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All posts by Tom P

Whats the secret and why aren’t all Magento Hosts doing this?

Hosting

What is the secret?  It’s SUPPORT combined with a superior solution.  This sounds like something simple, doesn’t it?  Well, it is.  But it’s not just about advertising that message; it’s about walking the walk and doing the basics brilliantly.  Time and time again, we’ve interviewed developers and Magento store owners and listen to them talk about their hosting solution.  Its surprising to actually hear what they say:

“I have a hard time getting through to someone in support.”
“The support team has not gotten back to me with a solution.”
“They keep pointing the finger at my developers.”

This is why we do things differently.  If a developer needs to chat with us about Magento, they just pick up the phone and call without going through any automated prompts.  All calls are answered by a real person – and most likely, that person will be qualified to address any Magento question.  All Magento clients (and their developers) also have instant chat access to their own Magento Project Manager (this is in addition the the 24/7 support we provide).  Isn’t it nice when you call someone and they actually know who you are and know about your store?  Sure, it sounds like something basic but all too often companies that grow too fast or spend too much money in advertising have a hard time keeping up with the most important fundamental task – taking care of the customer.

Here is a message from one of clients (who happens to be a developer):

“In recent years our company was focused only on Magento development and speed optimization.  We’ve worked with many hosting companies and none of them were able to configure the server exactly as we needed it for our Magento clients.  Bad server configuration, overcharged dedicated servers and impossible to communicate with server admins seemed like a huge wall we hit every time we picked a hosting company for our clients.  That was until we met Tom Puchalski & eBoundHost.

Never before have we experienced such great support and admin help for Magento server configuration.  The way they configured servers for our clients was beyond our expectations.  Not only were they able to optimize the server, (speed things up, sometimes even 20 times faster) but also they installed cPanel with Varnish without any issues – other hosting companies told us each time that it is impossible.  These guys are Magento hosting experts but they are more than that!

They actually care for each single client and their business making sure the store runs at 100% capacity installing only SSD drives for Magento servers. I recommend eBoundHost to all Magento store owners.  Our Magento clients are more than happy after they switched to eBoundHost.  We are and you will be too.”

Jakub Winkler
CEO / Magento Ninja / PHP Developer
Q-Solutions Studio
www.qsolutionsstudio.com

Free Domain Registration – Black Friday Special

Hosting

Take advantage of the Black Friday / Cyber Monday freebie.
Free Domain Registration – no strings attached.

What makes this deal so great, you ask? Because it’s completely free. That’s right, not 50%, 60% or even 90% off. The domain name registration is completely and totally free for one year.  Just pick a .com, .net. .org (or almost any other TLD) domain, use this coupon: FDCMD2014 and register it at a 100% discount. Nothing to lose, a free domain to gain!  If you choose not to keep it registered past the first year, we won’t hold it against you.

Visit www.eBoundHost.com
Enter coupon code:  FDCMD2014

This deal is available 11/28/2014 through 12/5/2014.
Happy upcoming Holidays from all of us at eBoundHost.com!

Magento Site Speed Optimization Case Study on www.NBLtextiles.com

Case Study, Hosting

View video testimonial from NBLTextiles

The next site on our series of Magento site speed case studies is www.NBLtextiles.com.  We created a staging / development environment for making changes and configuring the site for optimum Magento site speed performance.  Working in a development environment is best practice as it takes the risk out of potentially ruining a live site due to any accidental misconfigurations.

We took a copy of the Magento speed test case study site from its live environment to the staging environment prior to starting our speed optimization process.  Once the speed configurations were successfully deployed in the staging environment, we launched them into the live environment seamlessly.

STEP 1.  Magento Site Speed Optimization Case Study Diagnosis
To properly diagnose the site, we need to understand its performance based on various speed parameters.  Based on several tests from GTmetrix, Pingdom, Google Page Insights, and Webpagetest to name a few, we discovered that the time to first byte for www.NBLtextiles.com was very high (between 4 to 12 seconds) and the pages took anywhere from 10 to 20 seconds to load.  Here is a product page that was taking over 18 seconds to load:


The site has several thousand products and hundreds of product configurations per item (color, size, etc.)  Each time a visitor views any product details page, the database needs to be accessed to pull all of the different configurations for the product.  This creates a bottleneck when a site of this nature is hosted in a shared environment with no specific Magento optimizations.

