I posted a while back about the Magento ecommerce platform and how much I loved it.  Since that time I have worked with Magento on several projects and had the pleasure of installing it on multiple hosts.   However, I would like to point out that by “pleasure” I mean, ” absolute nightmare”.  It turns out that Magento is a hardcore beast that requires a very powerful environment to thrive in.  For just one example of this, while most ecommerce/cms platforms may install 3o – 60 tables in your MySQL database, Magento includes 100’s of tables just for the default install.  Every time you load a page, Magento is running numerous queries.  Caching can help with this lag, but even with proper cache settings, pages can still take in excess of 20 seconds to load.

There are 1000’s of forums posts you can find on google that will express lots of performance concerns.  After spending hours reading these posts, I was just about to give up on Magento.  However, it turns out that there are actually a large amount of people getting great performance from Magento by having their server configured properly.  A large part of the problem is that most of us small time web people are using some form of shared hosting.  Its affordable, but it also has VERY limited server resources.  I have installed magento on Godaddy( standard shared and their new grid hosting ), BlueHost, and HostGator… all of them took over 30 seconds to load pages, and often even timed out.  You will read the same thing on many other sites, so thats why I would like to suggest that:

Magento simply can’t run on most shared hosting plans!

Best Magento host I have found

So to get to the point, I came across a solution that didn’t cost $100 a month for dedicated hosting.  I heard really good things about Simple Helix.  They are one of the few hosts that are optimized for Magento.  They even have a one click install option.  You can literally have a Magento site running on Simple Helix in under 5 minutes.  They have a demo install of Magento that you can play with before signing up.  Its insanely fast.  Pages load in under 2 – 3 seconds.  Before signing up, I contacted their customer support and asked if I could expect the same speed found in their demo in my own Magento install on their standard plan.  They assured me that I would, and indeed they were right.  Just last week I moved 3 of my sites from Godaddy and BlueHost over to Simple Helix.  Apart from Magento their servers are just plain fast.

In summary, do yourself a favor”

If your going to run a Magento site, set it up over at Simple Helix!

A few years back I started getting lots of jobs from clients who were looking to jump in to the world of e-commerce.  At the time, I wasn’t too familiar with the available shopping cart platforms.  So like any good web developer entering new territory, I dove into a sea of google searches.  From this research, I found  that the two obvious favorites in the open source web community were (and still are) osCommerce and ZenCart.  After much more reading, I chose to started using ZenCart whenever possible on all of my e-commerce sites (osCommerce’s lack of a template system was the main factor in the decision).

Fast forward a few years, and my initial wonder with ecommerce development has long since faded.  I’ve come to despise almost every platform I have worked with.  As a developer, you either have to deal with a shopping cart with horrible CMS functionality, or a great CMS with limiting and time consuming shopping cart module setups.

Not to long ago,  I heard mention in a forum of some new shopping cart platform called Magento.  I headed over to their site, checked out the demo, then wiped the drool off of my chin.  I was impressed beyond belief.  The Magento admin section was extremely intuitive and powerful.  I felt right at home as if I had been using it for months.  It was nothing like my first time with ZenCart ( a client of mine put it best, “what the hell do I do with this?” ).  Managing your products is a breeze with a very nice interface, obviously created by some experienced designers.

By far, the most impressive thing about Magento is its CMS capabilites.  You can add new pages, even custom front pages (without special override modules/functions), just as easily as you can add new products.  Magento truely is the best of both worlds : Capable CMS and powerful shopping cart.

Head over to Magento and give the demo a try… you wont be disappointed