Recommended Spec For Vps For Large Cs Cart Website

Hello

I am wondering what the ideal recommended spec for a VPS hosting a CS Cart with approx 1000 products and a good flow of traffic would be.

We currently have;

4gb Ram

Dual Core Zenon 2.9ghz

100gb SSD

We also have another Woocommerce store with around 40 products on this VPS as well as some smaller sites with low traffic.

I've optimsed the site quite well with GT Metrix and the vast majority of variables have an A grade now. Load time I can't get below 7 seconds though?

Do I need to upgrade my VPS's RAM or CPU, or should that be more than enough?

If your VPS runs with OpenVZ, the you are just splitting up parts of a server (node) to be separate from the others like a "shared" hosting account. Xen virtualization requires a bit more in terms of management but you get more in terms of dedicated resources whitch can increase the speed of your sites.

The best advice would be to look at dedicated hosting, VPS is for people starting up, if you want scale then I wouldn't put your hopes into VPS as a long term viable option.

More RAM would definitely help you to increase resources such as MySQL / MariaDB cache and buffering, file cache buffer etc. Apache and PHP memory execution / resource time as well. I would look at least to 8GB > 16GB for anything serious.

Splitting resources in the same VPS is worthless and not sensible for redundancy and scalability. For a true system you need dedicated hardware and separate systems for each specific workflow (it also means less services running and better security and less trouble shooting issues if they occur).

Not everyone who has a driver license can buy a Ferrari. There are plenty of people they are running carts on shared or VPS plans. It still deppends on the server configuration, hardware and things like overselling...

Not everyone who has a driver license can buy a Ferrari. There are planty of people they are running carts on shared or VPS plans. It still deppends on the server configuration, hardware and things like overselling...

Some VPS are over priced to the point people SHOULD just pay a few extra's towards a solid, scalable solution.

Anyway, I'd still suggest more RAM and your own Server as opposed to sharing it with other people, it doesnt need to be a 'Ferrari' either, as I say some Dedicated options are more profitable in the long term due to less issues and scalability.

Some VPS are over priced to the point people SHOULD just pay a few extra's towards a solid, scalable solution.

Anyway, I'd still suggest more RAM and your own Server as opposed to sharing it with other people, it doesnt need to be a 'Ferrari' either, as I say some Dedicated options are more profitable in the long term due to less issues and scalability.

Sure, no doubts, if you have a few $$$ free for the monthly costs (leased or colocated, software, managment etc.).

There are many different tools to determine if your server has adequate memory/cpu for your site.

1000 products is a small store, not large. A large store would be over 100K products.

What is your number of concurrent users? That will be the biggest indicator of how much ram you need.

I would add 1GB for every 5-8 concurrent users you want to support in addition to your base of 4GB (which is below my personal minimum, but may be adequate for your needs). Note that admin activities like import/export will use much more memory than your users ever will. If you do a lot of admin activity during prime time you will want to add resources for that too.

Generally I recommend a minimum of 6GB of memory with complementary number of cpu cores (minimum of 2 and then incremented for concurrent users as well).

But the best you can do is to use monitoring tools that will graph out for you how much of your server resources are in use over a month or so. You can then determine if you need to add resources or not. Your hosting company should be able to help you with tools that work best in their environment.

FYI. Switching to Fast-CGI as the PHP handler on any server that was previously suPHP has cut our CPU usage in half for CSCart.

In addition .. on our clients where they get high traffic.

Eg. 100,000 - 150,00- monthly users and 1.5 - 2.5 million page views... switching to higher core CPUs, even if they are slower far outperforms better speed CPUs w/ fewer cores. This is because high traffic is sorted faster across more cores even at lower speeds.

So, if you are using cloud products that let you reconfigure .. it is worth a thought.

FYI. Switching to Fast-CGI as the PHP handler on any server that was previously suPHP has cut our CPU usage in half for CSCart.

Really, 50% for switching to FastCGI? That;s a pretty big increase..

I'd be interested in what you attribute that to. Both methods leave PHP running for use by the next thread (I.e. a running php process per Apache thread).. suPHP has higher startup cost due to essentially jailing itself and running as cpanel user/group but that should only occur on the first instantiation of that php process and even that is pretty low overhead.

Can you elaborate on where a 50% gain might come from? Is this only on sites that are saturated? Or are you seeing the gains where load averages are less than 1 over a 15 minute span?

As you've indicated, performance is relative to many factors that are probably unique to a site. Activity will be quite different in the first month or two (lots of admin activity) and will then change over time. That's why continual monitoring is essential.

The number of users, vendors, products, etc. is meant to give you a hint as to size/scale of a site. A site with 250K products that has 5 customers a day is vastly different that a site with 5 products accessed by 1000 customers/day.

Analyze your server logs to see what resources are being used and add to them. Ideally you want all of mysql to be in memory so memory is probably the most critical factor for a well performing site regardless of what the actual numbers of users, products, vendors are.

Hi,

my 5 cents. With this configuration with 1000 products (not heavy optioned) should work pretty fast. If server, web and the theme configured well you should have 1.8 - 2.3 sec even with 50-70 users same time (of course depending what they do at the same time ). Always use nginx!


4gb Ram

Dual Core Zenon 2.9ghz

100gb SSD