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I am in need of advice about hosting Magento on a VPS.

I am considering a VPS that is advertised as Magento optimized, has 1024MB ram and says it has 4.8Ghz cpu capacity (if i order 1GB or ram or more i'm supposed to get 2 Xeon cores).

The HDD is not mentioned i don't know if they use RAID or SAS or anything. Could a small sized Magento store run optimally on this setup? I'd hate to have pages and checkout etc take many seconds to load.

Thanks for any advice.

EEAA
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dan
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4 Answers4

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Yes - should work - however you may wish to use something like www.CloudFlare.com in front of it first - any reverse proxy would work of course...

It would be wise to do your shopping however on the VPS. Media Temple advertises here @ ServerFault and I have used them - decent folks. Also check out VPS.net

Bottom line - shop around and TEST before going live

Glenn Kelley
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I think 1GB RAM will be rather good. For better performance choose Xen virtualization.

NARKOZ
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It's possible to run Magento on public VPSs, but not always optimal. When demand picks up, you're likely to feel the pain. First reaction is to simply upgrade the VPS with more memory, but increasing RAM has diminishing returns with Magento.

The important of Disk I/O was noted previously. This can vary between VPS providers, but also on different systems within a single provider. The other tennants on VPSs can ultimately drag this down. It would also be most noticeable on the most critical pages, as well - cart, checkout.

Running MySQL on the same machine as Apache can produce less than satisfactory results.

And running MySQL under virtualization is also a factor that negates optimal performance.

user113458
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1GB RAM will certainly not be sufficient. I've mentioned this a number of times:

  1. https://serverfault.com/a/368649/113375
  2. https://serverfault.com/a/367861/113375
  3. https://stackoverflow.com/a/8216096

I wouldn't suggest a VPS in place of shared hosting, for a number of reasons.

Let's assume your budget is £30 per month - from bytemark.co.uk this gives you

1000MB RAM 1 CPU Core 20GB storage

The downsides of using a VPS being

  1. You need to manage your own server. That means you have to optimise the server, monitor the server, fix any issues with the server - have you got that level of experience?
  2. Your I/O is shared. Anyone else's activity using the common HDDs will bottleneck anything your Magento store needs to do
  3. You are limited to 1GB RAM, to put this into perspective ...

Each PHP thread (visitor) needs an average 30MB RAM and its corresponding MySQL connection will need just a bit more. So that is 80MB per visitor. Your base OS needs about 140MB RAM to run. MySQL base wants as much as possible, but as a minimum, it will need 300MB.

So you are using 440MB, leaving you support for 7 active visitors - which is fortunate, because 1 2.5GHz core can push through a maximum of 7 requests per second (for Magento).

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Conversely, you could pick a Magento host that already optimises its shared servers, uses external DB servers, and usually has a powerful machine that you can burst resources on, to a factor of around 8 of what your VPS offers.

There are a few Magento hosting comparison sites out there that will help you make this decision.

www.magentobenchmark.com www.magespeedtest.com

As speed sounds like your ultimate concern and it doesn't sound like you have the experience to really get the best out of a Magento server (be it virtual, dedicated or clustered) - don't DIY, just go with a consummate Magento professional host.

Community
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Ben Lessani
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