Earlier this month, LiteSpeed Technologies released LSWS 5.0 – the latest version of their Enterprise Web Server, the technology that powers the ProperHost Magento optimized hosting platform. This release is a particularly exciting one because it brings some revolutionary new features that mark the beginning of a new era in web server technology and high-performance hosting.
Most importantly to all Magento store owners is the addition of LiteMage Cache, a brand new extension that enables full page caching directly in the web server using ESI hole punching. Magento has a reputation for being slow due to its complex architecture and one of the ways to increase speed is by introducing one or several caching mechanisms. However, since certain areas of a Magento site needs to be dynamically updated for each user, such as items in the shopping cart or the “My Account” logged-in page, traditional caches cannot efficiently cache most Magento pages.
Significantly reduces page load times
LiteMage Cache uses Edge Side Includes (ESI) to punch holes in pages where information changes from visitor to visitor. The remaining content is saved to cache. When the next person visits the same page, the cached content is served quickly, with only the holes needing to be filled in with data for that visitor. LiteMage Cache also caches per-user data in private caches, so entire pages, even those with multiple holes, can be assembled completely from cache.
The world's most powerful Magento cache
This makes LiteSpeed + LiteMage Cache the fastest and most powerful web server and caching solution for high-performance Magento hosting. Benchmarks have shown that LiteMage Cache can increase speed by as much as 20 times compared to NGINX and Varnish-based solutions, which are also much more complicated to set up and not suited for shared hosting environments.
Support for HTTP/2 draft 17
Furthermore, LSWS 5.0 brings support for HTTP/2, claiming to be the first widely-used web server to support this important upgrade to the Internet’s fundamental protocol. HTTP/2 contains a number of advantages in terms of performance and security:
- A binary protocol instead of textual, making it more efficient and less error-prone
- Fully multiplexed – allows multiple requests and responses over a single TCP connection for parallelism
- Uses header compression to reduce overhead
- Significantly faster over SSL (https)
Additionally, LSWS 5.0 includes improved support for WebSocket real-time server/client communication and a number of other improvements and fixes.
We are excited to announce that ProperHost will soon offer LSWS 5.0 with LiteMage Cache on our Magento optimized hosting plans so our clients can take advantage of this great new technology!
Ecommerce is so powerful because customers are global which enables stores to sell products even to people across the world. In order to be successful in this it is important to show prices in the currency of your potential customers. Someone from the US viewing prices in japanese YEN will not be able to make sense of the price. In addition, it would be good to give the option to display the page in their own language if it is different from your store.
Adding multiple currencies in Magento
The first thing to globalizing your store is to add additional currencies. This is a very easy process. All you need to do is follow these steps:
- Go to System -> Configuration -> Currency Setup in your store backend
- Under Allowed Currencies select the currencies that you wish to make available in your store and save (CTRL+click to select more than one)
- Got to System -> Manage Currencies -> Rates and click the Import Rates button to ensure their currency rates are set
After the rates are proerly imported, then your store will be setup for multiple currencies. If you are using a good theme, then a currency box may appear on your store where customers can select their preferred currency when shopping.
Automatically switching your visitors to the correct currency
Letting customers switch to their preferred currency is great for usability, but something even better would be to switch them to the correct currency automatically. For that we present the following:
Easily switch your customers to the correct currency based on country with the Magento currency switcher. In addition, you can also switch the customer to particular store view if you have multiple stores. For example, you might have a store for Europe and for the US. US visitors can automatically be redirected to the US store and EU visitors to the EU store.
Translating your store to another language
Letting customers pick their currency is not the only thing that can increase usability. Showing your store in their native language can make them feel more comfortable. Completely translating your store to 30 differnet languages would be a very costly endeavor. As a result, an automated solution has been made to translate the frontend of your store for your customers in a nice way:
Let your customers translate your store using Magento auto translate. It works with almost every known language and is easy to setup. You can also use it for your PPC campaigns so that you can target other languages and the landing page will be translated to that language.
There are lots of ways to improve your store. We recommend having a look at these Magento extensions and we are confident you will find many different ways to enhance your stores usability and increase revenue!
