Archive for the ‘Hosting’ Category

90% of my Traffic is Lightspeed fast, but I need more!

Monday, August 9th, 2010

Lightning fast NEW scalable Magento Hosting. Easy, powerful, on-demand. (Guides)

What’s going on?

First, understand from a high-level that Lightspeed caches entire pages. It’s like taking a picture of a group at a family reunion. Instead of having to get the family back together every time you want to show that particular page (or see that group of people), you just bring up the photo you took. With Lightspeed, instead of loading PHP, running through Magento, and making DB calls to generate a page, Apache simply returns the static HTML generated for that page when it was first cached (Or that picture was taken). This means much faster page loads and much less work for Apache/PHP (or whatever web server setup you use).

For typical Magento installations, a small portion of your traffic requires you to change something (like adding cousin Larry to the picture), which can require getting the whole gang back together (PHP/Magento/MySQL). In the case of Magento, this happens for a small number of your users when a user logs in, adds something to their cart, starts checking out, or you’re in the admin panel, which renders new HTML forĀ  every single page load. With Lightspeed, a fully re-rendered page is required only occasionally for your customers. If your admin is “too slow”, you probably have problems that a hardware upgrade could address.

(more…)

Pushing the limits of Rackspace’s Cloud Hosting for Magento

Wednesday, May 19th, 2010

Lightning fast NEW scalable Magento Hosting. Easy, powerful, on-demand… You won’t go back to Rackspace (Guides)

I’m the almost business guy, so don’t expect a lot of technical information as you read this. However, there are some interesting Magento / Environment things happening in our office that are worth mentioning. I’ll do it, since the real technical people are busy changing the world.

Our big push right now is extending the limits of Rackspace’s cloud environment. We’re finishing an enterprise ecommerce deployment that’s fully scalable, billed only for the hardware / bandwidth usage (which means automatically down to 1 web server at night, up to 6+ during peak traffic) in a totally secure, redundant cloud environment. Amazon has tools that make this possible, but the business guys for this large client said “No” (some sort of corporate jockeying).

(more…)