This is the third blog of "Staying 2 Steps Ahead of the Performance of Your Magento Site," a series of five entries from Hostway partner Cynch, an expert on optimization and a leading migration and IT management agency.
Many bootstrap organizations are familiar with the endless perks of using Magento as their preferred e-commerce platform. But, as we all know, these businesses are also usually “strapped” for cash in their infancy. In many cases, they initially choose to deploy their websites on economical shared hosting solutions, dedicating a similar monthly budget to hosting as they might to their coffee supply.
There are two scenarios that generally cause you to consider upgrading to a dedicated hosting solution: increased products or increased traffic. Growing into a dedicated server deployment gives you a lot of flexibility and benefits:
No More Noisy Neighbors: Shared solutions host lots of other websites. Those have the potential to be stingy with system resources, get a ton of traffic, have security holes in them, and so on. When looking out for the success of your online presence, it’s better to be a hermit and not play at the same playground as your neighbors – there’s less risk and more guarantees that way.
You Can Be a Control Freak: I’m sorry, but website hosting isn’t like your favorite baseball cap: one size doesn’t fit all. As the other Cynch blogs in this series have indicated, the benefits of tuning your service stack are endless. Your shared hosting provider has to accommodate the masses, so chances are they are not going to cater to any special requests.
Prepare for the Rush: Once all the hard work and money you’ve poured into social media, advertising and content creation pay off, the last thing you want is to be unprepared for higher volumes. A shared hosting solution can only be economical to its provider if they either place quality of service restrictions on their tenants or simply let every one run rampant (refer to the first point in this discussion). You will hit a ceiling with what your shared hosting solution can handle – don’t wait too long to decide to move.
The moral of the story: drink less expensive coffee, and spend that money on a dedicated server for your growing Magento e-commerce website.
We hope you are enjoying the series so far. In our next installment, “Making the Move to Split Web & Database Servers,” we will discuss the advantages of splitting those servers, and how to get even more speed out of your configuration.