With Rackspace, you are in the hands of a proven Magento hosting partner that has helped more than 1,000 customers globally, ranging from SMBs to Fortune 500 companies. According to a study from ecommerce publishing authority Internet Retailer, Rackspace is currently ranked the No. 1 hosting provider for the Internet Retailer Top 1,000 websites. Rackspace now hosts a greater percentage of the world’s Magento deployments than any other hosting provider. In order to support you even better, Rackspace today has entered into the Magento Hosting Partner program as a platinum level partner.

Magento delivers its best performance on optimized infrastructure. Rackspace ecommerce Hosting Solutions for Magento provide an infrastructure designed to meet Magento’s platform requirements so you can enjoy following benefits:

1. 100 percent uptime: When your website is your cash register, it has to be open for business—always. This solution can guarantee 100 percent production uptime, provided a recommended topology is deployed.
2. Faster page load time: Loading ecommerce web pages within two seconds, even during peak load times, is an industry norm. This solution supports faster loading web pages.
3. Security of sensitive data: eCommerce sites require very secure infrastructure for managing sensitive data, including credit card information. This solution can help you with your PCI compliance needs by providing PCI compliant dedicated infrastructure and third-party payment gateways for cloud infrastructure.
4. Scalability: The ability to handle sudden and/or seasonal spikes on-demand, especially during the holiday season, is among the most important requirements of your online store. This solution is tailored to accommodate traffic spikes and fluctuations, so the infrastructure feels virtually unlimited.

Anna Carlqvist, a global ecommerce manager at GANT Clothing in UK said, “Within three months of launching the new site built on the Magento platform, GANT’s online orders went up 340 percent. We also saw a 290 percent increase in conversion rates and 35 percent reduction in page load time. Thanks to the infinite scalability of the Rackspace Open Cloud, GANT can scale servers up and down to meet customer needs whilst only paying for what we actually use. This has lead to a 50 percent reduction in hosting costs.”

We used our deep expertise of Magento deployments to launch four new reference architectures that empower you to build word-class ecommerce websites. The architectures marry Magento’s ecommerce platform with industry leading hosting infrastructure from Rackspace. These reference architectures offer you choice in how you want to build your online store and are available in four different levels: Basic, Intermediate, Advanced and Premier. Here, we will explore various design options and the Rackspace products used to build these solutions.

Factors That Influence Solution Design

Various factors influence your choice of hardware for your online ecommerce store. Some of the most important factors to consider include:

1. Which Magento Edition Is Right For You?
You can choose between Magento Community and Magento Enterprise to develop your solution.

How to decide which edition is right for you?
The following URL provides side by side comparisons of Magento Community, Enterprise and Go editions and can help you to make decision:

Comparison of Magento Editions

2. Where To Store Credit Card Data And How To Transmit It
The next important factors to consider are where you want to store credit card data and how you transmit it

Options available for storage
You can store credit card data in a Rackspace data center or use a third-party payment gateway to store credit card information using APIs. You can transmit data either from the server side using APIs or from the client browser before reaching your server.

How do you decide which option is right for you?
One way to determine which option is right for your business is to compare the cost of using a third-party payment gateway with the cost of storing credit card information in a data center. If you process a smaller number of credit card transactions, you might find that using a third-party payment gateway is more economical and the best option, provided it fits within your company policies. If credit card transaction volume is very high, you may find it more cost-efficient to store credit card information in a Rackspace data center and undergo PCI compliance audits. Your company policies and credit card transaction volume, along with other factors not discussed here, can help determine where to store credit card data.

When you choose to transmit credit card information from the server side using APIs, your server infrastructure becomes part of PCI compliance. On the other side, using APIs from client browsers, excludes your server infrastructure from scope of PCI compliance.

3. Max Number Of Concurrent Users
This is the number of customers that can log into your online store simultaneously and place orders without encountering issues related to resource allocation. This is an important consideration when choosing a reference architecture. We recommend designing your system for 1.5 times the peak load that you anticipate in your day to day transactions.

In addition to the factors discussed above, the following business parameters will also influence your reference architecture design choices:

• Size of catalog
• Average browsing time per user, (ie. five minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes)
• Average and peak visitors per day
• Average orders per day
• Peak orders per hour and per day
• Peak orders per hour and per day during the holiday season
• Number of concurrent users on the Admin Panel
• Amount of SKUs/product records in catalog
• Amount of categories

As a rule of thumb, please remember that the number of concurrent users and transactions help to size web servers, and the number of SKUs for sale on the website helps to size the database server.

