This is the first 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.

E-commerce sites on the web are expected to be blazing fast, and the average online consumer is getting more impatient by the day. They assume online vendors not only emphasize user experience and security, but also ensure data delivery within a second or two per click. While Magento is a great e-commerce solution, it’s not known for its speed.

Enter, stage left: memcache. memcache is an object-caching service that’s entirely memory-based. It exposes a TCP-based interface to store and retrieve any key-value pair of data. It’s very stable and very fast, and even better, Magento can use it out of the box.

There are three things you’ll need to do to allow your Magento deployment to utilize memcache:

1. Install the daemon (or service);
2. Install the required client libraries;
3. Configure your Magento deployment to use memcache for object caching.

If your hosting provider doesn’t already have a “Magento Optimized” hosting package – which should always include the daemon and the client libraries for memcache – then you have a little to do before Magento can cache stuff.

Installing the service, or memcached, requires either finding the packages for your OS or compiling and installing it from scratch. As I write this post, the latest version of memcached is 1.4.20. Most Linux distributions currently include memcached in their package repositories, so sometimes it’s as easy as using apt or yum to get the packages installed. If you’re hardcore and want to compile it manually, doing so is really simple:

wget http://memcached.org/latest
tar -zxvf memcached-1.x.x.tar.gz
cd memcached-1.x.x
./configure && make && make test && sudo make install

When you’re ready to install the client libraries, you may face a decision on which implementation of the PHP client libraries to install: pecl-memcache or peck-memcachd. To make your life easier, just install them both; most hosting providers will do so when deploying their optimized solutions. You’ll find that stable Linux distributions will likely not include the PHP extensions for memcache (php-pecl-memcache or php-pecl-memcachd) in their stock distributions, but externally managed distributions include them. Again, if you’re hardcore or prefer to manage your Pear and Pecl modules outside of your OS’s package manager, you can use pecl to install either package also.

Once you have all of your prerequisites available to you, the last step is to configure Magento to store and retrieve objects in memcache. Open up your app/etc/local.xml file and find the <cache> directive. Recent versions of Magento provide wonderful examples of how to specify memcache be used as the caching backend rather than file-based caching.

The last step before you can enjoy a turbocharged Magento site is to make sure you haven’t disabled caching within Magento’s admin interface. Go to System -> Cache Management and make sure nothing is set to Disabled. I can’t count the number of times I’ve had customers complain that their sites are still slow swearing that they have everything configured properly only to find that they have caching disabled within the admin.

Now, go and enjoy your faster website, happier customers, and hopefully, your e-commerce riches.

Cynch Inc. and Hostway have teamed up to put together a fully optimized solution for your Magento store for which caching is only one for the many tricks we have up our sleeves. Stay tuned over the next few weeks for more tips on how you can tune up your website to work more efficiently.

Also, don’t forget to catch our live webinar at the end out this series, “Staying Two Steps Ahead of the Performance of Your Magento Site,” where one of our techs will show you how it all comes together.

For more information regarding Hostway’s Magento stack, or how to optimize your existing environment to complement your business, contact your Hostway representative or Cynch Inc. directly at www.cynchinc.com/design/contact.html.

We’d like to thank all of our new and long-term customers who visited with us at our two trade shows last month, Imagine and TechEd.

At the Magento Imagine eCommerce Conference in Las Vegas, Hostway demonstrated its continually expanding capabilities in the e-commerce space, achieved through close work with Magento as a Silver Partner. We showed off the experience we’ve accrued while testing, building, deploying and optimizing a Magento platform that is now used by 60+ Magento enterprise and community merchants. We also partnered with our friends from Clustrix on a presentation about increasing Magento database performance in the cloud, and helped our friends at Cynch discuss their Magento optimization expertise.

Meanwhile, at Microsoft’s TechEd conference in Houston, Hostway presented as part of the Microsoft Hosting Partner Pavilion, announcing our early-adopter program for our 2012 R2 FlexCloud Platform, the next generation of our public cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offering. The infrastructure upgrades provided alongside Windows Server 2012 R2 offer three key benefits: Faster scaling, faster communication / reduced latency, and doubled virtual machine capacity.