STEP 2.  Creating A Development Environment
Based on the specific results and website traffic patterns in our speed test analysis, we put the site on a Microcloud blade running Xeon E3-1230 V3 CPU, 16GB of RAM, with Samsung SSD hard drives in RAID 1.  Additionally, Nginx was added for static content serving to run along with Apache 2.2. Varnish was also installed and configured for super fast caching.  Here are the results once placed on an optimized Magento platform with eBoundHost:

The home page and details pages now load in under 2.8 seconds and the time to 1st byte is under 165 milliseconds. 

Product page results load 3.8 to 11.5 times faster with sub 147ms TTFB.

 

 A word from NBLtextiles.com:

http://youtu.be/hxXI39kNByY

Shell Shock Bash Bug – Fixed on eBoundHost Servers

Hosting

A major security flaw was discovered in Bash.  The Shell Shock vulnerability allows attackers to issue arbitrary commands via crafted environment variables.

There is a simple test that will show you if you’re vulnerable. Just run the following command within your shell:

env X=”() { :;} ; echo UPDATENOW” /bin/sh -c “echo test”

If you see the word “UPDATENOW” echoed back then your Bash version is vulnerable and you have to update.

All eBoundHost managed servers were patched just moments after the vulnerability was announced.  If you already have an account on our managed servers you don’t need to do anything.  If you have an unmanaged server with eBoundHost, please contact us and we can help you at no cost.  This vulnerability also affects other devices and not only web servers.  If you’re using Linux at home or in the office, you need to update Bash to the latest available stable version just to make sure that you’re not at risk.

Magento Site 2.7X Faster & TTFB 24X Faster – Brick-anew.com Case Study

Case Study, Hosting

Brick-anew.com is an example of a website that was hosted by a company that specializes in Magento and claims to offer optimized solutions.  The slow speed concern was brought to our attention through the chat feature on our website.  Brick-anew.com was brought back on the right track after going through a hosting transformation.  Let’s examine the steps our team took to optimize this server so that we can fully understand how we achieved great speed results for www.brick-anew.com.

STEP 1 – WEBSITE SPEED OPTIMIZATION CASE STUDY DIAGNOSIS
The site was running at a slower speed from a general perspective and we knew that some further scope for speed improvement was left open for us based on our technical perspective.  The site was diagnosed and analyzed to find out the limiting factors which were slowing down the websites performance.

Lets look at just 3 speed reports prior to the migration to an eBoundHost Magento Optimized Dedicated Server:

1.  Home Page – Old Host                      Load Time: 6.015s    Time To 1st Byte: 3.067s

before2
2.  Fireplace Doors Page – Old Host    Load Time: 5.407s    Time To 1st Byte: 2.271s

before1
3.  Brick Paint Page – Old Host            Load Time: 6.008s   Time To 1st Byte: 2.245s

before3

Initial Testing
We offered to benchmark the store on our platform prior to making any changes to the current site.  What this means is that we created a mirror copy of brick-anew.com and placed it on our server so that we could compare the 2 sites side by side.  Here are the initial results.  The test site loaded in only 3.8 seconds.

What eBoundHost Provided
We provided Brick-anew.com with a dedicated server, using hardware RAID-1 drives (SSD), 16 GB of RAM, and a top end Intel Quad Core e31230 v2@3.3GHz CPU.  RAID-1 was used for superior I/O (disk) performance, 16 GB of RAM was used for proper caching (MySQL).

The results were great, but as a group we decided to add Varnish & NginX to the equation and do some more optimizing.  The load times went down even further:

1.  Home Page, Optimized –                    Load Time: 2.222s    Time To 1st Byte: 0.125s


2.  Fireplace Doors Page, Optimized – Load Time: 2.542s    Time To 1st Byte: 0.139s


3.  Brick Paint Page, Optimized –          Load Time: 2.938s    Time To 1st Byte: 0.180s

 

CONCLUSION:
Thanks to properly configured Varnish cache, Nginx, and image optimizations www.brick-anew.com is now in the top 1% of fastest sites on the web.

