Magento Hosting, why hardware really matters
Last week we set up a dedicated dual CPU xeon running at 3.30 ghz with 16gb of ram and a Samsung SSD drive for a customer who wanted unmanaged Magento hosting.
Things were fine until he needed constant support and it turned out had never managed any kind of server. Only issue was he refused to pay for management!
After several email exchanges we gave the customer a full refund and even helped him to migrate to a new host. We benchmarked his site on our brand new Dell/Samsung kit and waited for him to move away. We spoke to him and heard how he got a ‘much better deal’ for the same cost with free management, naturally we started to get worried at this point, right up until he told us about his hardware spec. Oh dear…
He paid the same price or a Intel Core i3 2.10 ghz with a SATA drive and 4gb of ram. This sort of kit has no place running a busy magento site and is more suited for using word on a home laptop. The really worrying thing was he seemed totally oblivious to the standard of hardware he had signed up for with one of our much bigger non specalist competitors.
It came as no surprise when his site was over 3 seconds slower on the page load, and we all know what will happen when the site starts to get busy. We really are mad about servers and running the latest hardware that bigger less flexible hosts just cannot match and it was a shame to see a customer pay the same for a much lower specced server just because he didn’t have the knowledge to run his own server and refused to pay for any management at all.
It also made us rethink our server range, we still have a passion for the latest 12G Dell kit, but we will be letting into the wild soon some lower specced servers for the less busy sites and the less demanding applications.