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December 18, 2015

The future stack

Future hosting stack comes to the Space 48 demo stores.

Space 48 are always very interested in technologies which can help our customers’ sites to run faster. Some of these might not be stable enough for us to recommend for implementation in production sites. However, we feel it’s important for ourselves and our customers to gain an early understanding and to assess their suitability.

With that in mind, we now have demo stores for all current versions of Magento (1 and 2, Community and Enterprise) running on PHP 7 and Nginx with HTTP/2 support.

PHP 7

PHP 7 is the latest version of the PHP language and has been in development for nearly 2 years. Up to twice as fast as the current version 5.6 and with numerous improvements, it’s definitely something we’ll be looking to offer upgrades to after a stabilisation period.

HTTP/2

HTTP/2 is the newest standard of the HTTP transfer protocol. It’s faster, more secure and removes some of the limitations which cause delays in page delivery (more info here). It’s not yet supported by all browsers (read more about the support), unsupported ones fall back to HTTP seamlessly.

The future stack

So with PHP 7 rendering the server side code up to twice as fast and HTTP/2 serving the content more efficiently we think you’ll notice the difference. We definitely did.

There are further enhancements which we are considering which should make these sites even faster. These will be detailed in future blog posts.

Contact [email protected] for any version or visit our demo page to gain access to the Magento 2 Community version.


Launch announcements for all the above software:

  • Magento 1 (with PHP 7 support): Not yet official – a patch to make the base version work is available here
  • Magento 2: November 17th 2015 – available here
  • PHP 7: December 3rd 2015 – available here
  • Nginx with HTTP/2: September 22nd 2015 – available here