS-Cart

In the advanced settings, you also have the option to customize certain properties specifically for your website:

  • Time-to-live: Set the time-to-live for statically and dynamically cached content.
  • Static files: List file extensions that display static content.
    • No regex allowed
    • Only file extensions without a leading dot allowed
    • For example: ‘iso’, ‘zip’, ‘rar’
  • Strip URL parameters: List the URL parameters that should be removed before passing them to the backend. This increases the cache hit rate.
    • Regex allowed
    • For example: Urchin tracking parameters such as ‘utm_[a-z]’
  • Nocache URLs: Exclude certain URL patterns from caching.
    • Regex allowed
    • For example: ‘^/link/to/login.php$’, ‘^/ajax_rpc.php’
  • Pipe URLs: Specify URL patterns for content that should be forwarded directly to the backend via pipe. This setting is primarily intended for large files and downloads that should not be handled by Varnish.
    • Regex allowed
    • For example: ‘^/path/to/downloads’, ‘.*.iso’
  • Nocache cookies: List containing cookie names that indicate that access must not be cached (e.g., for session-specific data). Cookies that do not appear in either 'cache cookies' or 'nocache cookies' are removed.
    • Regex allowed
    • For example: ‘PHPSESSID’, ‘session_[a-z]+’
  • Cache cookies: List containing cookie names that may be cached, such as language settings. Cookies that do not appear in either 'nocache cookies' or 'cache cookies' will be removed.
    • Regex allowed
    • For example: ‘language’, ‘consent_policy’
  • Nocache headers: Here you can list HTTP header names. If these are present in a client request, the request will not be cached (e.g., for debugging purposes).
    • No regex allowed
    • Allowed characters: a-z A-Z 0-9 - _
    • For example: ‘debug_no_cache’.
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