Screen Shot 2014-06-20 at 11.55.28 AM

WEBSITE SPEED OPTIMIZATION CASE STUDY DETAILS
Website                                                               – Brick-anew.com
Original Web Host Server                               – Undisclosed For Privacy
Magento Optimized Host                                – eBoundHost
Site Speed Optimizer                                       – Jarett E.
Editor & Magento Success Manager              – Tom P.

 

Magento Page Load Time Improvement Case Study – omgbuyit.com

Case Study, Hosting

The Problem
Omgbuyit.com is an example of a website that was hosted by a company that specializes in Magento and claims to offer optimized solutions.  Omgbuyit would routinely see page load times that exceeded 14+ seconds.  The store has over 100,000 SKUs and concerns about using up too much RAM on the shared environments came to light.  Of course this lead to the ultimate question:  How many visitors were bouncing out of the site because it took too long to load?

Initial Testing
We offered to benchmark the store on our platform prior to making any changes to the current site.  What this means is that we created a mirror copy of Omgbuyit.com and placed it on our server so that we could compare the 2 sites side by side.  Here are the initial results:

 

What eBoundHost Provided
We provided Omgbuyit with a dedicated server, using hardware RAID-1 all SSD drives, 32 GB of RAM, and a top end Intel Quad Core e31230 v2@3.3GHz CPU.  RAID-1 all SSD was used for superior I/O (disk) performance, 32 GB of RAM was used for proper caching (MySQL).

The Results
We were able to reduce their page load times from 14+ seconds to under 7 seconds with proper use of caching and optimizations.  Time to 1st byte was reduced from 7.797 seconds to 0.399 seconds.

Here is a screenshot showing the old hosting 14+ second load time:


 

Here are the results after once hosted with us:

Screen Shot 2014-06-17 at 3.25.26 PM

 

CONCLUSION

Optimizing this case study website was not as easy as it looks like from the report above.
eBoundHost has done some super-tweaking to achieve high speed performance levels.

Using a Magento Optimized host like eBoundHost offers much more configuration and tweaking  flexibility to gain more speed on any Magento site.

Omgbuyit.com got their website page time to 1st byte reduced from 7.797s to 0.399s, which is almost 20 times faster.  The fully loaded website time was also reduced by 54% from: 14.046s to 6.471s.

WEBSITE SPEED OPTIMIZATION CASE STUDY DETAILS
Website                                                               – Omgbuyit.com
Original Web Host Server                               – Undisclosed For Privacy
Magento Optimized Host                                – eBoundHost
Site Speed Optimizer                                       – Jarett E.
Editor & Magento Success Manager              – Tom P.

 

A Proud Community Partner – Foundation Fighting Blindness

Hosting

Screen Shot 2014-06-02 at 4.28.54 PM

Over 10 Million Americans are affected by blinding retinal diseases.  The Foundation Fighting Blindness is working to find treatments and cures for these devastating diseases.  eBoundHost is proud to be part of this event.

Date: June 8, 2014
Location: Busse Woods, Grove #5
Elk Grove Village, IL.
click here for directions
Registration:  9:00 a.m.
Walk Start:  10:30 a.m.
Walk Chairs: Mark Falejczyk & Amy Hayes
Youth Chairs:  Nathan Hayes & Grace Nash
Family Chair:  Pat Archer
Medical Chair:  Dr. Ruth Williams
Wheaton Eye Clinic
Media Chair:  Maria Sellers

Site Speed Jackpot – 500 eCommerce Sites Tested

Hosting

500 eCommerce Sites Tested?
We came across an interesting post written by Ian Lurie, the Chairman and Principal Consultant at PI PORTENT.  Ian took the time to perform tests on 500 eCommerce sites.
What he discovered will open up your eyes to how much money you could be leaving on the table if you don’t pay attention to your performance metrics.

Opportunity
Like Ian, we preach about the benefits of having a faster site every day.  In fact, everywhere you look there are ads pitching the benefits of having a faster loading site.
It’s like you can’t get away from it, yet not many site owners / admins are doing anything about it.  What does that mean for you?  OPPORTUNITY.

What They Found

Over 50% of eCommerce sites tested had an average load time of 5+ seconds.

