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We are preparing to launch 2 e-commerce sites using CE ver 1.9. Each site will begin with around 10000 sku's.
What are the key things we need to look for from a web host...are things such as database size, number of images, etc.. important?
Obviously, page load speed is very important also.
How do we best select a proper host?
Thank you
Disclaimer: Sonassi is a Magento host
TL;DR - A good host will tell you what exactly what you need (and justify it). You shouldn't be doing this yourself.
When a customer approaches us, we ask a few questions to understand what the current requirements, peak requirements and future requirements are for their store. Then we'll provide a recommendation on that basis.
Given we host thousands of Magento stores, we have a fairly solid understanding of exactly what infrastructure is required for a given set of customer requirements, so its pretty easy for us to give a recommendation (and prediction of exactly what resources will be used) when they actually go live.
The detail to note here is that whilst we can certainly tell you the requirements for our own infrastructure running MageStack - that almost certainly won't quite be the same as a set up elsewhere - so just bear that in mind.
Store and Catalogue
Traffic and Bandwidth
Hardware Requirements
Staging/Development Practice
Budget
Then using this information, send it to your hosting provider of choice and see what they recommend.
As a rule of thumb, it is possible to
First start by sizing up your traffic.
Using these numbers, you can work out exactly what you need in terms of CPU resource.
Eg. If you have 4,025 sustained unique visitors/day - you need 28GHz total CPU resource (ie. 8 Cores @ 3.5GHz, or 12 Cores @ 2.3GHz)
The other important detail is the speed of the CPU, it is possible to have:
For a standalone server (the best configuration for Magento), the rule here is 2GB RAM/CPU Core. So if you have 8 cores, then 16GB RAM should be the minimum.
To work out what you need in addition to this, you need to factor in the size of your catalogue. Doing this is easy, multiply your number of store views against the total catalogue size.
Eg. In your case, 1 store view * 10,000 products = 10,000
Our recommendation is,
<1,000 = 8GB RAM
<50,000 = 16GB RAM
<100,000 = 32GB RAM
<100,000 = 32GB RAM
<250,000 = 48GB RAM
<500,000 = 64GB RAM
<750,000 = 96GB RAM
>999,999 = 128GB RAM
You want to take the higher of the two numbers (ie. from the CPU Core:RAM ratio and catalogue requirements), or a sensible mix of the two.
Lets make something clear, for the average Magento store (ie. <50k unique visitors/day), Magento is not bound by I/O - SSDs will not make your Magento store faster; it won't improve concurrency and it won't improve TTFB. Similarly, using striped RAID levels (eg. RAID10) will also provide no advantage (as almost every file on disk is going to be smaller than the stripe size anyway, so only a single disk will be used).
The only time storage is a bottleneck is on contended services (ie. cloud/VPS).
However, there are certainly advantages to fast I/O beyond the store operation itself. With SSDs, file operations (eg. Git/SVN status, backup/restore, copying directories etc.) are substantially faster. Your developer's life will be substantially easier (with routine tasks being much quicker).
Also note that not all disk drives are created equal.
So be sure to actually pick disk drives that deserve to be in a server, Ie. the Intel DC S3700.
Picking capacity is easy, you just need two commands,
For the Magento document root
cd /path/to/magento/installation
du -hsL . \
--exclude="/var/log" \
--exclude="/var/session" \
--exclude="/var/cache" \
--exclude="/var/full_page_cache" \
--exclude="/var/report" \
--exclude="/var/tmp" \
--exclude="/includes/src/"
For the MySQL DB
SELECT
IFNULL(B.engine,'Total') "Storage Engine", CONCAT(LPAD(REPLACE(FORMAT(B.DSize/POWER(1024,pw),3),',',''),17,' '),' ',SUBSTR(' KMGTP',pw+1,1),'B') "Data Size", CONCAT(LPAD(REPLACE(FORMAT(B.ISize/POWER(1024,pw),3),',',''),17,' '),' ',SUBSTR(' KMGTP',pw+1,1),'B') "Index Size", CONCAT(LPAD(REPLACE(FORMAT(B.TSize/POWER(1024,pw),3),',',''),17,' '),' ',SUBSTR(' KMGTP',pw+1,1),'B') "Table Size" FROM (SELECT engine,SUM(data_length) DSize,SUM(index_length) ISize,SUM(data_length+index_length) TSize
FROM information_schema.tables
WHERE table_schema NOT IN ('mysql','information_schema','performance_schema')
AND engine IS NOT NULL
GROUP BY engine
WITH ROLLUP) B,(SELECT 3 pw) A
ORDER BY TSize;
.
Well that's up to you. I can't give a recommendation [although it would be obvious :)] - but you can certainly form your own opinion,
There's something to add here, you'll get two types of hosts
Which is most appropriate for you really depends on what your skillset is. In my honest opinion, developers are not system administrators - just because you can run apt-get install nginx - it doesn't make you an experienced sysadmin. Otherwise any store owner that could use Magento Connect could class themselves as a developer!
Understanding your role (and limitations) as a developer and letting someone with proper experience in managing the server has extreme value. Anyone can install a series of packages, but tuning the software configuration, ensuring it is stable, bug free, secure and high performance are a completely different thing.
I would only ever recommend the whole DIY route to people who have a massive amount of Magento server configuration experience, who have deployed thousands of servers before, with known tested and stable configurations. Otherwise, go with a managed Magento host that knows what they are doing and allow you to do your job uninterrupted.
Sources:
