Tutorials for Magento and Joomla! - Yireo

Finding a good hosting provider

When setting up a MageBridge shop, a good hosting environment is vital: Not only do you need to deal with performance and security, but there are other issues at hand as well. This tutorial guides you through some of the steps.

 Shared hosting

While shared hosting is cheap, we can never recommend it for Magento: Magento is a heavy-load application that therefor requires enough system resources to function. In a shared hosting environment, resources are never guaranteed and your Magento shop (and therefor your income) will in the end suffer from this.

VPS hosting

VPS (Virtual Private Server) guarantees that certain resources are dedicated to your server. Looking at the Magento system requirements, make sure the VPS at least supports the following:

• Linux or UNIX-like operating system (Windows is not supported by Magento)
• 1Gb of memory (512Mb of this is needed for Magento, another 512Mb is needed for the rest)
• 1 CPU (or core) dedicated to your VPS (speed should be above 1Ghz)
• 5 Gb of disk space
• SSH access
• Root access

Hosting providers

Some well known hosting providers have various VPS packages to help you with. With the specifications above you can find a suitable package easily. Some of these hosting providers are listed below:

• HostGator (VPS)
• Simple HELIX (dedicated, VPS)
• Magenting (shared)
• SiteCloud (VPS)
• Elief (VPS)
• Aspiration Hosting (dedicated)
• Crucial Web Hosting (VPS)
• MageMojo (dedicated)
• Nexcess (VPS)
• Byte Internet (shared, Dutch)
• CloudHosting (formerly XLSHosting VPS)
• Flexwebhosting (dedicated, Dutch)
• KnownHost (VPS)
• WiredTree

A dedicated VPS for one shop

With one shop (in this case, meaning one Magento site plus one Joomla! site plus MageBridge) you will need one dedicated VPS. If you add more Magento shops to the same VPS, immediately the risk of performance loss is increased dramatically, and the VPS may become a waste of money.

Production, testing, development

A good strategy is always to maintain not only a production site, but also a testing site and a development site. Changes should be tested first before putting it life. With a VPS you have good tools to make this happen. Note that a testing environment does not need to perform that well. You can dedicate resources to the production site instead.

Maintain a clean environment

Make sure all applications is installed in a clean manner: Don't clutter the hosting environment with numerous Magento installations and/or Joomla! installation. Setup only 1 single production site and 1 single testing site, but do not use the VPS as a waste-dump for unneeded files.

Extra performance is always needed

If you install Magento on a default Linux OS, things are far from optimized. Having 512Mb of PHP memory is only one small trick to make Magento more performant. Other tricks include tmpfs-filesystems, MySQL optimization, PHP setings and much more. The web (including our own Yireo site) is packed with tips and tricks on how to do this.

Who is maintaining the VPS?

A VPS sounds wonderful: You get a fully dedicated server with guaranteed resources. Probably Linux installed on it. But who's going to maintain that server? When there are security patches available on the OS-level, who's going to install them? Who has root-access? It is important to know that hiring a VPS does not mean that all your worries are over. One way or another, somebody needs to be in charge of the system administration. If you are not a Linux sysadmin yourself, you need to hire somebody to be that.