Magento Hosting
Magento is one of the most resource intensive ecommerce applications on the market. When compared to other open source ecommerce products, Magento has a file and database structure that is infinitely more complex. As the dozens of threads about hosting on the Magento forums will confirm, unless your site is getting literally no traffic, at £10 per month shared hosting package just isn’t going to cut it (it’s all very well having a lightning fast demo site, but what happens when you start getting hundreds of thousands of visitors per month?).
At Limesharp we’ve been hosting Magento sites for 2 years, and late last year we sat down with out hosting partner Rackspace to design a top of the range hosting solution designed specifically to run Magento, and to run it FAST. The result is a fully PCi-compliant load-balanced server environment consisting of top-of-the-range Dell R710 servers.
Load Balanced
By spreading your web solution across 4 top of the range servers, we are harnessing the power of 64GB RAM, 8 Quad Core Intel Xeon L5520 2.26GHz processors, and over 3 terabytes of data storage. Because of this load balanced environment our servers have a build in resilience you don’t get with shared hosting, or even your own dedicated server. If one of our servers was to fail, the others are still running ensuring that your website is still accessible for your customers.
Load balancing is usually very expensive to set up, which puts it out of the reach of most small to medium sized businesses. At Limesharp we have developed a solution whereby we bill on actual data use, which means that reaping the benefits of a blazing fast load balanced solution is now within the reach of even smaller ecommerce websites.
Cloud vs. Shared vs. Dedicated
There are so many choices when hosting your Magento website it may be difficult to know which can actually deliver the goods. There are shared hosting companies offering Magento solutions. There are also Magento agenices offering “Cloud Hosting” services (which is basically just a buzz word for shared hosting). The truth is neither of these services can compete with a dedicated hosting solution such as our own.
For a resource intensive application such as Magento, Rackspace recommends a dedicated environment for best performance.
PCi-Compliance
As of October 2009 all ecommerce merchants are required to by PCi-Compliant. One of the key criteria for our new hosting environment was that it should make PCi-compliance easier for our clients to achieve. We ensured that our servers are running the latest anti-virus software, up-to-date operating systems, that we have full intrusion detection capabilities and that our sites are set up in the most secure way possible. This means that passing the quarterly security scans required for PCi-compliance is a breeze for our customers.