Today’s cloud hosting market has never been more competitive. Cloud hosting customers expect cutting edge performance and rock solid stability for their websites, while at the same time expecting low cost solutions. The technical demands of cloud hosting are constantly changing as well as customers demand greater control over their customization options, and new competitors to the market are able to quickly provide the newest technologies and often therefore overshadowing older more established players in the hosting market who are tied to their old hardware and software through contractual agreements and migration complexities.
For companies looking to set up a cloud hosting environment for their own private cloud or to compete in the public cloud, there are several options to choose from amongst new technology vendors. Two particularly good products that can be combined to create a cutting edge cloud hosting environment are Cloud Linux and Magento eCommerce.
CloudLinux
CloudLinux is a new Linux kernel that is designed especially for demanding virtual hosting environments. With CloudLinux, even the most demanding customers can be hosted without the fear of compromising the other customers in the same virtual hosting platform. CloudLinux is designed on a state of the art architecture that allows individual tenants hosted in your servers to live in their own isolated lightweight virtualized environment (LVE). Each virtualized environment can be configured with their own predetermined resource allocation that can be ratcheted up or down as the customer desires. Each virtual environment is guaranteed to be isolated in their own resource pool, so no matter what traffic surge or unexpected CPU or memory requirements a particular customer generates, it will not spill over into your other customers resource pools. This allows for an unprecedented amount of stability in a Linux cloud hosting solution.
Magento
Released in 2008, Magento is a full functioning ecommerce solution for small to medium sized businesses. Built on the popular Zend Framework in PHP 5, it utilizes the Entity Attribute Value database model in order to scale to the demanding data needs of contemporary social networking environments. Since 2008, Magento has had 4 million downloads and is now wholly owned by eBay.
Magento has a strong customer management suite that allows for search engine optimization and product recommendation tools along with tagging and rating features. Configuration tools allow administrators to quickly set up a powerful retail presence complete with shopping cart, multiple payments and shipping options, layered navigation and customer assisted shopping. Brand management capabilities include a reward point system, wish lists, gift cards and gift registries. The flexible data model allows highly scalable product catalog and visitor lists with quick search queries.
CloudLinux and Magento
The Magento Enterprise ecommerce platform can be installed for each of your customers in your cloud hosting solution utilizing CloudLinux Lightweight Virtual Environments. Since each virtual environment is guaranteed to be isolated from the other environments, cloud hosting providers can provide unique customizable Magento environments to each of its customers looking to utilize their own unique environment.
Hosting Requirements
Magento can run on a fairly light hardware profile for a good number of monthly sales. For a modest ecommerce site with about 1000 orders per month, the application should perform well with a dedicated 2.2 GHz dual core processor, 4GB of RAM and a 250 GB hard drive. From a server administration perspective, the cPanel administration console is a great tool for administrators to manage each of the virtual environments running on the CloudLinux kernel. Running a dual server hosting environment is typical, but offsite disaster recovery is also an important consideration when building out any data center.
Author Bio: This post is shared by Jason Phillips. He is well versed in many different areas, including social media, magento hosting and technology. He is a workaholic and always keeps himself busy in one thing or the other.
