Get the Right server specifications 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.