eLief Blog

Magento Enterprise Edition Version 1.7 was recently announced.  The new release features enhancements and new functionality focusing on enhancing customer loyalty through a reward points system, performance enhancement through full page caching and many other key administrative functionality improvements.

New Features in Enterprise Edition Version 1.7

Magento Enterprise Edition version 1.7 features the all new reward points system, which allows merchants to implement unique programs designed to enhance user experience and increase customer loyalty. Points are awarded based on purchases, as well as actions such as registering on the site, inviting others to register, submitting product reviews and tags and more.  Points are managed by customers through their account and are redeemable at checkout time towards the price of a purchase.

Magento Enterprise Edition version 1.7 also places a focus on highly tuned page performance by making use of Full Page Caching.  Forrester Research has recently hailed caching as the “best practice” behind some of the internet’s fastest sites and new performance optimizations included in this version of Magento Enterprise Edition provide significant benefits for merchants of all sizes through a new Full Page Caching module. The optimizations, which together with other performance-enhancing functionality already in Magento, significantly reduce page load times, increase conversions, and enhance the customer browsing experience.

Additionally, Magento Enterprise Edition version 1.7 included no less than fifteen new features available to store administrator users to help augment the range of tools administrators have at their disposal for managing their site.  These include such features as sales report optimization, WYSIWYG Editing for Products, Categories, and email templates, Design Theme & Packages Facilitation, Custom Variables for use in email templates and CMS, and upgrades to the Magento Enterprise Edition CMS+ content management engine.

Magento Hosting For Enterprise Edition

In addition to our regular optimized web hosting services, all eLief VPS and dedicated servers can be optimized for Magento hosting – with our expertise and experience with Magento we can customize a solution based on your exact needs, number of products and SKU’s in your store, growth expectations and much more. Contact us today for a free quote.

From everyone at eLief, we would like to wish you a wonderful New Year.

This last year has been a great one for our company. In 2009 we have grown in size tremendously and have helped launch many successful web sites alongside you, our customers. Early in the year we partnered with ocPortal, Aardvark Topsites and Magento Commerce to provide a optimized hosting solution for those applications, including our popular magento hosting plans. In August, we launched our new high performance servers to improve the quality of the product we offer you. Later that month we launched over 70 video tutorials. In September, our new R1Soft CDP backup technology was introduced. In November we re-established ourself as a corporate web host with a new web site and identity. We also started to publicly offer affordable VPS solutions. 2009 certainly didn’t go without issue, however those problems allowed us to grow and improve as a company.

For myself the New Year represents many important things:

• Opportunity – with a new year and a new decade I find it very inspiring and motivational to help me move forward with my goals that I’ve yet to accomplish.
• Reflection – both personally and professionally. Human beings in todays society can be so busy with life that we take little time to really evaluate ourself, what we are doing and where we are going.
• Moving Forward – Sometimes the hardest thing to do is to move past the hardships in life. It is not an easy thing to accomplish by any means, no matter how big or small the issue might be. This decade and new year represents change, and it gives us all a chance to change things in our lives and with others.

This coming year, let us look forward to a brighter world. In these troubled times let us hope for peace, prosperity, security and happiness to return our great world to something new and better. Let us hope for new friendships and families coming together. Let us hope for our economy to flourish and for small business, corporations, countries and every individual within them to succeed and magnify.

Some of our company goals we hope to offer you this year:

1. Expand our video tutorials and knowledgebase
2. Introduce 24-hour phone support, free for all clients
3. Continue to excell in customer service and improve in any way we can
4. Develop an enhanced cPanel back end, merging your billing login with your control panel so you will only need to remember one username and password
5. Look into new opportunities to improve performance even more

I’d also like to share a few of my personal new years resolutions:

• Find time to exercise more often
• Establish new relationships and friendships
• Enjoy life more – it’s been too long since I’ve taken a real vacation!
• Help Others – I would like to donate some of my free time to help others on a more personal level

We would love to hear from you about what this new year means to you, and any of your New Year resolutions or goals. We encourage our visitors and customers to post and respond to this on our blog, or if you wish, you may contact me personally.

Have a most excellent New Year!

Warm Regards,

Richard Rowan
Owner, eLief.com

Installing ocPortal and other software on eLief is easy, we’ve included a short guide on how to do this below:

1. The first step is to login to your cPanel account with us.
2. Once you are logged into your cPanel account you will need to find the Software/Services section and click on “1-Click Applications Installer”.
3. This will bring up a large list of applications, under the left hand side look for ‘Content Management Systems’, click ocPortal -> Install this Application.
4. The on-screen instructions will guide you through the installation easily. It will automatically create your database and folders, download and update data and finalize the installation.
5. Your ocPortal install is now ready! Use the password and username to login to ocPortal and start customizing your site.