The biggest and easiest value jump is getting your site load time from 8 seconds down to 5 seconds as you will see in Ian’s graph.  The biggest revenue jump happens when you get your site to drop down to a 1 second load time from 2 seconds, but going from 8 to 5 seconds is easier and generates an 18% value/page view increase.

Software Adjustments
If you’re into the development side of maintaining your website, Ian goes into much more detail on minifying code, javascript timing, ETags, expired headers and image compression.  It will be worth your time to check out his post.

 Hardware Adjustments
We have performed a series of our own case studies and want to leave you with 6 observations:

1. Most developers / site owners realize that they can increase revenue by simply speeding up their page load times.

2. They run a series of speed tests through Google Insights or Webpagespeedtest and gather data.

3. They obtain detailed reports that show them how they can improve their page load times.

4. They focus their attention very heavily on coding / design while sometimes overlooking the performance of their server.

5. Those that understand their server plays a significant role in site speed start researching hosting platforms.

6. But they are hesitant to make a change with their hosting platform because they believe it is a monumental task, or they just don’t know who to trust.

Easy & Painless Solution
We took all of these variables into consideration while searching for an easy solution to take away the pain, so we created a live Magento hosting comparison tool. We have given these concerned individuals the opportunity to compare their current Magento site to a live mirror copy of itself on an optimized platform for free, just to take the fear factor away and show them what can happen when they get a tailored hosting plan that complements their specific site.

 

Let Your Magento Site Take A Free Test Drive (A Really Fast One)

Hosting

Recently eBoundHost introduced a new Magento performance testing tool that allows you to compare your Magento site to a live mirror copy of itself  on the FASTEST SSD optimized platform available.  Here is an example of a recent comparison test that was performed for DivineOptics.com.  As you will see, this Magento site loaded up 2.2X faster on our optimized platform.

DivineOptics Side-By-Side Results

To take a free 7 day test drive with your Magento site, use this link:
http://magento1.eboundhost.com/magento-performance-comparison/

Be careful, don’t drive too fast.

magentocar4

Magento Site Speed Case Study & Success Story – YunesSwathe.com

Case Study, Hosting

YunesSwathe.com is an example of a website that was hosted on a Non-Magento Optimized Platform.  The slow speed concern was brought to our attention via the Speed Test Request form on our website.  YunesSwathe.com was brought back on the right track after going through a hosting transformation.  Let’s take a detailed walk-through to understand what was done to optimize this Magento site for speed.

STEP 1 – WEBSITE SPEED OPTIMIZATION CASE STUDY DIAGNOSIS
The site was running at a slower speed from a general perspective and we knew that some further scope for speed improvement was left open for us based on our technical perspective.  The site was diagnosed and analyzed to find out the limiting factors which were slowing down the websites performance.

Lets look at the speed report prior to the migration to the eBoundHost Magento Optimized Cloud Platform:

First Byte Time – F
Keep-alive enabled – A
Compress Transfer – A
Compress Images – D
Progressive JPEGs -F
Cache static content -A
Effective use of CDN – X

As we can see here, this is a standard shared hosting server that is set up to cater to most php/mysql CMS (i.e. WordPress, Drupal, Magento, etc…) Kudos for setting keep alive to enabled and caching static content.  Of course it’s not enough to get the demanding Magento platform to load at a reasonable speed. That’s why we see a horrendous  2300ms TTFB here.

STEP 2 – TRANSFER WEBSITE TO MAGENTO OPTIMIZED PLATFORM
Through assisted migration, Yunesswathe.com was moved from a standard web-hosting platform to our Magento Optimized Cloud platform.

STEP 3 – LAUNCHING ON A PRE-CONFIGURED PLATFORM
Once website functionality and performance were carefully verified, A records were pointed and the site seamlessly switched over.  A new beginning for Yunesswathe.com.

