Moving from a dedicated server to a VPS?

SamStones · Feb 12, 2013

Hi All,

We moved to Magento last year and have found it's not as fast as we'd like. We've been on our current server for 2-3 years now, and it's time to look at speeding things up.

First off, does anyone know a freelance Magento server expert that can take a look at our current dedicated server setup and optimise it ?

Secondly, as the current server has been in use for 2-3 years we're considering moving onto something a bit newer to get a better £ / performance ratio. Previously I've always discounted VPS servers and preferred dedicated servers, but I've been having a look at the VPS offerings from Heart Internet and have been drawn in by the idea that we can upgrade / downgrade the specification with the click of a button and a quick reboot, thus giving us greater flexibility in the future. It seems we could get a VPS similar to our current dedicated server setup for around half the price we pay for the dedicated box.

What I want to know is: Are there any limitations to a VPS which we wouldn't have with the current dedicated server?

Anything else we should be aware of? Anything in particular we need for a speedy magento setup?

TIA

Faevilangel · Feb 12, 2013

Don't use Heart is my recommendation, their (shared) hosting panel is poor, their servers are slow and the support is poo.

I have had to deal with them on numerous occasions for clients and really don't enjoy it.

Go for a Magento Optimised host (such as DX3webs) who are members here and actually (from testimonials) really know what they are doing.

I don't use Magento so can't help with the inner workings but I know it does need an optimised server to run Magento properly as it's a proper beast of a system.

SamStones · Feb 12, 2013

Thank you for the recommendation. The Heat Internet web site does say the servers are optimised for Magento, but when I asked the sales person they said they weren't???

I'm looking at the VPS rather than the shared hosting, so hopefully it's a slightly different kettle of fish.

edmondscommerce · Feb 12, 2013

Also happy to recommend Dx3 for optimised Magento hosting

There are another couple of hosts we work with as well

Regarding VPS limitations - generally a VPS is going to have fewer resources than a dedicated server however yes you do often have the ability to easily scale up and down. This is drifting more into what would be regarded as cloud hosting though as opposed to straight up VPS

If you would like someone to have a look at your current dedicated server and see what could be done to speed things up without migrating away then we would be happy to help

webstore · Feb 13, 2013

We share host a small number of Magento CE sites on a VPS server and are getting reasonable speed results as reported by pingdom.com

Having said that, we understand that for best results a Magento CE site is best hosted on its own dedicated server with say a minimum of 4GB RAM.

On another matter regarding another VPS server (no Magento sites on that) from the same VPS provider, we very recently remotely upwards re-sized that, but it went terribly wrong. (We have done many resizes up and down on other VPS servers in the past with no problem).

We were then left with a VPS server with a file corruption and were told by our VPS provider that we would have to run a manual fsck to fix our Linux filesystem. Needless to say we were not happy about that given we felt the fault was with their hardware and/or resizing software.

After many hours of unsuccessfully trying to fix the problem we decided it would be easier to remotely build a new VPS server and to scrap the VPS server with the file corruption - which we will do in a few days time - after we have finished a mass of cPanel WHM-to-WHM site transfers - the only headache there being getting access to clients DNS A Name records or getting them to change their records.

Incidentally we use a 2-step transfer process of www. to ww2. to www. spanning 72+ hours with 302 redirection from the faulty VPS to the ww2. and this means that for ISPs who are slow in updating their DNS servers transferred sites can always be reached.

So do be aware VPS resizing can be problematical - albeit this in our experience is rare and our advice is when building your VPS server is to go for the RAM size etc you are going to need and NOT to step resize 1GB, 2GB, 4GB, 8GB etc over a period of time - tempting to save money - but in the end not worth it in our case !

antropy · Feb 13, 2013

SamStones said:
We moved to Magento last year and have found it's not as fast as we'd like.

What platform did you move from and why? What Magento features did you need?

You have more control over a VPS in a way - easy to clone, backup, restore in another datacentre.

The only downside I can think of is that although you have your own dedicated RAM and processor time, you are sharing the hardware with other sites so if one of those crashes the hardware server, your sites will do down too.

webstore · Feb 13, 2013

The VPS (cloudservers) we use are supported with RAID 10 and we assume supported with mirrored servers. Needless to say the VPS resources we use are ring fenced from others and for our clients shared hosted sites we use CloudLinux running on cPanel so we can limit the resources any given client site uses.

SamStones · Feb 15, 2013

paulfeakins said:
What platform did you move from and why? What Magento features did you need?

You have more control over a VPS in a way - easy to clone, backup, restore in another datacentre.

