Server Question for Large Magento Webshop

[pheebs]

Hey hey people

We've just started working with a company who is having major issues with their online Magento shop. They supposedly have a dedicated server with a company based in Germany and right now their shop is delayed/errors opening pages and various other issues. The developer has been saying it is a server based issue whereas the hosting company is saying it's to do with error in the scripting.

They shop has around 100,000 products and is based in Switzerland with a Swiss customer base.

According to the developer the shop size is 30-40gb although the server guy has stated it's around 95gb.

Our boss has decided he's more than likely going to move his site over to Switzerland based server company as he would like to have a higher ranking in google searches and has been looking at various companies and their offers. He also has reasons to believe another 10 shops are being hosted on the same server he's paying for.

He's recently had this through and wants to know if it's of any good to his business:

1. Hardware:
Rackspace: Chassis and Power
CPU: 1 x Xeon E3-1230
8M Cache, 3.30 Ghz
RAM:2 x 8GB DDR3 (16GB)

2. Storage:
HDD: 1 x Intel SSD DC S3500 Series - 120 GB
RAID Controller: No RAID Controller

3. Software:
OS: CentOS Linux 64bit

4. SLA
SLA: Basic
99.8% (max downtime 17.5 hours p.a.)
acceptable Response Time: 6 Hours
Maintenance Window: Mon - Sun 21:00 and 07:00
Pre-announcement of impending maintenance: Yes

5. Network:
VLAN: 1 IP address
IPMI: no Remote Management
Traffic: 500GB Traffic - bunstable up to 100 Mbps

6. Backup
Disk Space: 100GB Hosted Server Backup

This is all being offered for around £2000.00 a year.

I have *no* idea what any of it means or if it would work. Can you guys suggest what he should be looking for / if the above is a good deal and would work for his site / whether he should be on a dedicated Server or VDS / whether there's any company you can think of that may be able to provide something suitable?

(Spoke to the guys at Vidahost (hello Dom!) and they helped out with some general advice! Thanks so much!)

 

[mod1fied]

From my experience with Magento, we had started with around 25k products and moved upto around 60k products and were throwing away £800 a month on a server.

We found that server optimisation and memcache etc helped the most,. but out of the box performance is dreadful.

The spec you have listed is more or less on par with what we had before we started looking at other shopping platforms. Only real difference was we had 8 cpu cores and a RAID setup with HDD's not SSD's.

Hope this helps.

 

[Ringiho]

I'd be wary if you are having issues already of moving to a server with no RAID and a response time of 6 hours!

Although that might be a dedicated server rather than shared, the main pains are going to be when you have a problem with it and no one looks at it for 6 hours.

 

[#Chri5#]

He's recently had this through and wants to know if it's of any good to his business:

To echo what Ringiho said... no RAID

The business owner needs to decide if the response time is good enough for his business. If the server goes down and there are 6 hours of lost sales, what will that cost the business? Does the potential loss of sales / profit mean a higher SLA is required?

 

[pheebs]

Thanks for your feedback. Can I ask what exactly RAID enables/aids with. Again, apologies for my lack of tech knowledge or understanding, I'm just a designer of pretty pictures

I will pose these questions to my boss!

mod1fied: Just out of curiosity, what platform did you end up moving on to if you used to have Magento?

 

[anything I don't mind]

Take a look at ovh offerings. A lot of people dislike them but i have been a customer for 5 years and think they are great.

For the money i don't think you will find better value in terms of specs and bandwidth.

Example:
http://www.ovh.co.uk/dedicated_servers/hosting/2014-HOST-128.xml

Chassis 1U/T3
CPU AMD 2x Opteron 4386
Cores/threads 16/16t
Frequency/burst 3,1 GHz+/3,8 GHz+
RAM 128 GB DDR3 ECC 1066MHz
Disks 2x 2 TB SATA3
RAID SOFT/JBOD
Bandwidth 500 Mbps
Traffic Unlimited
Burst 1 Gbps
IP with no monthly fees* 256 IPs
Public network card 1 x 1 Gbps

£200 per month.