RESULTS:
Let’s look at the new report after migration:


FACTOR                          BEFORE CHANGE          AFTER CHANGE            RESULT
First Byte Time                                F                                             A      GREATLY Improved
Keep-alive enabled                          A                                             A                              Neutral
Compress Transfer                          A                                             A                              Neutral
Compress Images                            D                                             F                           Needs Work
Progressive JPEGs                          F                                              F                              Neutral
Cache static content                        A                                              A                              Neutral
Effective use of CDN                       X                                              X                              Neutral

We have achieved substantial improvement in time to 1st byte and page load times.  CDN was not chosen by YunesSwathe.com’s Admin for this particular situation due to the geographical location of their target market.  Now the next step was to make sure that the developers for YunesSwathe.com were aware that they have the option to optimize their images for better performance.

Screen Shot 2014-04-18 at 4.22.37 PM


CONCLUSION

Optimizing this case study website was not as easy as it looks like from the report above.
eBoundHost has done some super-tweaking to achieve high speed performance levels.

Using a Magento Optimized host like eBoundHost offers much more configuration and tweaking  flexibility to gain more speed on any Magento site.

YunesSwathe.com got their website page time to 1st byte reduced from 2.229s to 0.161s, which is almost 14 times faster.  The fully loaded website time was also reduced by 57% from: 10.298s to 4.448s.

WEBSITE SPEED OPTIMIZATION CASE STUDY DETAILS
Website                                                               – YunesSwathe.com
Original Web Host Server                               – Undisclosed For Privacy
Magento Optimized Host                                – eBoundHost
Site Speed Optimizer                                       – Jerry T.
Editor & Magento Success Manager              – Tom P.

Heartbleed bug (OpenSSL) patched on eBoundHost Systems – CVE-2014-0160

Hosting

All eBoundHost managed systems vulnerable to (Heartbleed) were patched. This security vulnerability is widespread with multiple operating systems globally and not an eBoundHost-specific issue.  OpenSSL was upgraded seamlessly.  Here is the link for the official Heartbleed website for more details:  http://heartbleed.com/

magentoheartbleed

The online Heartbleed testers such as http://filippo.io/Heartbleed/ simply connect to the server and see if the heartbeat feature is enabled.  Some online checkers will still show systems as vulnerable because they can’t tell if you are running the patched version or not since there is no known PoC to test against.

View Magento Optimized Cloud Hosting Plans

Magento Site Speed Case Study & Success Story

Case Study, Hosting

Magento Website Speed Optimization Case Study – nursejamie.com

nursejamiesite

Nursejamie.com was an example of a website that was hosted on a Non-Magento Optimized Platform.  The slow speed concern was brought to our attention via the Speed Test Request form on our website.  Nursejamie.com was brought back on the right track after going through a hosting transformation.  Let’s take a detailed walk-through to understand what was done to optimize this Magento site for speed.

STEP 1 – WEBSITE SPEED OPTIMIZATION CASE STUDY DIAGNOSIS
The site was already running at a good speed from a general perspective, but we knew that some further scope for speed improvement was left open for us based on our technical perspective.  The site was diagnosed and analyzed to find out the limiting factors which were slowing down the websites performance.

Lets look at the speed report:

nursejamiebefore1First Byte Time – F
Keep-alive enabled – A
Compress Transfer – F
Compress Images – F
Progressive JPEGs -F
Cache static content -F
Effective use of CDN – Y

STEP 2 – TRANSFER WEBSITE TO MAGENTO OPTIMIZED PLATFORM
Through assisted migration, Nursejamie.com was moved from a standard web-hosting platform to our Magento Optimized Cloud platform.

STEP 3 – LAUNCHING ON A PRE-CONFIGURED PLATFORM
Once website functionality and performance were carefully verified, A records were pointed and the site seamlessly switched over.  A new beginning for Nursejamie.com.  No hiccups, just pure improvement.

RESULTS:
We checked the websites speed once again.

FACTOR                          BEFORE CHANGE          AFTER CHANGE            RESULT
First Byte Time                                F                                             B                            Improved
Keep-alive enabled                          A                                             A                              Neutral
Compress Transfer                          F                                             A                            Improved
Compress Images                             F                                             F                              Neutral
Progressive JPEGs                          F                                              F                              Neutral
Cache static content                        F                                              A                            Improved
Effective use of CDN                       Y                                              X                              Neutral

We have achieved substantial improvement in time to 1st byte, compress transfer and cache static content.  CDN was not chosen by Nursejamie.com’s Admin for this particular situation due to the geographical location of their target market.  Now the next step was to make sure that the developers for Nursejamie.com were aware that they have the option to optimize their images for better performance.

nursejamieafter1

eboundhosttest2


CONCLUSION

Optimizing this case study website was not as easy as it looks like from the report above.
eBoundHost has done some super-tweaking to achieve high speed performance levels.

