There are gigabytes of content How to Speed Up Magento 2 with long Magento Performance Optimization tips lists. But in general, there are just 2 rules:
- Follow the Magento Performance Best Practices
- Get the best hosting solution you can afford
But keep in mind that the fastest hosting doesn’t equal to the fastest web store by default. Hosting configuration is crucial for Magento 2 performance and if you don’t know how to configure it on your own or don’t have time and resources to support and maintain servers, don’t risk - choose a hosting solution that is already optimized and enhanced for Magento like Hypernode, Cloudways Magento Hosting or MageMojo. Besides the pre-configured environment for Magento, they also offer 24/7 active hosting support and problem-solving.
A test is worth a thousand words. So we decided to install Magento with sample data on Hypernode and DigitalOcean with default settings. And compare deployment time and performance.
Let’s start with an overview of selected hosting solutions.
1. Hypernode
Hypernode is #1 Magento hosting platform in the Netherlands with more than 2200+ clients across 12 countries. They promise astonishingly fast performance and claim 167% average increase in speed for web stores migrated to Hypernode.
- Pre-configured PHP FPM
- PWA compatible
- Magento development tools (N98 MageRun, composer, Modman, zsh, fdupes, geoip, jpegotim, git-flow, MailHog and plenty more)
- Automated all the dull repetitive work (image optimizing, running security scans and validating the NGINX configuration)
- PHP 7.2 ready
- Magento malware scanner
- SSL via Let’s Encrypt
- 24/7 real-time monitoring
- Seamless Vertical Scaling
- Free near-zero downtime migration
- Redis & Varnish Cache support
- Analyzing tools (Blackfire and New Relic)
- Pro-active resource notification
- Elasticsearch built-in support
- Optimized cloud node booting
- Dedicated environment
- Global availability (select the data center closest to your own market for optimal performance)
- Cloud agnostic platform
- Brotli compression
- Real-time Access/Error Logs & Analysis
- Dedicated IP
- Automated back-ups
- Active DB Analysis
- Different cloud providers (OpenStack, DigitalOcean, AWS)
- 24/7/365 Support by Magento experts
We had some issues during the test but the Hypernode support team reacted immediately.
2. DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean is perfectly designed for developers. Over 150,000 businesses develop, manage, and scale their applications with DigitalOcean’s compute, storage, and networking solutions. The platform was built with simplicity at the forefront, so it’s easy to manage infrastructure, whether the project is running one virtual machine or ten thousand.
Reasons to choose a DigitalOcean Magento cloud infrastructure:
- Flexible server configurations sized for any application
- Access Controls/Permissions
- Backup and Recovery
- Collaboration Tools
- Deployment Management
- Data Migration
- Data Security
- Load Balancing
- Log Access
- Network Monitoring
- SLA Monitoring
- Virtual Machine Monitoring
- Virtual Server
- 24/7 support (Live Rep)
- Solid-State Drives (SSD)
- Global Image Transfer
- DNS Management
- Private Networking
- 99.99% Uptime SLA
- Floating IPs
- Team Accounts
- Multiple Datacenter Locations
We have one big project on DigitalOcean (over 40k product items and plan to reach 120k SKUs by 2021). After migration to DigitalOcean that web store has improved greatly in technical terms and its conversion increased 2 times. That migration has a significant impact on performance improvement. But just a good environment won’t work itself, magic won’t happen without an experienced team, efficient communication and great work on the setup.
To simplify Magento deployment on DigitalOcean we’ve developed Magento 2 Open Source One-Click App. It’s available on the DigitalOcean Marketplace for free.
3. Comparison (Hypernode vs DigitalOcean)
3.1 Basic settings
We used: Magento 2.3.5-p1 (Full Release with Sample Data)
- DigitalOcean Droplet (8Gb / 4 CPUs + 80 Gb SSD) Basic settings
- Hypernode (8Gb / 3 CPUs + 62 Gb SSD) Basic settings
3.2 Deployment time for Magento 2.3.5-p1 with sample data
Deployment time for Magento 2.3.5-p1 with sample data:
- DigitalOcean (40$/ 8Gb / 4 CPUs + 80 Gb SSD) - 16 min 40 sec.
- Hypernode (8Gb / 3 CPUs + 62 Gb SSD) - 4 min
3.3 Performance tests
PageSpeed Insights DigitalOcean 43% Hypernode 50%
PageSpeed Insights (DigitalOcean)
PageSpeed Insights (Hypernode)
GTmetrix
| DigitalOcean | Hypernode | |
|---|---|---|
| PageSpeed Score |
|
|
| YSlow Score |
|
|
| Fully Loaded Time |
|
|
| Total Page Size |
|
|
| Requests |
|
|
Redis-Benchmark test results
Hypernode vs DigitalOcean Redis Benchmark test results
Summary
We work with Hypernode and DigitalOcean for a long time and lean on our experience we can evaluate both as great hosting solutions for Magento web stores. The advantage of Hypernode over DigitalOcean is that you don’t have to do the setup servers yourself. When something goes wrong, Hypernode solves this via automation and auto-healing processes.
In case when you don’t have an experienced dedicated team for server setup and maintenance Hypernode takes the cake as it configured for Magento by default and takes care about all issues on server side.
Magento web store on DigitalOcean also can show astonishingly fast performance but only if you have qualified resources to set up servers and constantly monitor and improve performance.
