As I’m sure you’re aware, Magento is a fantastic eCommerce CMS. It’s ideal for either someone starting out in eCommerce that’s looking to scale quickly or a company that’s been trading for a number of years. However Magento’s largest problem is that it’s very resource intensive. So much so, that Microsoft should have written it. At Nimbus we have a number of tactics that we use on our customer’s Magento sites to improve performance. Ready to have an optimised Magento site? Let’s get straight into it…
Increase the speed of your Magento site with our managed Magento hosting plan. Giving you faster site speeds with Varnish Cache, handling 100,000 requests per second.
Hardware
The most important part is having the right hardware behind the site. Web hosts that offer unlimited bandwidth and disk space are the ones to avoid first. This generally means, they are overselling their servers. This type of eCommerce hosting works well for basic brochure websites but anything database intensive like Magento will need something a bit more powerful.
All the packages from Nimbus run on premium hardware from HP that uses Intel Quad Core processors, fast SAS (SCSI) hard disks and blisteringly fast memory.
The cloud software we use prevents us from overselling our hardware so the specifications that we quote our customers are what we guarantee.
Database Optimisation
An optimised Magento site likes lots of memory, especially for the database. By tuning MySQL you can optimise the performance by keeping lots of the indexes and data in memory. This reduces the amount of time it takes for MySQL to find certain records, which in turn improves page load speeds.
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Our platform was designed with your needs in mind, which means it’s easy to use, and time-saving too.Replacing Apache
Apache is great for the majority of basic web sites out there but as soon as things get intensive then there’s a great alternative, nginx. Pronounced (Engine X), it’s designed as a lightweight webserver that has simple configuration and ideal for running intensive web sites like Magento. It uses less memory and less CPU resources basically doubling a server’s capacity.
CDN Networks
CDN networks are becoming more and more popular especially for sites that have a global audience. They work by hosting regional servers closer to your end users. These servers host your static content like javascript, CSS files and images where they will download faster and take away traffic from your primary web server. The side effect is that your web server has more resources available to handle more traffic without any hardware upgrades.
What next?
The process of optimization never stops and at Nimbus we are constantly evaluating new methods. As we discover and evolve the ideas we roll them out to other customers who can benefit from these new achievements.
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