Frequently Asked Questions
Find answers to common questions about Varnish CDN — from sovereignty and compliance to performance, security and onboarding.
The Basics: Who & What
Varnish CDN is a high-performance, fully managed Content Delivery Network (CDN) built on the industry-leading Varnish Enterprise caching engine. It is a sovereign delivery service hosted and operated entirely within European jurisdiction, designed to provide enterprise-grade speed without the regulatory risks of US-based providers.
Varnish Software is the recognised leader in high-performance caching. Our technology is trusted by over 10 million websites and powers infrastructure for global giants. Varnish CDN is our first managed SaaS offering, bringing this same enterprise power to organisations of all sizes through a "plug-and-play" model.
Yes. Varnish CDN offers a Free Plan designed for testing, development, and small-scale projects. It includes access to our core global infrastructure and basic edge security, allowing you to experience the performance and sovereignty of Varnish CDN with zero upfront cost.
No. Varnish CDN features a single interface that gives you the efficiency of Varnish without requiring you to write code. You can go live in minutes with pre-defined rulesets for security and caching, without touching any VCL.
Each plan includes a monthly traffic allowance. If you exceed it, you pay a per-TB overage rate. Plans start free (Developer), then €69/month (Growth), €299/month (Business) and custom pricing for enterprise. You can upgrade or downgrade at any time.
Bandwidth is measured as the total egress data leaving our network. Data transferred from your origin into our network (Ingress) is always free.
Your service continues uninterrupted. Overage traffic is billed at a per-TB rate that depends on your plan — €30/TB for Developer, €25/TB for Growth, and €20/TB for Business. Enterprise customers receive custom rates.
Sign up for free at our dashboard — no credit card required. Point your domain to Varnish CDN, configure your caching rules through our visual interface, and you are live in minutes. No code or infrastructure expertise is required.
Sovereignty & Compliance
Unlike major competitors, Varnish CDN is operated by a 100% European entity with no US parent company. While global providers often have EU servers, their US ownership subjects them to the US CLOUD Act, which allows US authorities to legally compel access to data regardless of where it is stored. Varnish CDN keeps your traffic, logs, and metadata strictly outside US jurisdiction.
By ensuring data processing and storage occur strictly within European jurisdiction, we eliminate the extra-territorial legal risks associated with non-European providers. We provide the transparency, log-retention, and jurisdictional certainty required for "Essential" or "Important" entities to secure their digital supply chains under the NIS2 Directive.
Performance & Technical Excellence
Yes. Varnish CDN is anchored on major European backbones and exchanges, serving over 90% of users within 20–35 ms. We focus on "heavy" nodes in the right legal hubs rather than thousands of small nodes, matching market standards for speed while ensuring data never leaves European legal protection.
Yes. Even for local delivery, Varnish CDN provides High Availability (keeping your site up if your origin fails), Optimisation (reducing server load), and Security against threats such as DDoS attacks.
Standard CDNs often act as a "black box," with logs arriving minutes or hours late. Varnish CDN provides Real-Time Edge Observability. You can monitor traffic spikes, Cache Hit Ratios, and error rates (like 404s or 503s) as they happen. Furthermore, you can export these logs directly to your own observability platform to maintain a unified view of your infrastructure.
You can instantly purge a single file, an entire subpath, or your full cache from the dashboard or API. Tag-based invalidation is also supported — assign tags to content and purge all matching items with a single request.
Yes. Every plan lets you define default caching behaviour, and paid plans offer custom cache rules ranging from 100 (Growth) to 2000+ (Enterprise). You can manage cookies, headers, query parameters and set per-path caching strategies — all from the dashboard.
Yes. Growth plans and above include lossless image optimisation that can reduce image sizes by up to 34% with no perceived quality loss. Image transformation is also available, letting you dynamically resize and convert images at the edge.
Yes. WebSocket proxy support is available on Growth plans and above, allowing you to route real-time WebSocket traffic directly to your origin through the CDN.
Security & Resilience
Varnish Software AB is ISO 27001 and ISO 9001 certified. Payments to Varnish CDN are PCI DSS 4.0 Level 1 compliant. All plans include managed SSL, and higher tiers offer advanced WAF, DDoS protection and bot protection.
We utilise a multi-layered defence strategy that leverages 300 Tbps global network capacity. By combining the precision of Varnish Enterprise software with high-capacity European infrastructure, we absorb and filter volumetric traffic at the edge. This prevents "traffic jams" at the network layer, ensuring your origin remains stable even during the most intense, multi-terabit-per-second attacks.
The Varnish CDN solution is built on a robust, high-availability European backbone with a total capacity of approximately 300 Tbps. This scale is comparable to the largest global hyperscalers, providing the volume necessary to maintain industry-leading performance and 100% uptime for high-traffic enterprise applications.
Large-scale security is a matter of bandwidth and intelligence. Our 300 Tbps capacity provides a "protective buffer" that can ingest massive spikes in traffic without performance degradation. By partnering with leading European infrastructure providers, we ensure that your digital assets are shielded by one of the world's largest and most resilient networks, specifically optimised for sovereignty and defence against sophisticated DDoS threats.
Yes. Through a feature called "Grace Mode," Varnish CDN can continue to serve expired content from its cache if your backend or origin server becomes unresponsive. This transforms a simple cache timer into a vital business continuity feature, ensuring your customers never see a "502 Bad Gateway" error during a server outage.
Onboarding & Support
Absolutely. Varnish CDN is highly interoperable. You can run it as a "Sovereign Layer" for European traffic or as a redundant "Plan B" to increase stability without a full "rip and replace" of your current stack.
Support: We provide a self-service interface with comprehensive technical documentation and a ticketing system for business-hour support.
Payment: Smaller customers can use monthly recurring credit card payments. Enterprise customers can move to custom contract plans with monthly invoicing.
Understanding the US CLOUD Act
The Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data (CLOUD) Act is a US federal law passed in 2018. It grants US law enforcement the authority to compel US-based technology companies (via warrant or subpoena) to provide requested data, regardless of whether that data is stored on US soil or in a foreign country.
For any organisation subject to GDPR or NIS2, the CLOUD Act creates a "jurisdictional conflict." Even if a US-owned CDN has servers in Frankfurt or Paris, the company is legally bound by US law to hand over data if requested. This directly contradicts GDPR Article 48, which states that foreign court orders are only valid if based on an international agreement like a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT).
- Extraterritorial Reach: Jurisdiction follows the owner, not the server. If the provider is US-owned, the data is within reach of the US government.
- Bypassing Local Courts: US authorities can access data without a requirement for judicial review in the EU or notification to the affected users.
- "Go Dark" Risk: US policy changes can lead to sudden data inaccessibility or service cut-offs, as seen with several global providers in recent years.
- Director Liability: Under NIS2, company directors can be held personally liable for failing to secure their digital supply chains against such jurisdictional risks.
- Substantial Financial Penalties: Failing to secure the supply chain or manage jurisdictional risks under NIS2 can result in massive fines:
- Essential Entities: Fines up to €10 million or 2% of total global annual turnover, whichever is higher.
- Important Entities: Fines up to €7 million or 1.4% of total global annual turnover, whichever is higher.
Varnish CDN is owned and operated by a 100% European entity with no US parent company. Because we are not subject to US jurisdiction, the CLOUD Act does not apply to us. This ensures your traffic, logs, and metadata remain strictly under the protection of European law, providing the "No-CLOUD-Act" guarantee required for high-trust and regulated sectors.