Question

E-Commerce Setup Suggestions

Posted February 26, 2015 10.6k views

I’m new to DigitalOcean and setting up my own servers. All my experience is from Windows IIS. Most of my sites are basic wordpress sites with no e-commerce.

I do have a friend I’m hosting a site for that has ecommerce. Are there anything I should do or not do in setting up the server for his ecommerce site? I have an SSL and all of our payment processing is done by 3rd party provider.

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  • vincentc February 26, 2015
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    Hello there and welcome.

    Personally I use Nginx+php5-fpm instead of apache. It has a higher performance (especially for static content like images etc), can handle a lot of traffic and memory usage is really low in high traffic scenarios.
    My clients use E-commerce and speed is an important element. I get loadtimes of 600ms on my wordpress e commerce websites.
    (links for testing loadtime: http://loadimpact.com/ , http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/ )
    But it will take some time to get used to the configuration of nginx (lots of tutorials).
    If you don’t want to take the leap, you can still improve performance with caching.
    Plugins like WP-super cache or something similar. Keep in mind that you should only enable this when the site is ready (caching can be a pain in the ass when you are testing and editing the site).

    If you are planning to deploy more sites, I would suggest platforms like IspConfig3 (lots of configuration options) or VestaCP (out of the box experience)

  • Noob February 26, 2015
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    Does Vesta install everything for me or do I need to setup nginx, php, mysql, etc before I install it?

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3 answers
sierracircle February 26, 2015

Since your friend has an ecommerce site, you might consider giving him his own droplet rather than sharing a droplet.

That will allow you to bolt down his droplet security a little tighter, and reduce the possibility of one of your other applications getting hacked and compromising his site.

I host several sites for various businesses in my area. Most of them are small sites with not much traffic. Blog sites and a few simple business sites I will share on single droplets, and have not had any problems doing that.

If a business has ecommerce, I isolate them on their own droplet.

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  • sierracircle February 26, 2015

    also,

    1. a primer on ssh security: http://bodhizazen.net/Tutorials/SSH_security#Server

    2. create a swap: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-add-swap-on-ubuntu-14-04

    3. create a backup routine to backup all of your websites and databases to a remote location (off of your droplet) every night.

    How To Add Swap on Ubuntu 14.04
    by Justin Ellingwood
    Swap space can be used as an "overflow" area for your system when you run out of RAM. The operating system can store data that would normally be kept in RAM on the hard drive in a specially formatted file. In this guide, we'll demonstrate how to create and use one of these files in Ubuntu 14.04.
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  • vincentc February 26, 2015

    if you create different user-spaces for the websites, then it should be isolated.
    Of course, if they get in with ssh, it’s game over for every website. Same for zero-day exploits. But this can also happen on each droplet.
    You might consider ispconfig which is made for hosting different sites at one vps. The default and out of the box security (like per web user-space) are great. Of course the tutorials on digitalocean on securing your VPS is a must.

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  • Noob February 26, 2015

    Thanks for all of the input. I planned on putting my friends e-comm site on it’s on droplet and then all other hosting on a different droplet.

    As for the CP software, I really like the look of Vesta over ISPConfig but I want to use the one that’s the best. So would everyone recommend ISPConfig? On either one, do I have it install it on each droplet or just one of them to access them all?

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  • Noob February 26, 2015

    Would you run hhvm or php5?

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Noob February 26, 2015

Thanks for all of the input. I planned on putting my friends e-comm site on it’s on droplet and then all other hosting on a different droplet.

As for the CP software, I really like the look of Vesta over ISPConfig but I want to use the one that’s the best. So would everyone recommend ISPConfig? On either one, do I have it install it on each droplet or just one of them to access them all?

Reply Report
Noob February 26, 2015

Would you run hhvm or php5?

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