Why VPS Server for Magento Commerce?

• 23 October 2013
• by: Kenny
• in: Tutorial & Guides
• note: no comments

Magento commerce is great shopping cart software to help with enterprise ecommerce solutions. It's famous for powerful management over products and the entire selling process. But when you look for decent magento hosting suggestion, most people will tell you to check out vps or dedicated server hosting. Why is that? Isn't shared hosting good enough to support magento scripts?

The answer is absolutely no. Let's see what advantages we can get from vps server first

• Root access. VPS is performing the same as a dedicated server that comes with its own OS and disk drive. VPS user receives full root access for any side configuration. If your magento site requires some special server end setup, you don't have to seek help from hosting support because you can fully handle it by yourself. Using vps simply brings us convenience.
• Better performance. VPS is only used by yourself so your website performance won't be affected by other users. For those ecommerce applications with extremely high uptime and loading speed, vps should be the primary consideration if dedicated server is not in consideration yet. Besides the dedicated server resource from vps server, you can also apply various optimization tactics to make it working perfect with your website script. You do not receive such support via shared server environment.
• Easy maintenance. In case something goes wrong on website or server, you can apply urgent maintenance and make sure your website is always online. You don't have to always contact hosting support for most problems fixing. Especially when your site down on peak time, you can't wait long for a simple fix because you're loosing business.

As we see, those VPS advantages are not included from shared server. Especially when you're under development process, you might require various modification on server settings. VPS will support your requirements side by side.

But we should also note the purpose of magento software. It has a complex structure with almost every side consideration for online cart. It also gives developers second development opportunity to fulfill your local needs. Because of this, magento commerce is some kind heavy weight comparing to all exisitng shopping cart solutions like oscommerce, opencart and xcart etc. Most magento applications are setup for enterprise carts that generate huge daily traffic. Because of this, shared server will not work.

Can we install magento commerce on shared server? Absolutely no problem at all based the software system requirements. It's actually included from most auto installer like softaculous and simplescripts. Just few clicks to get it running on your website. You can also use it as normal for simple store setup. The problem is you can not make full use of the available features on shared server. If you try to make it full functional with heavy transaction, other people on same server will start to complain.

Basically, if you want to maintain a large shopping cart site for your enterprise, magento is perfect choice based its design structures. But you will need a vps or higher server solutions to make it working properly. If you just want to maintain a simple store site, you don't need magernto at all for it's complexity. Instead, you have wide choice over lots of popular platforms like opencart, zencart etc. These softwares provide simplicity and user friendly structures to simplify your work greatly.