Earlier this week a critical vulnerability (CVE-2015-0235) in the Linux GNU C Library (glibc), commonly referred to as the GHOST vulnerability, was announced to the general public. Quite a few clients have contacted us concering the security of their servers and how this vulnerability affects their websites. We therefore want to assure everyone that our server administrators applied patches to all affected servers(shared and dedicated) immediately after we became aware of the vulnerability. Customers with a managed dedicated server have already been notified.
In short, GHOST is a 'buffer overflow' bug affecting the gethostbyname() and gethostbyname2() function calls in the glibc library. This vulnerability allows a remote attacker that is able to make an application call to either of these functions to execute arbitrary code with the permissions of the user running the application. Most Linux distributions are vulnerable to this bug, including RHEL 6 & 7, CentOS 6 & 7, Debian 7, and Ubuntu.
At ProperHost security has always been paramount and we are committed to keeping your data safe.
Unfortunately, Magento search results are not very relevant out of the box, which is bad considering 43% to 50% of e-commerce customers use store search to locate products they want to purchase1. If they cannot locate the products they want quickly, then they will go to another store where they can. Relevant, fast searches means more product sales. In this guest post, John from our partner Extendware discusses three Magento extensions that can help improve your store's overall search experience.
Lucene search is great at improving search relevancy. High search relevancy means customers can find products quickly and as a result make purchases. It is easy to install, easy to use, and great for customers on our shared hosting plans. If your store has less than 10,000 products, then your store is perfect for using the Lucene search extension. It helps improve relevancy and breadth of search by performing multiple searches for a single search. Each search will progressively broaden the match. As a result, exact matches appear first in the results whereas more fuzzy matches appear last. This also ensure more search results return some results.
Sphinx search provides similar result relevancy as Lucene search. The primary difference is in the type of site that uses the search. Sphinx search is meant for customers of any catalog size (even 100,000+ products) who are are on one of our dedicated server plans. Sphinx search uses the Sphinx search engine which is a standalone search server and as a result it will be faster than using mysql to search.
Improving search relevancy is not the only important thing. Making search easier for your customers can also help them find products faster and make more purchases. Ajax Search Autocomplete will show search results in your search box as customers type. It can show search results from your products, categories, and CMS pages. It will also suggest alternative queries. The combined effect is an overall better and alternative search experience.
Here is what the ajax search looks like:
Improving the technology used by your Magento store is important to stay competitive in e-commerce. Extendware offers a range of Mageneto extensions to help you achieve your e-commerce goals!
New tax regulations imposed by the European Union require that from January 1st 2015, businesses who sell digital products and services to European customers should begin charging VAT at the rate of VAT in the country in which the customer is based. This is contrary to the previous rule, where VAT to EU buyers was to be charged at the rate of where the seller was based.
These new rules apply to the sale of most digital products and services, such as web hosting and domains names, including all ProperHost products and services. The rules apply to all EU and non-EU based companies conducting business within the European Union.
How does it affect me?
In order to comply with the new rules, we will start charging VAT to all individuals and non-VAT registered businesses based in the European Union. If you currently live in one of the 28 EU member states, you will see VAT being added to your invoice at the rate applicable in your country. For example, if you are based in the Netherlands you will be charged 21% VAT on top of the monthly service fee. Each EU member country enforce a slightly varying VAT rate, ranging from 17% to 27%
Exemption for VAT-registered businesses
Registered companies with a valid VAT number are exempt from the rules and will not be charged VAT. The customer is responsible for paying the tax through the reverse-charge mechanism. If you are a VAT-registered business, it is therefore important that you update your account details with your VAT number.
For more information, see
http://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/taxation/vat/how_vat_works/telecom/index_en.htm
A note on PayPal subscriptions
If you are affected by the new VAT rules and currently pay by PayPal Subscription, you will be required to manually alter the subscription to ensure you are paying the correct new amount. If you know this will affect you, we would recommend cancelling and creating a new PayPal subscription from the next invoice we issue to avoid any issues.
For reference, the 2015 VAT rates by country are available from this link.
