Recommended Hosting Platform

[kevljones]

Hi All.

Just mulling some hosting options for a new Magento 2 installation. We currently have a consumer store running version 1.9.0.1 but are looking to upgrade to Magento 2 and also add a trade store to it as well. We anticipate visits of around 100,000 per month based on current Analytics data and look to grow this to 200,000 within the first year.

We have some custom development work being carried out to add some functionality to the trade store and the developers and recommending a dedicated server in the region of £500 - £600 per month. This seems a little overkill for me given our traffic.

I'm thinking a VPS with 6 Cores 12GB RAM running Cloudlinux/cPanel/WHM as a starting point rather than a dedicated platform or maybe using Amazon Web Services with a similar spec that can be scaled upwards.

Any thoughts or recommendations would be appreciated. I want to find a balance between cost and site performance and don't want to pay for resources that aren't necessarily being used.

Kev

[MagenX]

you need to look for digitalocean or vultr

simple cloud ssd servers, awesome API, very cheap (amazon is expensive)

configure autoscaling. 

it will be much better than single dedicated server or vps.

when your traffic goes up it will start new servers. traffic goes down - servers will self-delete,etc

[JLHC]

I noticed that you said "Cloudlinux", which is not needed for your case as you are only hosting your own website in the server. 

You should definitely consider going with a smaller VPS or Cloud for a start and scale up when your store grows. Make sure you go with those with dedicated resources as some are shared (and worse, running OpenVZ) to ensure that you will not be negatively affected by bad neighbors. 

[kevljones]

Thanks.

The reason I mentioned Cloudlinux is because there will be a Wordpress blog running on the server two which links to Magento via the Fishpig plugin. I will probably start without Cloudlinux and see how things go without it.

I'm leaning towards a mid-range VPS which we probably won't need all the resources initially but which is a lot cheaper than the dedicated server our development house is trying to get us to take up (most likely a commission there somewhere). We can scale the VPS as demand for the site grows and then go dedicated should the time ever come that we need to.

Have you ever used Amazon Web Services? I use S3 as an offsite backup for a VPS that I currently have, but never used their compute services.

Kev

[kevljones]

Thanks. I've heard of Digital Ocean quite a few times, however I've not actually used them yet. The fact that I keep hearing about them suggests I should give them a go.

Will have a look into them and throw them into the mix. Auto scaling is whats needed as based on analytics data I have there are significant peaks in demand when new products are featured in newsletters / blog posts or when we post an offer or new video on our social media platforms.

[brendanb]

I have been using Digital Ocean for about 4 years now for all sorts of jobs. They are great for trying stuff out, spin up a vm in a minute. Kill it off later the same day. I have had some vms running with they for over two years continuously. From time to time they have to move things around, but they give loads of notice and downtime has only been <1min.

Im currently using a DO instance to test out magento 2.1 Its easy for this sort of thing.

I'm considering running a production magento site off this also. Just getting my feet wet first. Documentation wise they are great. Loads of content to read over.

Im pretty sure they have a magento VM for 2.0 already set to go if you just want to test out

regards

Brendan

[NirvanaHosting]

With that current number of visitors would expect somewhere in the region of £700-1,000/mth hosting. Unfortunately people do not understand the intangibles of a hosting environment, or the complexities of an environment like AWS. Allocating 0.5% to 1% of online revenue, depending on store size, for hosting is the guideline we have been provided.

If you are business minded someone like Nexcess is the best balance. With simpler shared or dedicated hosts there are intangibles that you will have to deal with. Using DigitalOcean or other non-enterprise clouds you have a combination of the intangibles and also the architecture. We use a special 7-10node cluster architecture on AWS but it was designed by large enterprise architects and costs $85k (we lease it so only get SSH access).

Then you need to take in to account the number of products, number of stores, amount of code. If we didn't have the specialist architecture which provides us the same benefits as enterprises like Saks and Net-A-Porter, it's worth the limitations of access, then Nexcess is what we would use, and have tried a few from DigitalOcean to SimpleHelix.