VPS

kylelnsn wrote:Unmanaged possibly.

The specification I am struggling to nail down what size we need.

yodapt wrote:1 core is enough, and 512Mb ram are enough too. Really most VPS out there would be enought to run OC, the thing is what kinf of traffic you expect, that will influence the performance of OC more than it's resources.

• Steadily working on products and things will increase your OC load by about double, especially in a team environment. So keep that in mind....its one thing to run the catalog side, but it takes more resources to run the admin side too.
• Traffic/bot gains from SEO, promotions, etc can crash your server if there is no extra overhead. Its generally a bad idea to get the VPS that is barely capable of running your realm. Asking for trouble if its too small...you need headroom for spikes, or at the least, larger OS jobs such as cPanel updates.
• If you ever need to regen your image cache it will timeout pretty much everyone and fault out your requests due to capped virtual mem and limited entry processes. There is a possibility of massive CPU load when clearing normal caches (if your DB is not optimized and/or speeder bots like MSN are hitting).
• First byte time matters -- if your server is struggling to make a connection happen due to resource limit, google will notice. This is why Pagespeed has the first byte clauses.
• With a little server, if you have a large /home and try to backup, gZip will eat all resources and server fault more folks...perhaps nightly if its automated. A simple SQL dump may cause timeouts on frontend.
• Clamd will eat your precious resources if you run it as a daemon on such a small fry. This is true for other services too such as management panels, monitoring, etc. Might not seem like alot but when you add them all together you may find a surprising chunk used.
• If you try to make a product with large options, try to show too many list items, or other trivial things, the server will creep and possibly, again, timeout the frontend due to EP holdup.
• Also keep in mind you need ram and CPU to actually run the VPS. Although VPS nor OC need much CPU, your DB will be hammering it nonstop under steady traffic. If too much is taken from your OS, the VPS will creep. If too much is taken from OC, timeouts will occur.
• You can assume 40% CPU used for DB alone. If the DB->OC is not optimized and you have many cats and things, it can average as high as 90% CPU. If you do not have enough CPU overhead, your server will encounter "MySQL has gone away" style timeouts which affect the frontend.
• OS matters -- You will be managing the software yourself. Many folks like Ubuntu, but CentOS is significantly more powerful, supported, stable, backed, LTS, and can use cPanel/WHM. Choosing Ubuntu will compound your headaches and force you to be totally DIY, choosing CentOS will make your VPS easier to manage because its the industry standard and millions more people use it. Using the standard tools will decrease your liability of breaking something and lessen the need to use SSH if you are uncomfortable with it.
• SSD doesnt really matter much. The only time OC needs significant I/O is when you are uploading an image or a file. Otherwise it is a negligible difference in render time. Save $$ and go for non-SSD VPS if they have it (you can usually get more CPU/RAM this way). Customers will never really feel the difference in I/O speed either way....but they will very much notice a difference in power.
• 512mb ram may 500 error your feeds on a bigger store unless you have feed/sitemap caching (which isnt in stock OC). Bots often hit 2-3 times for a sitemap resulting in too muchr ram+CPU used and real people might not be able to connect till its generated. This is also a means for any joe to use the F5 to EP-DDoS the heck out of you causing 100% faults. See code below, 4 requests ate 270mb ram and 6 continuous minutes of script time, meaning your 512mb server would have faulted out for 6 mins:

@Store 03-26-2015 07:22:56 PM Example Store Sitemap was generated via IP 65.55.213.242 [msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)] Memory: 67.5MB Time: 92.66 Sec
@Store 03-26-2015 07:22:56 PM Example Store Sitemap was generated via IP 65.55.213.242 [msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)] Memory: 67.25MB Time: 92.75 Sec
@Store 03-26-2015 07:23:30 PM Example Store Sitemap was generated via IP 65.55.213.192 [msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)] Memory: 67.25MB Time: 92.8 Sec
@Store 03-26-2015 07:23:30 PM Example Store Sitemap was generated via IP 65.55.213.192 [msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)] Memory: 68MB Time: 92.78 Sec

@Store 03-28-2015 01:28:02 AM Example Store Sitemap was generated via IP 65.55.213.242 [msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)] Memory: 68.25MB Time: 77.47 Sec
@Store 03-28-2015 01:28:02 AM Example Store Sitemap was generated via IP 65.55.213.241 [msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)] Memory: 68.5MB Time: 60.82 Sec
@Store 03-28-2015 01:28:30 AM Example Store Sitemap was generated via IP 65.55.213.242 [msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)] Memory: 68.25MB Time: 57.26 Sec
@Store 03-28-2015 01:28:30 AM Example Store Sitemap was generated via IP 65.55.213.241 [msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)] Memory: 68.25MB Time: 73.3 Sec

@Store 03-29-2015 06:07:28 AM Example Store Sitemap was generated via IP 65.55.213.241 [msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)] Memory: 68.5MB Time: 87.5 Sec
@Store 03-29-2015 06:07:28 AM Example Store Sitemap was generated via IP 65.55.213.241 [msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)] Memory: 68.25MB Time: 87.7 Sec
@Store 03-29-2015 06:07:54 AM Example Store Sitemap was generated via IP 65.55.213.242 [msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)] Memory: 68.25MB Time: 83.71 Sec
@Store 03-29-2015 06:07:54 AM Example Store Sitemap was generated via IP 65.55.213.242 [msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)] Memory: 68.25MB Time: 83.69 Sec