Here are some pictures from these shows:

Shawn Haukaas (center) of August Ash was our XBox One winner. He's flanked here by Kevin Whitton (left) and Brian White from the Hostway channel team.

Randall Jarzombek (left) and Jason Ruiz attended TechEd in Houston for Hostway.

We hope to see you at more events as we roll into summer!

It’s no secret that cloud computing is playing a major role in the transformation of several industries, and retail is among the fields capitalizing most on its benefits. From breaking down silos between legacy systems to revolutionizing the Point of Sale (POS) model, cloud computing has helped both e-commerce and storefront retailers alike streamline operations and improve business outcomes.

According to a recent report from Accenture, cloud computing has spawned "A new era for retail," making capabilities previously only available to large retailers affordable and intuitive for small and medium-sized businesses. All that’s required is Internet access and a web-enabled device.

In addition, many cloud-based offerings boast transparent pricing models and scaling based on tiers, so businesses are not stuck with long contracts, legacy equipment, or upgrade and customization requirements. Cloud-based solutions offer retailers unprecedented flexibility by providing access to data and analytics in real time across business lines.

Let’s take a look at three ways retailers are benefitting from cloud-based services:

1. The Rise of Mobile POS: Retailers like Apple and Home Depot recognized years ago the need to provide an option for customers to check out with the sales associate that helped them make a purchase instead of waiting in a general line. Since then, mobile POS systems have been popping up in restaurants and bars, clothing boutiques, mall kiosks and other businesses as retailers streamline the shopping experience and improve the intimacy of the customer interaction. Mobile POS systems also help stores recapture valuable floor space because they no longer need to worry about housing servers, computers and cables under a sales counter. While large retailers scramble for ways to make their legacy POS systems PCI-compliant in the post-Windows XP era, retailers that embraced cloud-based mobile POS solutions early on – or made the migration from legacy solutions already – are now sitting pretty.
2. Real-time data from the sales floor: Real-time data is valuable across the board – from C-level management to department managers to buyers to sales associates. For example, management can see if their investment in a new designer’s line is paying off based on marketing campaigns they conducted vs. the number of people who take that designer’s outfits into the dressing room during the first few hours the store is open. Then they can see how well those dressing room numbers convert to sales.
3. Real-time access to inventory across stores: Perhaps the most powerful impact of cloud-based services will be on the sales floor. For example, Nordstrom has armed its sales associates with mobile devices that allow them to not only check customers out using a mobile POS, but also gives them access to the company’s entire inventory, which is useful when helping customers check if an alternative size or color is available at another location or online. It also keeps sales associates engaged with customers rather than hiding behind sales counters.

The scope of change that cloud computing is bringing to the retail industry is stunning. Web-based SaaS solutions hosted in the cloud are making their mark on every part of the business, from retail tools to human resources and ERP applications. How has your retail operation become more successful since adopting cloud-based solutions?

SMBs are trying to compete with the big guys online, and in many cases are doing so quite successfully. But it’s taken a while for many cash- and time-strapped SMBs to get to the point where they can even have a consistent online presence, let alone one that is optimized to help them compete against high-profile competitors. Now that the tide is turning for SMBs, there are four key trends emerging that need to be embraced to move to the next level.

1. This is the year for mobile commerce. Every year, experts claim "this is the year" for one technology trend or another.  According to a recent report from InMobi, 2014 is the year for mobile commerce. The report states that 83 percent of global shoppers who use mobile devices plan to make a mobile purchase in the coming year. Worldwide, 48 percent of respondents listed mobile as a key media that impacts purchasing decisions. Reliance on mobile is even higher in some consumer markets, such as India, where it was cited by 60 percent of those surveyed.

Prepping your website to meet this mobile commerce wave means more than simply optimizing your existing website for iOS, Android and other devices. Small business owners need to make their buy-from-anywhere shopping more appealing to potential customers by building out great mobile experiences, with responsive websites that work on every device and resize in a way that makes sense to the increasingly savvy mobile shopper. Seamless browsing and shopping across platforms will be crucial for SMBs in 2014. Ask your hosting provider for tips on getting started.

