Southfield, MI, April 8, 2013 – Hostdedi, a provider of optimized Magento hosting and Magento Platinum Hosting Partner, has published “Magento Hosting: Best Practices for Optimum Performance”, a free white paper that contains guidance and analysis regarding the best configuration of Magento Enterprise Edition and the applications it relies on.

Based on extensive testing, the white paper makes a number of suggestions for configuring Magento for optimum performance. Hostdedi found that Apache and Nginx, when configured properly, produce roughly equivalent performance, that full page caching with a Redis backend produces significant performance enhancements, and that using Varnish in front of the HTTP server with the Hostdedi-developed Turpentine plugin can increase transaction per second throughput by as much as 1,000%.

“Magento is very capable and relatively quick out of the box, but eCommerce requires the best possible performance; reduced performance leads directly to lost sales,” commented Chris Wells, President and CEO of Hostdedi, “This white paper, based on our long experience with Magento and careful empirical testing, sets the standard for highly performant Magento deployments.”

Hostdedi tested various configurations using one of their MCE-SIP-200 server clusters, which consists of a pair of application servers, a database server, a dedicated file server, a firewall, and a dedicated load balancer. Benchmarking was carried out with the open source HTTP-based benchmarking utility, Siege, and the Gatling stress tool.

The white paper presents the benchmark results of various configurations in order to determine the most performant combinations. Among the configurations considered in full are:

• Whether to use NFS or locally synced file storage.
• Which of Nginx or Apache produces the best performance and with which configurations.
• Whether MySQL or Percona are the best choice of database server and under which conditions each is appropriate.
• A comparison of an optimized standard Magento site and a Magento site optimized with the Varnish web application accelerator and the Hostdedi-developed Turpentine plugin.

Also discussed are the use of memcached, PHP-FPM, Redis, and Alternative PHP Cache. Additionally, the white paper contains extensive discussion of the Magento Enterprise Full Page Cache and the various other caching options Magento Enterprise offers.

“Magento Hosting: Best Practices for Optimum Performance” is available for free and can be downloaded from the Hostdedi website: https://www.nexcess.net/magento-best-practices-whitepaper

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About Hostdedi
Hostdedi is a Southfield, Michigan-based managed hosting company founded in 2000, with wholly owned data centers located in Dearborn, Michigan and Southfield, Michigan. Hostdedi offers a variety of hosting services ranging from entry-level packages to custom clustered/complex hosting configurations, with an emphasis on mission-critical hosting for high-profile eCommerce web sites. For more information, visit http://www.nexcess.net.