Magento Site Performance Optimization

Chapter 1
In conclusion, if you intend to serve more than five customers at a time, you should
consider a configuration ranging from a CPU with a high frequency or many smaller
ones along with, at least, 1 GB of RAM. In a perfect scenario, you should also go for
SSD disks, which are a big plus point as Magento makes an intensive use of them.
Still, we are at light years of the test performance on Google, in this introductory
chapter. As a reminder, the average time per request was 81.635 ms. We can nuance
these results because we test the Google homepage, nevertheless, there is a long
way to go.
If the hardware improves only that much our performance, the responses must be
elsewhere. In the next chapter, we will see how to improve our performances by
installing another webserver.
Selecting a trusted company
Your web host can become a friend you never hear from or your worst nightmare.
Indeed, it will be a shame to see all our further attempts in optimizing our Magento
site annihilated by a poor host.
Magento Inc. maintains a country-wise list of hosting companies that install Magento
on your servers for free. This list is available at http://www.magentocommerce.com/
wiki/1_-_installation_and_configuration/magento-web-hosting.
Beside this list, the following are some points that you should look at when picking
your hosting company:
• Amount of web space and I/O performances
• Reliability and speed of access
• Data transfer (traffic/bandwidth)
• Root access FTP, PHP, Perl, SSI, .htaccess, SSH, MySQL, and crontabs
• SSL (secure server)
• E-mail, POP
• Control panel
• Multiple domain hosting and subdomains
• Web server and operating system
• Price
• Monthly/quarterly/annual payment plans
• Customer support 24 x 7 DDoS protection and virus scanner
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