Very reasonable prices on SSD configurations as well, far superior than the competition as far as i am aware, but stand to be correct if anyone knows a better host offering with SSD than ovh?


Or maybe this one: http://www.ovh.co.uk/dedicated_servers/big-data/2014-HG.xml#options

 

[pheebs]

Thanks for the suggestion! Only problem is they're based in Switzerland with a Swiss customer base so they're trying to find a server company based there to help with Google Rankings

 

[anything I don't mind]

I understand wanting a local host for performance and legality reasons (in some cases) but never to help with google rankings? How will a swiss server help with google rankings?

I was under the impression that you could pay an emarketing company to help with google rankings outside of the hosting setup.

Just did a google search, "ovh google ranknigs" came across this:

https://www.ovh.co.uk/cdn/improve-seo.xml

edit: OK i see what you are after now. I see ovh have a CDN with 19 international locations but swiss is not one of them.

 

[james_uk]

Hi,

We offer our hosting customers CDN facilities via CloudFlare which neatly side-steps the issue of locality.

If your Magento store warrants the kind of hardware you've been looking at I certainly would not advise making the decision based upon cost. Decent enterprise grade server hardware (e.g. SSDs as have been discussed) together with the data centre and network facilities to support your server kit costs serious money - if it's cheap, it's cheap for reason.

Extrapolating your lost sales per hour of website downtime will help you arrive at the kind of figure you need to be spending monthly (don't forget decent hosts are made or broken by the backup facilities and RTOs they can offer to customers).

 

[On Holiday]

 

[Caged]

Isn't it a bit old-school to buy a (single) dedicated box and then manage the infrastructure yourself? I think you'd be much better off on a platform that is well supported on something like AWS and therefore able to scale with demand.

 

[Beansprout]

Caged...How does AWS handle server / site management & maintenance & scaling & so on?

OP - Magento can be a beast and is certainly complex so before you (well - your developer - not your fault for not knowing who to listen to or not) go blaming/changing the server, I would get another Magento developer to look at it....every day I fix web design issues for our hosting clients whose clueless (and usually uber-expensive?!) web developers blame "the hosting / the server / the colour of the sky" and - funnily enough - want their client to move to XYZ server with them. At great cost. Or they've just missed something, since we're all human.

If your developer is competent, he'll know specifically what to ask the hosting company. And vice versa with the hosting company asking the dev, although obviously a hosting company isn't also a specialist Magento developer but most have a rough idea of how to diagnose problems if they're being caused by a software incompatibility or system overload/crash. You would hope (But this also depends if you have a managed service or not)

If neither of them make any sense or want to work with each other, then yes it's probably time to look at a new partnership.

As for geolocation, read what Google publish. Can't see an issue but I'm not an SEO expert..

Lastly, I can't remember the last time I saw any of our reputable competitors offering less than a 99.9% SLA. And 6 hours is a little bit of a crazy response time. That's almost a whole business day.

Some offer 100% but aren't worth the paper they're written on - one huge hosting company has a 100% SLA but only pay out after a few hours of a problem?! Also, any payout is perhaps much less than you would take in sales (£2000/yr/12 = £166/month which is a normal cap) but the cost to do it all yourself is in the tens - if not hundreds - of thousands, so.... SLAs can simply be a guide of how good the provider thinks their infrastructure is, or how important they think running things well is.

 

[Caged]

Caged...How does AWS handle server / site management & maintenance & scaling & so on?

I didn't mean that it did it for you. The OPs current approach seems to be to buy a dedicated box and then when you outgrow that, buy another one.

I was suggesting that if you're going to be making changes anyway then maybe it makes sense to build something capable of taking advantage of the almost limitless capacity available from these large cloud providers, to avoid paying for capacity you don't need when you're quiet, and then not having the capacity when you're busy.