VPS for e-shops: What you need to know before choosing a server

An online shop is the most performance-demanding type of website. Every page displays dynamic data from a database, prices, availability, shopping cart, recommendations. A poorly chosen server results in slow loading times, which directly reduces conversions. Studies consistently show that every second of loading delay decreases the conversion rate by 7 %. This guide will help you choose the right VPS for your online shop.

Performance requirements for the e-shop: CPU, RAM, I/O

Three key server parameters for an e-shop are CPU (PHP/Python processing), RAM (MySQL buffering, OPcache) and I/O (reading/writing database files). Each has a different impact on performance:

Component	Role in the online shop	Bottleneck in case of shortage	Minimum recommendation
CPU (vCPU)	PHP compilation, page generation, order processing	High CPU load, request timeouts	2 vCPU (up to 500 items/day)
RAM	MySQL InnoDB buffer pool, PHP OPcache, Redis cache	Swap, slow database queries, OOM killer	4 GB (WooCommerce)
Storage I/O	MySQL read/write, temporary files, session storage	High wait times, slow database transactions	NVMe SSD
Network (bandwidth)	Transfer of product images, static content	Slow loading of products with images	100 Mbps+ (or CDN)

WooCommerce: The most widely used platform in the Czech Republic

WooCommerce powers approximately 40% of e-shops worldwide, and the figure is similar in the Czech Republic. Built on WordPress, it runs on PHP and MySQL, and has specific requirements that shared hosting or an underpowered VPS cannot handle.

Minimum recommendations for a WooCommerce VPS

• PHP 8.1+ - PHP 8.x is significantly faster than 7.x (approx. 20-30% performance increase). Use PHP-FPM, not mod_php.
• MySQL 8.0 or MariaDB 10.6+ - newer versions have a better query optimizer and performance for e-commerce workloads
• OPcache enabled - PHP OPcache caches compiled PHP bytecode files. Without OPcache, PHP compiles each file on every request. This is 10 times slower.
• Nginx instead of Apache - Nginx handles concurrent requests with significantly lower memory consumption than Apache. For an e-shop with fluctuating traffic, Nginx is the right choice.
• RAM: 4 GB minimum - of which 1-2 GB for the MySQL InnoDB buffer pool, 256 MB for PHP OPcache, and the remainder for PHP-FPM processes

Magento: A more performance-demanding variant

Magento (Adobe Commerce) is a platform for medium-sized and large online shops. It is significantly more powerful and flexible than WooCommerce, but at the cost of higher server requirements.

• Minimum: 4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM - Magento 2 cannot be run on less. The recommendation for production with real traffic is 8 vCPU / 16 GB RAM.
• Elasticsearch/OpenSearch mandatory - Full-text search in Magento 2.4+ requires Elasticsearch. This adds approximately 500 MB - 1 GB of additional RAM.
• Varnish for full-page cache Without Varnish caching, Magento is slow. With Varnish, pages are served from memory in milliseconds.

Redis and Memcached: Why They Are Critical for E-shops

The most common bottleneck in an e-shop is not the CPU or RAM. It is the database. Every request for a product page can generate dozens of SQL queries (products, prices, categories, recommendations, reviews). Redis solves this problem by caching query results in memory.

Redis for WordPress/WooCommerce

Using Redis as an object cache for WordPress means that repeated database queries are served from Redis (memory, sub-millisecond) instead of MySQL (disk, tens of milliseconds). The difference in Time To First Byte (TTFB) is dramatic: typically dropping from 300-800 ms to 50-150 ms for cached pages.

Redis also handles PHP session storage, standard file-based sessions are slow under high concurrency. Moving sessions to Redis will significantly improve the e-shop's scalability.

Memcached vs Redis

For new projects, always choose Redis. It is more powerful, supports more data structures and offers persistence. Memcached remains in the code of older applications (Drupal, older Magento), but as a new cache it no longer makes sense today.

NVMe storage: For a compromise-free e-shop

The e-shop database is highly I/O intensive, every order, stock update or customer action generates database writes. The difference between NVMe and SATA SSDs is most evident here. Read more in our article. NVMe vs SSD for VPS.

For MySQL on an e-shop, IOPS (operations per second) and latency are critical: not sequential read speed. NVMe SSDs offer 500 000+ IOPS versus 30 000-80 000 IOPS for SATA SSDs. Under high concurrent load (sales events, Black Friday), this difference is directly visible in page load times.

SSL performance: TLS overhead on the e-shop

Every HTTPS page requires a TLS handshake: a cryptographic operation that loads the CPU. For an e-shop with HTTPS on every request, this has a real impact.

TLS optimisation for an e-shop includes:

• TLS 1.3 - significantly faster handshake than TLS 1.2. Nginx 1.19+ and OpenSSL 1.1.1+ support this natively.
• Session resumption - returning customers do not need to undergo a full TLS handshake
• OCSP stapling - The server independently verifies certificate validity and caches the result, so the customer does not wait for the OCSP server.
• HTTP/2 or HTTP/3 - Multiplexing requests significantly reduces latency for pages with many resources (images, CSS, JS).

Czech context: Heureka, Zboží.cz and speed

Czech e-commerce has its specificities: a large proportion of orders come via Heureka.cz and Zboží.cz. These platforms display the target page load time in their ratings: a slow e-shop receives a lower score and is displayed less favourably. Server latency in the Czech Republic (see our article on VPS in the Czech Republic) is therefore a direct commercial factor for Czech online shops.

When to scale up: Signs that your VPS is no longer sufficient

Monitor these metrics. They signal that you need a more powerful server:

• CPU load > 70% on average - not top-tier, but average. A persistently high CPU load means the server cannot process requests fast enough.
• MySQL slow query log - if queries longer than 1 second appear regularly in the log, it is time to add RAM or optimise indexes
• Swap usage > 0 - any use of swap on a database server is a bad sign. A database in swap is orders of magnitude slower.
• TTFB > 500 ms A Time To First Byte above 500 ms is bad for an e-shop. The target is below 200 ms.

If you need significantly higher performance for a high-traffic e-shop, dedicated servers with 10 Gbps connectivity offer fastvps.cz - a specialised platform for high-performance hosting.