reverse proxy and caching for a website

Question

I come from Europe and in my country there are really expensive webservers, so i have my VPS server in the USA. Now i need on one hand a website with local IP and on other hand fast webserver. So i am paying 90$ in the USA for 2gb/4gb ram VPS, prices in our country for 1gb VPS are around 100-150$ and their help support and constant performance are questionable.

So i was thinking i would implement reverse proxy for a website that i need a local IP for. I can buy VPS with 256mb of ram for 30$ or 512mb for 50$ here.

I was reading a lot about Varnish web cache and i still do not know how much ram i would need for running it. I need it for a magento web store with 300-400 products in it and also for custom webstore that is constantly using APIs to get product list from other websites. Both websites will have to manage few thousand visitors per day.

So i have come to 2 solutions and now i do not know which one would be better. 1. set varnish web cache on my faster USA VPS and set only proxy on my country's VPS(256mb or 512mb of RAM) 2. set varnish web cache AND reverse proxy on VPS server(256mb or 512mb of RAM) here in my country.

Which one would you suggest to me?

Thank you very much for your answers.

Best Regards

Answer 1

There are certainly lots of cheap VPS hosts in Europe, probably even more so than in the US. If you want to go with a brand name "expensive" ones, Linode alone has presence in London, UK and they currently (as of February 2012) charge only 79,95 USD for 2GB/80GB/800GB VPS based on Xen PV.

However, for 80 USD, you might as well get a dedicated server somewhere in central Europe instead. I have a 768MB/30GB/300GB @ 29,95 USD Linode over here in California since December 2011, 6ms away from me, and it's absolutely awesome, although I'd rather get a cheap dedicated server in Europe if I needed more than 1–2GB of RAM (HP DL120 G7 with E3-1220L / 4GB / 500GB / 5TB can be had for 59 EUR in Germany; IMHO, a much better deal than Linode when you need so much RAM and HDD).

I recommend you try nginx 1.1 with proxy_cache instead of varnish. I would imagine that 256MB RAM should be more than plenty for either nginx or varnish to run as a caching reverse proxy.

Also, you may want to look at something like http://www.cloudflare.com/, although they only seem to cache "static" content like images, so it might be useless for your web-store-style caching. Or its competitor, http://www.incapsula.com/, which supposedly does have the ability to cache some dynamic content for Business users (free version only has static caching).

Answer 2

Firstly, for a small Magento store, with 400 products and 1 store view - you can achieve sub 1 second page load times without the need to look into advanced caching (see for yourself here http://demo.sonassi.com/ )

Secondly, if you are targeting Europe to sell to - you should host in Europe. The latency from hosting in the US is going to make any fast hosting seem much slower anyway.

For you, I wouldn't suggest a VPS in place of proper Magento shared hosting, for a number of reasons.

Let's assume your budget is £30 per month - from bytemark.co.uk this gives you

1. 1000MB RAM
2. 1 CPU Core
3. 20GB storage

The downsides of using a VPS being

1. You need to manage your own server. That means you have to optimise the server, monitor the server, fix any issues with the server - have you got that level of experience?
2. Your I/O is shared. Anyone else's activity using the common HDDs will bottleneck anything your Magento store needs to do
3. You are limited to 1GB RAM, to put this into perspective ...

Each PHP thread (visitor) needs an average 30MB RAM and its corresponding MySQL connection will need just a bit more. So that is 80MB per visitor. Your base OS needs about 140MB RAM to run. MySQL base wants as much as possible, but as a minimum, it will need 300MB.

So you are using 440MB, leaving you support for 7 active visitors - which is fortunate, because 1 2.5GHz core can push through a maximum of 7 requests per second (for Magento).

--

Conversely, you could pick a Magento host that already optimises its shared servers, uses external DB servers, and usually has a powerful machine that you can burst resources on, to a factor of around 8 of what your VPS offers.

There are a few Magento hosting comparison sites out there that will help you make this decision.

1. www.magentobenchmark.com
2. www.magespeedtest.com

You are going to get MUCH, MUCH faster performance using a proper shared Magento host than a self-setup VPS (in this scenario).