We are the official ocPortal hosting partner and support all requirements. Our applications installer is available on all of our web hosting services and cPanel reseller hosting plans. The installer is also not limited to ocPortal and can install over 50+ applications, including our popular magento hosting plans.

Magento Hosting

Magento Hosting is an extremely popular ecommerce solution, so it’s perfectly understandable that people are looking for hosting packages which are optimized accordingly. Just as specialized blog hosting companies, forum hosting companies and others have managed to create subniches as far as hosting is concerned, “Magento hosting” will be a term more and more people will be using.

There are quite a few cpanel reseller hosting companies, for example, with hosting packages which have been optimized for Magento and if that’s the case, you will probably find a descriptive sales page on their website which does all of the explaining. If the hosting company does not have a link to a Magento hosting package on its homepage, you can still determine if it could represent a Magento hosting solution by:

Analyzing Magento’s System Requirements

First of all, you need to go with a Linux box, this much is certain. Magento supports Apache 1.3.x, Apache 2.0.x as well as Apache 2.2.x, so most hosts would “qualify” from this perspective. Now as far as PHP is concerned, there are certain things that you need to keep in mind.

Magento is compatible with PHP 5.2 (go with a memory limit of 128 Mb at the very least) but be sure to make sure that Safe_mode is off. There are also certain required extensions which you need to remember about: simplexml, hash, PDO_MySQL, DOM, mcrypt, curl, SOAP, GD and iconv.

Your server needs to be able to run cronjobs and it also needs to be able to override options as far as the .htaccess file is concerned. And finally, when it comes to SSL, you need to know that it doesn’t support self-signed certificates.

Which Hosts Qualify?

Most companies which offer Linux hosting (i.e. cpanel shared hosting, cpanel reseller hosting, unlimited domain hosting , etc.) solutions will be able to cater to your needs, but it’s extremely important to make sure that your package supports Magento before making the payment. If you’re not 100% sure, contact the sales department of each host and ask them.

A lot of companies have a live online support interface, so you’ll be able to find someone who can answer this question right away and without even picking up the phone. If an online support interface is not available, you can simply email them or (if you need a response ASAP) give them a call. Most good cpanel reseller hosting companies as well as unlimited domain hosting companies offer 24×7  support, so getting in touch with someone should not be complicated at all.

It’s extremely important to choose only companies with whom you’re 100% comfortable. On the one hand, it is true that cheap web hosting packages are always tempting, but when it comes to Magento hosting, going with providers that have proven themselves time and time again is definitely the best long-term solution.

After all, would you rather save a few dollars here and there but face the risk of your site being offline a lot? The consequences are more than obvious: less traffic, ultimately fewer sales, you’d probably end up losing considerably more money than you’ve managed to save by going with the cheapest option. Better to spend a little bit of extra money but know that you’re working with true professionals.

Magento Hosting Mistakes?

Unfortunately, there are a lot of mistakes associated with Magento hosting which could cost you. Leaving the previously mentioned mistake aside (always going with the cheaper option), there are quite a few other things which could cause problems.

First of all, not monitoring your site on a daily basis is definitely not a recommended practice. You never know what could go wrong, so keeping an eye on things will definitely not hurt. Maybe your hosting companies will upgrade one thing or another and that will interfere with Magento, you just never know. As soon as you notice a problem, contact your host ASAP and don’t forget to mention that you’re running Magento. A good Magento Web hosting support representative will be able to determine the cause of the problem quickly and will make the necessary changes within moments.

Don’t forget to be careful when installing other applications on your server. There are instances where certain scripts or applications can interfere with Magento. It’s not uncommon to modify your settings in order to be able to run a certain application, only to realize that the new settings caused problems with Magento afterwards. Anyone makes mistakes and, once again, that’s why always monitoring things is recommended. If you follow these simple guidelines, finding a great Magento Web hosting company and running a profitable Magento website will be a piece of cake.

As a continued effort to improve our service for you, we will be upgrading our servers on Wednesday, August 5th. The new servers will include a major hardware upgrade for both improved performance and increased disk space allowance. All old servers will remain active while the new DNS propagates, so no actual downtime is expected. A full press release will be released later this month detailing the new enhancements.

Some benefits of this upgrade include:

• New high performance hardware
• Dual Intel Nehalem 5520 Processors, 8 Cores (16 Cores displayed with Hyper Threading enabled)
• 12GB DDR3 RAM (Noticeable improvement over current DDR2 RAM)
• Caviar Black Hard Drives – High performance drives w/ dual processors per each drive. Greatly improves disk i/o performance(A key factor in dynamic and database intensive websites & applications).
• R1Soft CDP Backup’s – You will now be able to restore backup’s right from your cPanel control panel. It includes daily and hour-by-hour restore points for you to choose from along with snapshots.
• Increased disk space and bandwidth upgrade’s for all web hosting plans, free of charge. Upgraded plans can be viewed directly on our site at http://www.elief.com/web-hosting.php or under our Magento Hosting plans.