I'm running a "business" package on 1and1.com (1&1 Internet). It's cheap. It's been useful and effective for hosting my Wordpress blog and zen cart.

I want to move to Magento. Our business is growing and I'm tiring of zen-cart, which seems to be dated.  And I want to find multi-channel solutions so that we can effectively manage sales on Magento, Amazon and eBay fairly seamlessly.

When I ran downloader.php, it crashed out saying it couldn't allocate memory for some operation.

So I found and downloaded magento-check.php.  Running does little more than tell me that the proper tools are installed to run magento. It doesn't tell me whether or not my memory requirements or anything else is satisfactory.

From Zen Cart I was able to pull up the "Server Info" page, which tells me:

PHP Memory Limit: 90M

Ya. That's not very good.

Magento states that it needs a minimum of 256M and 512M would be better.  So what would be BEST for my operation.

I current do about 200-300 sales a month on the Zen Cart, and obviously would like to see it grow to 1000 sales/month in the next year.

Should I upgrade to a full server solution with 1&1? (Dual Core 2.2 GHz, 2GB Ram 250 GB hard drive space for $59 / month?  Do I need something bigger than that?

Or can I get away with something smaller than that?

1&1 also offers a "Dynamic Cloud Server" option, which I can start off with 1 core, 1 GB RAM, 100GB of disk space, for a little less per month (not much less really), but I can dynamically up it to 6 cores as needed, 24 GB RAM and 800 GB disk space, so it seems like an easy way to scale up as needed as the business grows.

I've been satisfied, for the most part, for years with 1&1 for my lower end needs. I don't see us needing expensive Rackspace hosting any time in the near future.

I'd love to hear from somebody who's been there and done that to give me an inkling on what I would be starting off with because I don't feel like setting up something that I will feel constrained with and run into issues with only to have to upgrade next month to a whole new package or host.

Thanks!   -mark