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Get the Right server for Magento hosting

Many of our customers run e-commerce websites, so we know that running a busy online store is tough! If you want to start your own store, you need to use the best tools for the job. Otherwise, your store is going to be a real headache.
I was recently chatting with one of our customers who set up a store on Magento. He purchased a Dual Core with minimum resources from us around 6 months ago, and he’s still using the software today, on the exact same dedicated server plan.
The traffic to his site has exploded over the last 6 months, and he’s now got three times as many products on his Magento store. So his dedicated server was not able to serve pages just as speedily as it did on day one. We thought that his Magento tips would be a great topic for a blog.

What Do I Need to Run Magento?

Magento is a pretty complex application. It’s continually pulling in lots of pictures, videos, options, text, social media buttons, comments and other content. So it needs a decent amount of power to run well. A dedicated server is the best solution for Magento, even if you are using the Community Edition. A dedicated server is self-contained, so you can set up the software exactly how you want it. You can run Magento on a Virtual Private Server (VPS) too, but a dedicated server is the best way to ensure that your resources are yours alone.

You also need to bag plenty of RAM in your server so that it can cope with high demand, and you’ll never need to worry about other people’s sites bringing yours to a standstill. The more RAM you have installed, the more data the server can cache in memory, and the less it will need to write to disk. This means it will serve up pages more quickly, and it can also deal with requests from many customers at the same time, making shopping smoother and checkout faster. More RAM – more speed – more sales! It’s that simple.

What If My Server is Under Powered?

It’s possible to run Magento on a Virtual Private Server (VPS), or a shared hosting account. VPS and shared hosting are both affordable options for startups, and a site with low to medium traffic may cope. However, there are some negative consequences, particularly for larger stores:

• On a shared hosting account or a VPS, a large shop could be quite slow. It might be fine when there’s just one person looking at it (that is probably you!), but when you have many customers browsing at the same time, they could waiting a very long time for pages to load if the VPS is under-resourced.
• Once the pages load, the images, and video will take even longer!
• Slow sites always cause customers to leave; we recommend that you keep page loads under 2 seconds, and optimizing your dedicated server for Magento is the only way to achieve that.

• Slow server response will kill your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts stone dead. In fact, it could even stop Google’s spiders from crawling your site, so you’ll never even get listed!

Our Simple Server Solution for Magento

Looking at a new Magento install? Get the server right - keep your customers happy from the start. We recommend that you purchase a Quad Core dedicated server plan (or higher). Quad Core is the minimum processing power we’d recommend for Magento, and is proven to cope with medium to high levels of traffic. Also, choose as much memory as you can afford so that your media loads comfortably. Check out our complete list of dedicated servers now.

How Can I Deal With DDoS Without a Hardware Firewall?

A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack can bring a server to its knees in minutes. DDoS involves flooding a server with requests, forcing the server to be unusable and unresponsive. While occasional DDoS attacks are inconvenient, repeated and persistent attacks can cripple a website and prevent you from running your business.

Large businesses like PayPal have felt the full force of DDoS in the past, but no website or business is immune. While DDoS attacks are illegal, in many countries but it is incredibly difficult to track down the perpetrators, since they often use botnets to carry out their crimes. Prevention therefore is the best cure.

About Firewalls

Hardware firewalls are often considered the most robust type of protection against all kinds of intruders, and the best defence against DDoS, but they are not always practical. The days of placing mainframes behind firewalls are long gone. If you run virtual machines, a hardware firewall isn’t practical. The solution? You will need to run a software firewall to protect each server you deploy. Config Server Firewall (CSF) is a free software firewall that is designed for Linux servers. It’s valuable because it’s designed to prevent the kinds of brute force attacks that can bring a server down. CSF has flood detection technology that is specifically designed to recognise, and protect against, a DDoS attack. The key feature is connection limit protection, which monitors incoming connections and detects very high quantities of active connections from one IP address. While CSF isn’t totally failsafe, it does a good job of preventing mild or moderate attacks.

csf firewall

How to Set Up CSF

CSF can be used from the command line or from specific hosting control panels, including cPanel on Linux. It’s especially useful for deployment on Dedicated servers and Virtual Private Servers (VPS), many of which have cPanel installed as part of the package. The user interface is also installed on Webmin. To enable DDoS protection without cPanel or Webmin, you’ll need to edit the CSF config file with a text editor. You must define the ports that are to be monitored; remember that not all ports will be open by default anyway. You can also optionally set a threshold for the number of IP addresses that trigger a block, and you’ll choose whether to block them permanently or for a set period of time. The portflood setting allows you limit the number of connections to any port in a specified period. It’s wise to also download IP block lists for CSF. These will effectively pre-program the firewall to block IPs that are known to be the source of problems, ensuring that your server cannot be targeted by these IPs. CSF also has a whitelist; check that your own IP address, and the IPs of any other administrator, is added here.

 

Getting Help

CSF is a very good firewall that is ideal for dedicated hosting and cloud environments. It is quick to deploy and easy to configure, even if you are not well versed with the command line. Below you can find a quick tutorial on how you should start the installation.

The first step is to login as the root user on the terminal. And then use the following command to download CSF:

wget https://www.configserver.com/free/csf.tgz

Use the following command to extract the files

tar xfz csf.tgz

Use 'cd' to open csf folder

cd csf

Now run the CSF install typing

sh install.sh

Edit the config file to turn off the ‘testing mode’ type

 

vi /etc/csf/csf.conf

Press ‘i’ to enable editing mode and change TESTING = “1” to

TESTING = “0”

Press “Esc” key to exit the text editor type

 

:wq

Now save the changes made in the text editor. Enter the following command this will restart the csf:

csf -r

CSF is now installed and running, you can now close the terminal. For more detailed information on CSF check out the CSF user documentation.

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