How can I disable the Varnish cache?

Varnish is a HTTP/web page accelerator. We use Varnish both as a load balancer and to speed up page loads by having Varnish answer requests instead of storage servers (which answer slower). Basically, Varnish makes a web page faster.

Sometimes it is useful to temporarily disable the varnish cache, for example, when editing your website. You can do this by adding a .htaccess file with the following code to the directory that you are editing.