For more information on how to tune your environment for optimal performance, please contact our Magento Partner Manager at RJ.Rowntree@rackspace.com.

Related Blogs

1) Rackspace Sponsors 2013 Magento Imagine eCommerce Conference
http://www.rackspace.com/blog/rackspace-sponsors-2013-magento-imagine-conference/

2) Sync Your Magento eCommerce Site To Cloud Files And The Akamai CDN
http://www.rackspace.com/blog/easily-sync-server-files-to-the-cloud/

3) eCommerce And Hosting – A Match Made In Internet Heaven
http://www.rackspace.com/blog/ecommerce-and-hosting-a-match-made-in-internet-heaven/

4) Why Rackspace Is The No. 1 Hosting Provider For The Top 1,000 E-Retailers
http://www.rackspace.com/blog/why-rackspace-is-the-no-1-hosting-provider-for-the-top-1000-e-retailers/

Based on the knowledge and expertise we’ve gained serving some of the top retailers in the US, we’ve launched four new reference architectures for eCommerce solutions. These reference architectures offer you a choice in how you build your online store and are available in for four different levels: Cost-effective, Intermediate, Advanced and Premier. These architectures provide retailers solutions templates for building online stores. Here, we will explore various design options and the Rackspace products that are used in building these solution templates. This blog post will be followed by a series of blogs that will provide detail information about each of these reference architectures.

Use Cases
There are numerous possible use cases for our new reference architectures. We’ve identified the main two as:

• Hosting online eCommerce store on a secure, highly available infrastructure that supports faster loading of web pages
• Supporting bursting capability for handing load spikes generated during holiday peaks

Factors To Consider
There are several factors that can influence your choice of a reference architecture. We have identified these as the main ones:

1. Storage of credit card data

The first important factor that dictates choice of a reference architecture is where you want to store credit card data.

Options available for storage
You can either store credit card data in a Rackspace data center or use a third party payment gateway to store credit card information.

How do you decide which option is right for you?
A rule of thumb that will influence this decision is a comparison of costs associated with using a third-party payment gateway and costs associated with storing credit card information in data center.  If you process a smaller number of credit card transactions, you might find that using a third party payment gateway is economical and the best option, provided if it fits within your company policy. If credit card transaction volume is very high, you may find it economical to store credit card information in a Rackspace data center and undergo PCI compliance audits. Your company policy and credit card transactions volume can help determine how you choose to store credit card data.

2. Catalog display logic and shopping cart logic

Typically, catalog display logic translates to the “web” layer and shopping cart logic translates to the “app” layer.

Options available for design
If you keep catalog display logic and shopping cart logic together on the same server, that is called a two-tier architecture. The first tier is composed of a combined web and app tier. The second tier is composed of a database layer. If you choose to keep catalog display logic and shopping cart logic on different servers, that is a three-tier architecture. The web layer is the first tier, the app layer is the second and the database layer is the third.

How to choose between a two-tier or a three-tier architecture?
Based on our experience, we find our customers typically start with a two-tier architecture. As business grows, they start separating two layers so that each tier can scale independently.  Your scaling needs for catalog display and shopping cart will help you decide between a two-tier and a three-tier reference architecture.

Available Rackspace products
Your display logic and shopping cart logic can either run on Cloud Servers or Dedicated servers.

With Cloud Servers, you can get powerful Linux and Windows servers in minutes. Cloud Servers is both persistent and highly elastic. You get the best of both worlds since it looks and feels like a traditional server but is on-demand in the cloud.

Dedicated servers, on the other hand, provide a single-tenant environment for your exclusive usage.

How to choose between Cloud Servers and Dedicated servers?
A rule of thumb is to choose a Cloud Server whenever possible. However, there are certain situations those warrant a Dedicated server. If you want to store credit card data in a Rackspace data center, you have to use a Dedicated server. If you prefer a single-tenant environment, as dictated by your company policy, then you also have to use a Dedicated server.

3. Database storage

The way you store data and retrieve data significantly impacts time it takes to complete online transactions.

