FAQFrequently Asked Questions

Magento / Online Stores

Yes, we offer free installation of any version of Magento of choice with all hosting plans.

There can be several reasons for speed problems, however the main causes are usually servers that simply cannot deliver the required performance, and problematic extensions that slow down the site. Magento is very different from other PHP carts and content management systems, and requires significantly faster hardware to run properly. Magento also tends to run badly on conventional shared hosting where hosting companies fill servers to saturation point. U.S. and other offshore hosting for complex pages such as Magento is also considerably slower for Australian visitors than hosting locally.

The basics of Magento speed are:

  • Fast Hardware, with particular attention to server CPU
  • Local hosting: servers should be as close as possible to the target audience
  • Correct PHP and MySQL setup
  • Professional development - badly written themes slow down page loads considerably
  • Database maintenance
  • Data compression, minifying javascript, combining css files

We are always happy to provide independent benchmarking data for existing Magento sites on 3rd party servers, as well as comparing current performance data to a duplicate of the site on our hardware. Please contact our team to request benchmarking or a free trial of your current site on performance hosting.

If urgent, we can have a site transferred and ready for testing in around 15 minutes. This is limited by the upload speed of the existing server. The time needed to go live depends on the current TTL (cache time) on the DNS A record, this is normally between 5 minutes and 4 hours.

New Magento installations are normally ready to use within several minutes of an order being placed and the first invoice being paid.

VPS and dedicated server clients are free to run any services they need on their server. Shared hosting clients are also welcome to run other websites and content, however server configuration on shared servers cannot be modified as may, rarely, be required for platforms other than Magento. That said, our shared servers do run all major platforms such as Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal without problem, and extremely fast.

Yes, we guarantee absolute compatibility with Community, Professional and Enterprise versions of Magento.

Yes, Magento integrates with Saasu using Slink and with Xero using a Foman extension.

Miscellaneous

We do not offer development, but we can put you in touch with recommended local developers who are proficient in Magento.

We are more than happy to help with PCI scans and compliance on VPS and dedicated servers. Our shared servers do normally pass scans, but because of the nature of shared hosting generally it is not possible to guarantee PCI compliance beyond SAQ Validation Type 1 - SAQ A on any shared hosting, including our own. On VPS and dedicated servers we are more than happy to advise on PCI compliance requirements up to SAQ Validation Type 4 - SAQ C.

We use and recommend CentOS, the open-source port of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. All shared hosting plans and VPSs run on CentOS, with Red Hat Enterprise Linux offered as an option on VPSs.

Yes, every hosting product offered by M.D.G. IT is hosted from Equinix IBX in Mascot, Sydney or Global Switch in Ultimo, Sydney, two of the biggest datacenters in the Southern Hemisphere. Our support team are based in Melbourne and Sydney.

Plans & Pricing

Multi-store installations are usually not more demanding performance-wise compared to single store installations with the same catalogue size. We hence recommend a plan based on existing or projected traffic.

All M.D.G. IT hosting plans include full management. This covers everything from server setup, firewall maintenance and performance benchmarking to DNS updates and site migrations. We are also happy to help troubleshoot any errors that are possibly related to hosting and to generally point your developers / designers in the right direction if they run into problems. Once development is complete and the store is live, our clients need only manage the running of the store in the Magento admin backend, not worry about the technical details of web hosting.

The main difference we offer is that we specialise Magento. This means that our servers are set up for fast Magento performance.

This also means that our support scope covers all aspects of site migrations, extension installation, development advice and troubleshooting. Because we focus on the Magento platform, we can provide a depth of support that few other hosts can match.

Yes, absolutely. Upgrades on prepaid accounts are charged at the pro-rata difference between the two plans.

All shared hosting comes with unlimited mailboxes with POP and IMAP access. We also offer BlackBerry FastMail access on all cPanel servers. For VPS and dedicated server clients, we generally recommend running email on a separate server to the web server. This means that clients can run faster, non-cPanel servers, which can also run Varnish, and problems on either mail or web server do not affect the other service.

On non-cPanel servers we can either provide a free mail-only hosting account on a separate mail server, or a 3rd party service such as Google Apps or Hosted Exchange can be used. Google Apps and Hosted Exchange both cost around $5 / user / month. Larger mail providers have notable benefits, including spam filtering that individual mail servers cannot match, as well as synced contacts and calendars across organisations.

Site Transfers

Yes, we can install 3rd party SSL certificates if provided the certificate itself and the private key. This can either be exported using cPanel (see SSL hosts) or exported by the current webhost.

We offer free transfer of existing Magento installations with all hosting packages. If you would like your site transferred, please open a support ticket with your existing site's hosting credentials after placing your order. Details on how to open a support ticket are included in the welcome email which is sent to all clients on sign-up.

To transfer a Magento site we need:

  • Current SSH login details if you have SSH access (hostname, port, username and password)
  • FTP login details if SSH (above) is not available
  • Current hosting control panel URL, username and password
  • A list of any @yourdomain.com.au email boxes that are in use
  • Login details for your domain registrar

Please don't hesitate to get in touch with our support team if you need more information, or if you need to put together a detailed plan for a site migration.

If a site's current traffic is less than 10GB a month, we recommend starting with a MagentoPro plan. For sites that require the additional reliability and speed of dedicated resources, our VPS hosting plans deliver enterprise grade performance and availability.