When other hosting companies say they're optimized for Magento, what they really mean is, "Yes, we meet the system requirements for Magento."
It's a term that is thrown around a lot, but none of them are truly providing a hosting environment specifically geared towards Magento.
We're the exception to the rule. We've been working with Magento since it was in beta, and our experience with the application itself, the community, and Varien, has led us to an ideal hosting environment meant for running Magento.
While we can't share all the things we do, here are a few of the key features that make up an optimized Magento hosting environment:
Hardware
Split-Shared
- Dual Processor, Quad Core Intel® Xeon Harpertown 3.0 GHz
- 32 GB fully buffered DDR-2 RAM
- Seagate® Cheetah 15K.5 hard drives
- RAID 1+0 disk array
- 1000 Mbps uplink speed via SoftLayer data center
- Adaptec ABM-800 battery backup module
- Dual power supplies with independent power sources
Split-Dedicated
- Dual Processor, Quad Core Intel® Xeon Nehalem 2.93 GHz
- Intel® Turbo Boost Technology
- Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology
- Intel® Virtualization Technology
- 36 GB fully buffered DDR-3 RAM
- Seagate® Cheetah 15K.5 hard drives
- RAID 1+0 disk array
- 1000 Mbps uplink speed via SoftLayer data center
- Adaptec ABM-800 battery backup module
- Dual power supplies with independent power sources
Web Server
- LiteSpeed Enterprise web server
- Smart KeepAlives
- Static and dynamic output compression
- eAccelerator for PHP opcode caching
MySQL
- MySQL query caching
- InnoDB performance tuning
- Local, unshared MySQL database server
Security
- Unneccessary services and ports are disabled
- ConfigServer Security & Firewall
- Weekly and monthly security audits
- Secured PHP configuration
- PHP hardening using Suhosin
- PCI compliant hosting environment
Hosting Evolved
Besides configuration changes, the very foundation of our hosting products are completely different than traditional hosting environments.
The container concept allows us to isolate a set number of users per container, which means you don't have to share and compete for services like HTTP, MySQL, and PHP with 500-1000+ other users.