Options available for database technology
At Rackspace, we provide you three choices for database technology:

1. You can use Cloud Databases, the high performance MySQL database on the cloud. The Cloud Databases architecture is built for high and consistent performance, with container-based virtualization instead of traditional hardware virtualization, high performance SAN storage and a dedicated storage network.
2. The second choice is a database installed on a Cloud Server connected to Cloud Block Storage. You can enhance the network security of your Cloud Servers by running your shopping cart and database servers on an isolated Cloud Network to filter illegitimate traffic from catalog display. Cloud Block Storage attached to a Cloud Server can provide extra space that your database will require. Using Cloud Block Storage you can get dependable performance for your I/O-intensive applications. Cloud Networks provides customers with the ability to create isolated, layer 2 (L2) networks within the cloud. With the click of a button, you can now create software-defined networks that look like traditional networks in both architecture and function.
3. The third choice is running a database of your choice on a Dedicated server.

Which database technology option is the best for you?
The type of database and volume of I/O transactions will dictate which database technology is right for you.  Cloud Databases is the best option if you want to use a MySQL database and want Rackspace to manage it for you. If you want to use a database of your choice that supports virtual environments then you can run your own database on Cloud Server. If your database of choice doesn’t support virtualization, or for the highest I/O performance, we recommend running your database on a Dedicated server.  It is difficult to quantify I/O criterion, as it greatly depends on your application logic and varies from environment to environment.

The following flow chart (click to enlarge) summarizes how your business requirements dictate your final choice of the reference architecture:

Stay tuned for the next blog post, in which we will explore the cost-effective reference architecture and its components in greater depth.

But, with product launches, page updates and marketing campaigns, it can be easy to lose sight of the true impact website performance can have on shopping cart conversions.

Did you know that 40 percent of people abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load?  And, a one second delay in page load results in 7 percent fewer conversions?  (Check out the ecommerce infographic below to see other interesting stats on how people interact online with shopping carts.)

When looking at your ecommerce website hosting solution, it is imperative to consider the availability, performance and security of your shopping cart.  There are numerous architecture options available to help with this – it’s just a matter of talking through which solution best meets your online business needs.

Rackspace is the No. 1 hosting provider to top 1,000 retailers in the US, according to Internet Retailer’s newsletter “Introducing the Top Vendors to the Top 1,000.”  Rackspace is also the top hosting provider for Internet Retailer’s Hot 100. According to Internet Retailer, we support 11 of the hottest ecommerce sites in the US, more than any other hosting provider!  We are leading in this market, and our customers and partners turn to us when they need a trusted hosting partner.

So what does Rackspace have that puts it atop these two significant lists?

Our customers told us one thing that sets us apart is our broad product portfolio, which includes dedicated hosting, public cloud, private cloud and hybrid cloud. Our product portfolio gives our customers the flexibility to chose the right solution for any given business problem.

Our customers also value that we back our product portfolio with word-class services and support. Rackspace provides Fanatical Support – from help making strategic decisions to debugging production issues. Our solution architects share best practices around performance optimization and security; Rackspace Advisory Services helps our customers experience a seamless journey to the cloud; and Rackspace Critical Application Services guarantees 100 percent production platform uptime, provided a recommended architecture is deployed.

Rackspace has alliances with many customers and partners within the ecommerce and retail ecosystems and we have proven experience in advising on and hosting infrastructure that runs ecommerce applications like Magento, Oracle Commerce, hybris and IBM Websphere Commerce. Our network of partnerships with ecommerce platforms, integrators and members of the ecommerce ecosystem makes it easy to get end-to-end support for overall solutions that include multiple products from various vendors.

Our customers added that with Rackspace they feel they are in good hands and have signed on with a true hosting leader, which was validated when Gartner positioned Rackspace as a leader in its Magic Quadrant for Managed Hosting based on the completeness of our vision and our ability to execute.

Finally our customers said they experience high availability and faster page load times for their online stores, which eventually translates into higher customer loyalty and higher conversion rates.

Greg Selkoe, CEO of Karmaloop.com, a Rackspace customer that ranks No. 138 on Internet Retailer’s 2012 Top 1,000 web retailers, said, “The hosting company holds our heart in their hands. They can shut it down any time if they make any mistake. We need to know that our heart surgeon is the best in the world and the person is going to keep us running and healthy all the time. We feel very confident with Rackspace Hosting in giving our heart – our entire online store – in their hands.”

As a part of our focused effort for ecommerce solutions in 2013, we plan to launch Rackspace Solutions for eCommerce this week. As part of the launch, we will release four new reference architectures for ecommerce solutions. Stay tuned for a series of blog posts that will provide more information about these new reference architectures.

We look forward to becoming your trusted hosting provider, and we wish you all a happy and successful 2013.