The only downside I can think of is that although you have your own dedicated RAM and processor time, you are sharing the hardware with other sites so if one of those crashes the hardware server, your sites will do down too.

We moved from osCommerce as we needed to update the site and just felt the osCommerce / Cre options were too dated compared to Magento.

edmondscommerce said:
If you would like someone to have a look at your current dedicated server and see what could be done to speed things up without migrating away then we would be happy to help

I've come to the conclusion that it's no bad thing moving to a VPS server as we can save a fair bit on our current monthly costs and then upgrade if the needs dictate it.

We probably do need someone to have a quick look over the current server setup to see how well we're doing so far (to gauge if it's a hardware or config issue currently). It's probably more the server configuration that needs looking at. As I said, I'll probably move to a VPS platform anyway, and then pay someone to set up / configure that properly. If this is something you can do Joseph please let me know.

dx3webs · Feb 16, 2013

Hi there
We are more than happy to take a copy of your site and place it on our shared hosting package so you can see the difference. It will knock the spots of a vps. Drop me a pm for live examples of our clients on various packages
Thanks

astutiumRob · Feb 21, 2013

SamStones said:
have found it's not as fast as we'd like

First step would have to be to find out what (if any) bottlenecks there are - disk i/o, size of page, php/apache, database etc

There may be nothing at all wrong with your server, and it just needs correctly configuring/managing.

A VPS is a "bit of a server" with a variety of possible disk/storage setups.

antropy · Feb 21, 2013

astutiumRob said:
First step would have to be to find out what (if any) bottlenecks there are

The poorly written Magento codebase

edmondscommerce · Feb 21, 2013

actually from experience its more likely to be third party extensions that cause major performance issues than the core codebase

antropy · Feb 22, 2013

I don't doubt that in some cases but I've seen totally fresh Magento installs with the default theme and no extensions run painfully slowly with barely any products and just 1 or 2 concurrent users.

dx3webs · Feb 22, 2013

@Paul you need a new host.

Seriously, I know you are a open cart fan but try Magento on a properly configured server you can fall in love all over again

antropy · Feb 22, 2013

dx3webs said:
Try Magento on a properly configured server you can fall in love all over again

Have you got any links to a Magento site that loads quickly? I'll have a little go with http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/

I'm not sure if you develop websites or just host them but the Magento code is certainly not the cleanest I've seen.

antropy · Feb 22, 2013

Ah I should have checked your signature. Looking now.

antropy · Feb 22, 2013

I admit your demo Magento site loads very fast - I'll put that down to the quality of your hosting service rather than Magento itself

dx3webs · Feb 22, 2013

lol

just sent you a PM with a few real-world sites to look at

Just think how fast a baby e-commerce application like OpenCart would run

antropy · Feb 22, 2013

All load very fast, nicely done

MagentoLab · Feb 23, 2013

For server side performance:

- Use Magento optimized servers
- Use Litespeed instead of standard Apache
- Use memcached
- Use FPC (Full Page Cache)

ManWithBagOverHisHead · Feb 24, 2013

Faevilangel said:
Don't use Heart is my recommendation, their (shared) hosting panel is poor, their servers are slow and the support is poo.

We've had a very reasonably priced vps from heart for about 6 months and it's been excellent. It's a windows server, our ecommerce site is asp.net and ran like a rocket out of the box, no tweaks required... I hear magneto is slow so we dodged that.

ManWithBagOverHisHead · Feb 24, 2013

paulfeakins said:
I admit your demo Magento site loads very fast - I'll put that down to the quality of your hosting service rather than Magento itself

We looked at magneto before going with a dot net solution... All the magento sites were slow but we were told we could pay for a powerful server with 4 Gigs ram, multi CPUs and then get an expert to optimise it. Free software isn't cheap.

Went for free asp.net software, bottom of range vps with 1gb ram, free SQL express, runs like a rocket with no expert tweaks.

Asp.net is a much better platform for writing serious web apps in my opinion, so you don't have to jump through hoops trying to configure lots of caching and other plugins to get it to work, and you save on hosting costs too.

dx3webs · Feb 24, 2013

ManWithBagOverHisHead said:
All the magento sites were slow but we were told we could pay for a powerful server with 4 Gigs ram, multi CPUs and then get an expert to optimise it.

or you could have chosen a Magento specialist host and paid 15 quid a month for a super fast magento site.

johngarratt3 · Feb 26, 2013

Since we are referring to a host that offers good web hosting environment for Magento websites, I would like to strongly recommend rshosting.com. I have my own Magento Store, and have a dedicated server with them, which is optimized and fast, and moreover its a fully managed server, giving a real benefit for a non-it person like me.

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