Hello, I currently have 6 Magento stores, and below the breakdown and performance. all speeds are according to http://www.iwebtool.com 3 Sites on 1and1 shared hosting (1and1 Linux Home) - 2 of the sites have 70 products or less (it takes about 4-5sec (using iwebtool) to load the homepage, and loading pages lag a bit) (one site receives about 4000K visitors/month the other is 200/month all are expected to grow to 10K/month) - 1 is undeveloped but will have 500-600 skus (this is undeveloped yet sooooo freakin slow) (10K/month visitors expected) 6 Sites on Siteground (shared, but seperate hosting (each has its own cpanel, if you know how their system works when you have more than one website on one account) - 3 is wordpress - 3 are magento > compared to the 1and1 magento sites, the siteground ones load faster, yet you can still feel the lag. > Site A > has under 200 proucts, loads in 0.5 seconds *right now* (but its usually around 1-2seconds) - 1k/visitors, 10K/m expected > Site B > has about 400 products loads in 0.5 seconds *right now* (but its usually around 1-2seconds) - 1k/visitors, 10K/m expected > Site C > has about 60 products loads in 1.99 seconds *right now* (but its usually around 3-4seconds) - just developed 5k/month expected I plan on developing one more magento store. QUESTIONs > is it better for me to host these sites individually, or get a my own dedicated server. > what service providers would you recommend for dedicated servers > or is it cheaper to optimize magento? using the techniques in this quide “Methods To Speed Up Magento - A Guide To Making Magento Faster†> http://www.magentocommerce.com/boards/viewthread/36225/ - considering I would have to hire someone, and only willing to spend 100$ per site to optimize the sites ..... I want my sites to load like http://www.ratetag.in please guys I am so new at this, please suggest companies, so far I’v looked at 1and1 dedicated, GoDaddy and Siteground (tooooo expensive) My hosting costs right now are around $500/year domains $150/year what is the difference between VPS and Dedicated Servers and which one is better? advice or comments, ideas, much appreciated.
Based on the visitor usage, you probably should go for a full dedicated at this point. This is also assuming that you will have growth over the next few years. There's tons of good companies, but which one should depend on where your customers are from. Are your customers US based or another country? Definitely host your sites in the same countries that your customers are in. This is a good idea for both usability and SEO purposes, and just logically, the less far the data has to travel the better. Server specs. Probably anything will be an improvement over what you currently have. Generally for basic dedicated, or colo I would look for 1 - 2 Quad core processors, and 4+ Gb RAM. When we setup colo servers, we usually shoot for 2x Intel Quad core processors, and 16 - 32Gb RAM. This provides a solid platform, and gives the database enough RAM that you can throw just about anything at it. These would probably be excessively expensive for dedicated hosting, but if you decide to go for colo hosting, you can build one of these with 15K SAS RAID for under $3000. Also, make sure you have good bandwidth for the server. I would say a dedicated 4Mb/4Mb would be a good starting point, but you'll probably want more in the future. Also make sure your sites are using APC or another front-end caching mechanism. These will drastically reduce load on the server.
Some decent hosting companies include: LiquidWeb - Good support, decent but not super fast servers. WiredTree - Think they are slightly better than Liquidweb servers and support is just as good. Linode - Good and fast, doesn't include a control panel so youlll get to know the command line pretty well. ThePlanet - Seems like a lot of spammers use the planet. I'm sure its quality but just make sure ips are clean. VPS Ville - inexpensive and fast servers. Check em out.
I've seen bad IP's on just about every host out there. No matter what host, I would definitely check to see that the IP's aren't in block lists.
We used to host each individual site with different host, but we moved to one host and with one server. This makes it easier to manage and run updates patches. We been with rackspace for over 9 months now and very happy with them.
I can definitely help you here. Please send me a pm if you are genuinely inetrested. We are an established 6 year old comapny with our Data cenetr facity in Toronto, Canada.
Dedicated of course (you have whole box only for yourself and no one mess with it), I even can't imagine running 6 magneto stores on one virtual.. magneto is really heavy script. Check out webair.com if you are looking a good dedicated hosting plan, you can also contact them for an individual deal. I'm sure you will be satisfied.
> is it better for me to host these sites individually, or get a my own dedicated server. Are you experiencing a performance hit on shared hosting? If yes, then you need to look for a more robust solution. To find the right solution, compare what you are paying for all those shared accounts vs the prices of a dedicated box. But honestly, you should start on a Virtual Private Server. You can scale resources on a VPS in a matter of a few minutes - unlike on a dedicated server if you have to add resources you have to order hardware, install it, reboot it. The provider would do that for you, but it is still a hassle. And with a VPS, you can start small - say with 512MB of RAM and 20GB disk space, and as your site traffic increases and you need to get more resources/performance out of the VPS you can simply tell your host to add more memory/CPUs/disk space as needed. It's a beautiful thing.
Softlayer.com is who I currently have my 3 dedicated servers through. If you can afford it, and either have the technical knowledge to manage it yourself or have someone who can do it for you then dedicated is the way to go without a doubt.