Scalability Blog

Magento is a powerful and incredibly flexible ecommerce program. While the expansive ecommerce platform offers an enormous amount of store customization, a slow loading online site will do little to entice a customer to buy its product. An optimized server running Magento, on the other hand, can offer a strong performance, resulting in higher sales and happier customers. To ensure the lowest system loads and best possible response time, ServerStack works to optimize many aspects of the Magento servers.

ServerStack begins its optimization of Magento from the ground up. Before even opening one configuration file, customers are on a foundation of dedicated Dell Servers. Once customers are established on their fast and scalable servers, ServerStack provides its customary high level of service, configuring PHP and MySQL to work best with Magento.

As Magento is written in PHP, ServerStack ensures that the language is processed as effectively as possible. Nginx is set as a reverse proxy to the Apache web server, allowing Nginx to serve the required static content while Apache does the heavy lifting needed for PHP. Furthermore, ServerStack uses APC for caching—choosing it because of its effective integration with PHP. APC is not only written by PHP developers, but will be officially integrated with PHP6.

At the same time, ServerStack works to configure MySQL, keeping access to the backend database fast and secure. With over a decade of experience in the hosting industry, ServerStack implements their time-tested MySQL configuration to further increase Magento performance.

However, optimizing an application is only half of the equation. The general behavior of any application on a server is most dependent on the actual coding behind the site. For this reason, once Magento is installed, ServerStack continues the dialogue with the customer, ready to fine-tune the application. After Magento is installed, configured, and optimized on the customer’s dedicated server, ServerStack employees let the user try it out and answer any specific questions that they may have about how to keep it running at its peak level. ServerStack streamlines the entire process so that the customer can focus on selling their product instead of shuffling through manuals.

When the site goes live, ServerStack continues to manage Magento fully. Server graphs are monitored consistently, checking how the server manages with the load put on it. Should there be evidence of swap, ServerStack employees investigate the cause: they implement minor configuration changes for small issues or fully provision the server if more attention is needed.

ServerStack also stands by as soon as the customer needs to scale. When milliseconds count with customer conversions, ServerStack wants to ensure that a giant site runs just as well as a growing one.

No matter your ecommerce needs, Magento provides an incredibly powerful and flexible platform. To harness it better, and to spend your time driving sales instead of configuring, scaling, and testing, ServerStack takes on all the backend work and supports you in your business.