Layered Performance
To host any complex application well, you have to understand how it works; so it helps we have hosted Magento since its infancy. In 2008, Sonassi made a decision and switched to be a Magento-only agency, so since then we have tweaked, fine tuned and analysed every aspect of our servers. We've gathered a wealth of understanding of what Magento really needs to run well.
Several months of testing, benchmarking and years of hosting Magento stores has all contributed to how we have set up our equipment today; it is this distinction that separates Magento compatible hosting from our truly Magento optimised hosting. We have even shown our dedication to true Magento performance through MageBenchmark.
sonassi's Magento hosting school
Let's take the opportunity to clear up some common Magento misconceptions.
- Litespeed/Nginx/Lighttpd perform better than Apache
- SSDs will perform better
- Full page caching is necessary for good performance
- Shared hosting is insecure
Our dedicated to Magento holds true and is clearly identifiable by all our websites running on the Magento/Zend framework from sonassi.com, sonassihosting.com and even our control panel at theclientarea.info. Ultimately, if you are looking for a professional and experienced Magento host - you've found it with sonassi hosting!
the layers
We hand picked the components that would deliver nothing short of excellent Magento performance and unparalleled Magento stability after testing multitudes of hardware and software configurations. Hopefully you know understand how a cluster is put together, if not, read about the Magento cluster.
The key to our network is layered performance, with independent servers fulfilling their role to instantly allow your store to scale on demand.
The layers help manage and distribute load whilst isolate equipment and applications from each other.
- Layer 1 is the firewall, it closes all non-essential ports and secures your web environment.
- Layer 2 is the Load balancer, it accepts a request and intelligently decides what node should be allocated ('/admin' => admin node, '/*' => any available node)
- Layer 3 and 4 are delivery nodes, static content (css/js/images etc.) are served from powerful lightweight nodes allowing all PHP processing to be carried out by dedicated dynamic nodes
- Layer 5 is the MySQL database, only the dynamic nodes on the internal network can interact with this system - protecting your data from the world!
By having multiple individual elements, we can instantly scale if you experience traffic spikes (usually a result of appearing on digg or stumble upon), your site will remain both on-line and serving content at high performance!
intelligent load balancing
The load balancer is a layer 7 network device, which means it can intelligently decide what node should be responsible for the request. This is ideal as Magento has two very different types of demands, front-end requests and back-end requests. A customer using the front-end needs quick load load times and a fast browsing experience, whereas a site administrator using the back-end not only requires fast load times, but the ability to run PHP processes for extended periods of time - such as product imports, exports or mass attribute manipulation. This allows us to dedicate /admin (slash-admin) requests to nodes with specific PHP configurations, CPUs with greater clock speeds (as PHP is not mutli-threaded) and additional RAM.
In addition, slash-admin nodes also feature advanced access control which can be defined in your control panel at theclientarea.info, locking down admin requests to specific IP addresses or users, keeping security at an absolute maximum.