Magento Installation

Some web hosts provide professional Magento installation as paid or free additional service to their magento hostingpackage, or have Auto-Installers in their Control Panels. If your web hosts does not provide any of these options, or you want to install Magento manually in order to customize its settings, please read the following short manual.

• To install Magento you will have to download the latest stable Magento version from the official Magento website. You can download the full installation file package from magentocommerce.com/download . It usually comes as a zip file, so you will have to unzip it first, or upload it and unzip it on the server.
• You can upload the files via FTP to your hosting account. You can choose between the public_html folder and a sub folder, if you do not wish Magento to appear directly on your home page.
• When the package is uploaded, you will have to extract it if you haven’t done that yet, and change its file permissions (set to 755) according to the requirements listed on magentocommerce.com
• You need to create a new MySql database and new user for your future store. To do that, login to the Control Panel of your hosting account and use the MySQL databases management tool.
• Attach the user and the database together.
• Run the Magento Install Wizard. You will have to point your browser to the URL of your website – your home page or the folder you have chosen to install Magento in. Follow the instructions of the wizard.

• Fill out your database connection information – data base name, user name and password.

• Setup your administrator user. Choose an encryption key, or leave this field blank – Magento will generate it for you. Be sure to write it down, since you will need it for password encryption and other operations later on.
• That’s it! You are done.

Related: Magento Mobile Apps, Mobile Apps Builder

Magento Requirements

In order to be able to install and run Magento without issues on the magento hosting provider of your choice, there are some system requirements you should consider. Please make sure to check if your future host meets these requirements before buying a hosting account with it! You can also take a look at our selection of tested Magento hosting providers.

• The Operating System should be Linux x86 or x86-64
• Web Servers: Apache 1.3.x, Apache 2.0.x, Apache 2.2.x
• PHP 5.2, Safe_mode off, Memory_limit no less than 256Mb (preferably 512)
• Required extensions: PDO_MySQL, simplexml, mcrypt, hash, GD, DOM, iconv, curl, SOAP (if Webservices API is to be used)
• MySQL:
  • 4.1.20 or newer
  • InnoDB storage engine

• SSL: If https is used to work in the admin, SSL certificate should be valid
• Server setup:
  • Run scheduled jobs (crontab) with PHP 5
  • Override options in .htaccess files

Magento and PCI Compliance

If you sell products online you will have to deal with the credit card data of your customers. PCI compliance is related to the storage of this data and its security. It is a standard set by credit card companies in order to prevent or at least reduce credit card fraud in the industry. To comply with this standard can be very costly and time consuming. Not to comply with it can lead to fines in case of stollen credit cards’ data.

If you as an online merchant using Magento want to achieve PCI compliance, here’s what you need to know.

There are four different tiers for PCI Compliance, connected with an annual review by a Qualified Security Assessor, and a quarterly scan by a Approved Scanning Vendor of different scope.

• Tier 1: You have more than 6 million transactions per year
• Tier 2: Your stored transactions per year are betweet 1 and 6 million
• Tier 3: In case you have less than 1 million transactions during the year
• Tier 4: If you have less than 20.000 transactions a year

Here are the requirements for the PCI Compliance

• You have to maintain a firewall in order to protect the card holder data
• Do not use default system user and password or other security parameters
• Protect the card holder data
• Data transmissions should be encrypted
• Up-to-date antivirus software
• Systems and applications security
• Restricted access to card holder data
• Unique ID for each person with computer access
• Monitor regularly the access to your network resources
• Test regularly the security systems and processes
• Policy for information security

If you have the Magento Professional or Enterprise Edition and you process payments yourself, that the full payment application is considered as a custom application and it has to fulfill the requirements mentioned above. Since this is a very time consuming and costly process, and in case you only use the Magento Community Edition, there are a few other options to be PCI compliant. Here are the other options in detail:

1. You can use a third party payment methods, for example PayPal express.
   If you choose this option you won’t have to be PCI compliant yourself, because you don’t have to store credit card information on your server. In this case you have to consider that your customers will be redirected to the site of the payment processor and will have to leave your website, which might be inconvinient and interrupt the buying process.
2. You can use a SaaS PCI compliant payment application.
   You can use for example the CRE Secure which is PCI compliant. The customer is taken to another website (URL changes), but the form may be customized to look consistent with your store.
3. You can use the Magento Payment Bridge – which is PA DSS compliant.
   It is available free of charge with Enterprise and Professional Editions of Magento and requires an upgrade from Community Edition.  In case you decide to go this way, there are technical requirements for PCI compliant hosting (website and database).  This is the best option from the three since it provides a seamless user experience but also the most expensive one.