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/ Hosting for an e-shop doing 40,000 orders a month
Custom hostingSysadmin
Hosting for an e-shop doing 40,000 orders a month
Moving off an over-subscribed shared host onto dedicated infrastructure. Load time dropped from 3.4 s to 0.9 s.
Hosting for an e-shop doing …
The problem
An e-shop built on a custom PHP application ran on managed hosting that fell over during every campaign. Average TTFB 1.8 s, over 6 s at peak. The hosting provider’s answer was that they were “exceeding plan limits”.
What we did
We built dedicated infrastructure across three machines:
- App server — Nginx + PHP-FPM, pool settings tuned to the real load profile.
- DB server — PostgreSQL with a replica,
shared_buffersandwork_memsized to the dataset rather than left at defaults. - Cache layer — Varnish in front of the application for anonymous requests, Redis for sessions and application cache.
The migration ran over a weekend with a 12-minute window for the DNS switch and final database sync.
Result
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| TTFB (median) | 1.8 s | 0.21 s |
| Page load | 3.4 s | 0.9 s |
| Peak handled | ~400 req/min | 4,200 req/min |
| Outages in 12 months | 14 | 0 |
The client hasn’t had a campaign outage since. Monthly infrastructure cost rose roughly 40 %, but the first Black Friday that didn’t fall over paid for it several times over.