Scaling Magento With Hardware – Dedicated Servers

This morning, I spoke with a customer who wants to prepare their environment for the upcoming holiday season.  Their Magento site is becoming an unexpected success story, growing by leaps and bounds, so they need a more robust hosting environment to keep up with their growth.  They were concerned about the difficulty of scaling on “bare metal” (meaning not-in-the-cloud) dedicated servers.

eBoundHost can seamlessly “scale up” your environment to prepare for holiday traffic and then back down again after the holidays are over.

The Amazon marketing team did a great job of putting out the message that you can only scale on AWS but it’s simply not true.  No matter where you host the same work has to be done to size, test, integrate and maintain the environment.  All of this work still has to be done on a public cloud and you would have to do it yourself. Its even easier to scale on the JetRails® platform because our engineers handle the entire process, you pick up the phone and we take care of it all.

Additionally, bare metal environment performs much better than comparable cloud packages because there is a virtualization penalty and time-share restrictions for CPU, RAM and disk I/O in the cloud.  With bare metal all the resources are fully yours, available at any time.

Dedicated hardware resources are less expensive to operate than a cloud environment.  In order to account for the uneven usage of the cloud, AWS deployments are typically 2-3 times more expensive than comparable bare metal servers.  There is simply no magic, the cloud is just servers in someone’s data center.

Expert help is always available.  If you have more questions about scaling for holiday traffic, call us (800) 554-9990.

Tom P September 21, 2016