Using a Magento Optimized host like eBoundHost offers much more configuration and tweaking  flexibility to gain more speed on any Magento site.

Nursejamie.com got their website page time to 1st byte reduced from 0.867s to 0.337s, an average of 62% improvement on a relative performance scale.  The fully loaded website time was also reduced from  5.100s to 2.233s, an improvement of 56%.

WEBSITE SPEED OPTIMIZATION CASE STUDY DETAILS
Website                                                               – Nursejamie.com
Original Web Host Server                               – Undisclosed For Privacy
Magento Optimized Host                                – eBoundHost
Site Speed Optimizer                                       – Denis Z.
Editor & Magento Success Manager              – Tom P.

How Load Time Affects Your Website And Bottom Line

Hosting

We’ve been noticing that many internet users are becoming more and more impatient when it comes to finding what they want online in a timely manner.  Remember the sound that your 14.4k modem made back in the day and how long it used to take you just to connect to the web?  Think about how far we’ve come since then.  The new reality now is that the average person has a device in their pocket that has more power than a state of the art computer from 1997.  I remember having to wait about 5 seconds for a picture to appear online; but at the time it was perfectly acceptable.  Think about what you would do if your smartphone took 5 seconds to load a picture now….  Not a fun thought.  You wouldn’t go to McDonalds and order a BigMac just to wait 20 minutes to get it, would you?  Absolutely not.  And neither would 90% of the population…

shutterstock_58335922
So, why is it so important to understand the average consumer browsing the web today?  Well, if you’re a business owner, the lack of that knowledge can hurt your bottom line.  Every second counts.  Long loading time is a major reason why some people abandon websites.  The longer it takes a website to load, the more likely the consumer will leave and go to a different website.  Even if you have the best product, the best service and the best price…. does it really matter?  No.  Not if the the end user decides your information takes way too long to show up on their screen.  Think about it.  Your online presence may be your 1st impression to that customer, and we all know how important that 1st impression is.

shutterstock_162886037

Lets put our “Store Owner Shoes” on for a moment.  You own a large “Green Widget” company.  On average, your “Green Widget” eCommerce site generates $10,000 in revenue per day.  If you learned that you could add an extra $20,000 to your top line every month without any dramatic changes, would you want to know more?  Lets talk about how this is happening to many businesses all over.  I’ll share the data with you and break down the math.

About half of consumers expect a website to load in 2 seconds or less.  Your “Green Widget” site takes 4 seconds to load.  How many customers do you think you lost before they even gave you a chance?  Decreasing the load time of your site by even 1 second will generate an extra $20,000 per month in sales.  Every second shaved off your load time results in a 7% increase in conversions.  There it is – nice and easy.  No boring SEO book to read, no advertising seminars to attend, no expensive consultants to hire….none of that.

So how can you decrease the load time of a Magento eCommerce Storefront?  The answer is simple.  Use our Magento speed test form and we’ll tell you how to improve it.

Here a few questions to review with your developer or host:

1.  How many other domains will I be sharing a server with?
2.  Is the SSL Certificate included?
3.  Is your host / data center PCI compliant?
4.  Is your hosting provider offering SSD (solid state drive) technology throughout the entire platform? (no spinning disks)
5.  So you are running an open source eCommerce platform. Is your host on top of its security vulnerabilities?
6.  What are your current time to 1st byte expectations for my site?
7.  Does your current host specialize in Magento specific solutions & is migration free?
8.  How long will it take you to get an accurate & competitive quote while researching?
(Without picking up the phone and potentially running into sales pressure.)
9.  Does your host offer 24/7 support?
10. Will they answer your phone call in under 10 seconds or do you have to go through a long automated process?
11.  What do those online reviews look like?

Lastly, remember the RULE OF 7.   –  A 1 second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in eCommerce conversions.




Just a moment...
Just a moment...