A website that loads within the blink of an eye is the expectation of most users today. In fact, the website load time impacts your search engine rankings as well as your brand reputation. Website owners deploy various methods to increase the speed of their websites like caching, image, and video optimization, using a CDN (Content Delivery Network), etc. Collectively, these measures help in reducing the load times and lead to a faster website. In this article, we will focus on caching and look at the two most popular caching solutions – Varnish and NGINX offered by most providers offering Cloud Hosting in India.
Varnish Cache
The more popular of the two – Varnish Cache is a web accelerator deployed at the front-end. It is used by websites which have heavy or dynamic content to manage high volumes of traffic. Further, Varnish is an HTTP proxy (reverse caching) and helps the website by caching dynamic as well as static content. In fact, it can speed up your website up to 1000 times!
NGINX
NGINX was released in the year 2004 and is used as a proxy server. It is usually used as a reverse proxy, HTTP cache, load balances, etc. to help improve the website’s performance by reducing the loading time. It is known to be better at handling concurrent connections and is more popular with sites facing high volumes of traffic and having multiple application environments.
Which is better – Varnish vs. NGINX?
There are many similarities between Varnish and NGINX like they both are used as a load balancer and reverse proxy. However, there are some technical differences between them, as highlighted below:
|
Varnish | NGINX |
Flexibility | The Varnish Configuration Language (VCL) allows developers to customize the caching solution as per the needs of the business. Factors like |