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.
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:
• 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!