2. It’s time to get social. Social media and content marketing are no longer online marketing “trends” – they’re an inherent part of many customers’ commerce experience. SMBs are realizing the importance of interacting with their followers on Facebook and solving customer service queries via Twitter. Social referrals and conversions from sites such as Facebook and Pinterest are becoming a critical part of the e-commerce experience for SMBs, with the objective of having customers not just interact with your business, but also with each other.

3. Align your small business with Big Data. Calculators and cash registers don’t allow businesses to do anything more than crunch numbers. But new point-of-sale (POS) technologies will let SMBs evaluate their sales data to spot trends and buying habits with a whole new depth. Its customer relationship management (CRM) meets POS, and the information gathered will not only help with sales, but with the other elements that SMBs need to manage their businesses, such as staffing and inventory. According to a recent customer survey commissioned by ShopKeep, up to 42 percent of the 640 small businesses surveyed are already using real-time data to adjust business decisions, in some cases in under 24 hours.

4. Get familiar with personalization. Using the information gleaned from Big Data above, SMBs have the opportunity to go beyond simply suggesting similar products – which is a must-do strategy in and of itself – to actually tailoring a user’s shopping experience based on previous data. Allowing customers to move through different channels based on what they’ve done on your website in the past is essential to e-commerce in 2014.

What one thing do all of these trends have in common? They are enabled by advances in technology that make adopting methods once beyond reach now easy and cost-effective for businesses of all sizes. In many ways, SMBs are ahead of the game, because they’ve limited their investment in "enterprise-grade" technologies that gave large businesses an initial leg up. Now that advanced e-commerce capabilities are available to the little guys at a price point they can afford – and in a "form factor" they can understand – the playing field is starting to become a little more even.

Just when you thought you could breathe easy with Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Christmas behind you: The next holiday season for online retailers is right around the corner: Mother's Day, Father's Day, and graduations.

While these holidays won't come close to the traffic experienced on Black Friday – when a record 66 million shoppers spent a whopping $1.2 billion – they will spread a little mid-season cheer for online retailers who experience the majority of their sales between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Is your e-commerce website – and your web hosting company – ready for another spike? Let's take a look at three things you can do to get ready for your next big holiday season:

1) Be aware of your page load times and take steps to reduce them. Reducing image sizes and implementing content delivery networks (CDNs) are two of the best things websites can do to deliver pages faster. CDNs bring your content closer to your global customers by continuously pulling and caching content from your server and distributing it to secure servers around the world. The recommended page load time is three seconds or less.

2) Make sure your web hosting provider can support your need to burst. Many e-commerce websites have dedicated servers to support their traffic, but in slow or booming times those dedicated servers can be under- or over-utilized. Creating a hybrid hosting scenario can ensure you have high base capacity with fixed costs through dedicated hosting, while providing elastic traffic handling on a pay-as-you-use model through cloud hosting.

3) Ensure your data is backed up, preferably in a secondary location. Data backup is like an insurance policy: you hope you never have to use it, but when you do, you're happy you made the investment. Having your website crash is traumatic, and losing customer data in the process is catastrophic. You can rest more easily knowing that your customer data is protected and can be restored quickly in case of an outage.

It's important to know the cost to your business if your website is not ready for the masses. A recent report from the Ponemon Institute and Emerson Network Power indicates each minute of an unplanned website outage can cost companies $7,900 per minute, on average, up from $5,600 in 2010. Can your business really afford to lose out on that kind of revenue? Making sure your website is ready to go will ensure you don't miss out on a single dollar.

With today’s growing e-commerce market, it’s essential to have an e-commerce website that is both user-friendly and visually appealing. However, when your Magento front-end is the main focus of work, you have to make sure the other parts of your business are being neglected.

On December 11, at 1 p.m., join Hostway Demand Generation Manager Javier Cano, Logicbroker Sales Director George Heudorfer, and Logicbroker Marketing Coordinator Rebecca Kaelin as we discuss how expert partners can handle hosting and back-end integrations.

Free up your resources and allocate them towards nurturing your business and maintaining a competitive edge in today’s upbound e-commerce environment. See how to:

• Eliminate data entry and process more orders in less time
• Instantly add drop-ship without adding inventory cost or headaches
• Streamline the order process with suppliers and marketplaces
• Build an Optimized Hosted Infrastructure

Register now for this informative webinar.