A Magento performance solution!
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!
October 16th, 2009 at 12:16 am
Maybe mask that affiliate link to make your Magento hosting review appear a lot more credible?
November 28th, 2009 at 2:59 pm
Ehh no. I didn’t write a review for the money, but if that was my goal I would have provided more service reviews on my site and of products that have better affiliate programs than simplehelix. Bluehost pays 8xs as much in their affiliate program, but their servers are horrible.