Westserve

Playing with web servers

This is going to sound just plain weird to any non-geeky readers, but I enjoy playig around with web servers.
I’ve been pretty happy with the VPS that I have had at LiquidWeb for nearly a year. Their support is just extraordinary, going way beyond what I would expect from a web host, but there is one nagging annoyance: speed.
LW’s datacentre is located in Michigan in the U.S. The fact that is not located on the West Coast seems to add considerable overhead to access times and overall responsiveness. It’s not bad, but it’s not brilliant either.

This was driven home recently when I decided to start developing a new ecommerce presence for Ministry Grounds around Christmas time. I settled on Magento. Magento is open source, but being developed and supported by a company called Varien.
Magento is very ‘Web 2.0’ and has been built from the ground up to be very scalable. That means it’s a very big and very complex web app – but one that will grow with you. It’s huge overkill for my little online coffee store, but it’s been a good experience to get my head around the concepts and philosophy of such an app. And it should mean I don’t have to think about changing ecommerce apps again for a while.

But I digress… the size and complexity of Magento means that it is pretty heavy on server resources, and it started bogging down my little VPS.
So I started looking around for a ‘single app’ hosting solution – a place where I could park my Magento store, and have it serving up pages at a good pace without killing my VPS in the process.
I thin I found one: Simple Helix – The products offered are a bit of blend of shared and VPS hosting, but most interestingly, they optimise their servers for Magento. So I’ve set up my development store there (and boy wasn’t that as easy exercise to do using WGET to transfer all the files server to server direct!), and I’m am very impressed with the speeds it’s achieving.
The support has been good thus far (not quite as snappy as Liquid Web’s, but pretty good), and the Control panel is ‘DirectAdmin’ – simpler than cPanel, but quite adequate for my uses. A big bonus is SSH access – not always a common thing on this kind of hosting.

Hopefully, the extra business the new store will bring in will more than pay for the $20US per month the plan costs… See here for all the details.

I’ll report back later when the store is up and running properly.