Magento, the all singing, all dancing ecommerce system that’s heads and shoulders above everything else. It has more features than a Swiss army knife, and best of all, it’s open source and completely free to use!
Mosso is Rackspace’s cloud computing service, it promises to be somewhere between a VPS (Virtual Private Server) and a dedicated server - it’s scalable, dependable, and above all, fully managed and supported like Rackspace’s excellent support.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that the 2 Ms would be a as sweet as chocolate, but you’d be wrong like I was wrong.
Having tested Magento on WebFusion’s VPS, it was unacceptably slow, during peak times it would take 15 seconds to load the page on a fast broadband connection. The problem (probably) is that Magento uses a lot of CPU resources. It does a lot of database queries and reads and writes many files on each request. The caching system helps substantially but on a shared server, it’s still too slow for practical use. Imagine if just a handful of people installed a copy of Magento on their VPS - the server would come to a halt pretty quickly.
In theory, using cloud computing with it’s unlimited resources should speed Magento up exponentially, in reality however, the reverse is true. During peak time, most requests timed out, and the ones that do make it through takes more time than making tea.
Was the problem to do with Mosso? or can it be said of all cloud computing in general? I wont be answering that any time soon, I’m sticking to the ground for as long as I can.
So the only real solution for Magento is a dedicated server, which considering, is not too expensive if you are prepared to get your hands dirty. For the same price as a Mosso installation, you can get a basic dedicated server at EasySpace, and believe you me, Magento is very usable!
So click my EasySpace banner yo!
