Magento is an effective and efficient solution to develop a complete e-commerce website with extensive requirements. With many themes and plugins, it stands out to be the best platform offering swift operations.
Its growing popularity has led to the introduction of many Magento hosting providers, and choosing the best among them is not easy. Find the best hosting for Magento now.
In this article, we will:
- Learn about Magento
- Compare Magento 1 and Magento 2
- Understand the need for hosting for Magento
- Learn about the features of a good Magento
- Discover the best Magento hosting providers
Contents
What is Magento?
Magento is a leading e-commerce platform that’s highly flexible and scalable. The most significant benefit of using this platform is that you don’t have to be technically sound to use it.
Magento earned success because of its useful and unique features like marketing and promotion, search engine optimization, site management, design, and catalog-management tools. The platform is suitable for both small and big companies.
Magento 1 vs. Magento 2
In 2015, Magento released Magento 2 as an upgraded version of Magento 1. The newer version eliminates many issues that were missing in the previous version.
Magento 2 gives your online business the much-needed competitive edge by providing a faster, SEO-focused and more user-friendly platform.
The best part of Magento 2 is it supports the latest PHP version and includes security improvements. That gives an added speed to the site compared to the older version.
Unlike Magento 1’s messy dashboard, version 2 also has a comprehensive, user-friendly and interactive dashboard. You can see and find all information in one place and navigate around the site easily.
In terms of SEO, Magento 2 has quite improved features. It can prevent duplicate content, enable the meta tags for each page, and optimize the site for mobile use.
Why Do You Need Hosting for Magento?
Even though Magento 2 has overcome the most cited speed and performance issues in version 1, hosting remains a vital factor in determining your site’s performance.
User experience and SERP go hand in hand. So, while hosting affects user experience, it also impacts the SERP position. So, hosting is integral to the Magento website.
What Factors Make A Good Magento Hosting?
Because hosting determines your Magento site’s performance, base your search of Magento hosting on the following factors.
Site Traffic
Site traffic plays a pivotal role in your choice of Magento hosting service. Every hosting service primarily serves requests per unit time slice.
So you need to prepare for an anticipated number of requests during regular and peak times. Choose the hosting service that can match the load of your site traffic.
Hosting Type
There are primarily two types of server hosting based on server maintenance: managed hosting and self-service hosting.
Managed hosting is costlier as it comes with a technical team who looks after everything from maintenance and configuration of the server to implementation of updates and issue fixes. In contrast, self-service hosting is a cheaper option where the client has to manage everything.
So choosing the hosting type based on your maintenance need can save you a lot of cost and time.
Server Type
The choice of server significantly impacts your site performance. A dedicated server will ensure optimal performance even under high traffic as you will have the server run at its full capacity for your site. However, it usually comes with a heftier price tag.
On the other hand, shared and VPS servers could be cost-effective, but they come up with a limitation on disk space and speed. Weigh options based on your traffic needs and the need for server customization.
Compatibility
Not all web hosting servers are compatible with Magento 2. Only the servers that support PHP 5.4+, MySQL 5.6+ and Apache 2.x can run your Magento online store seamlessly. Check if the hosting service supports these technologies.
Security
An e-commerce site is vulnerable to hacking. The only solution to avoid your site getting hacked is by enforcing the highest level of security. Always look out for web hosting providers who provide security features like daily backups/live backups, suPHP and IP blocking in addition to SSL and SSH encryption support.
The Top Magento Hosting Provider
If you have come to this section, you want to see our list of Magento hosting companies. Here are our top picks:
Nexcess
Pros: Best for managed e-commerce Magento hosting
Nexcess is the best available managed hosting service provider for Magento. They offer outstanding download speeds and high server performance. If compared to standard web hosting services, their service can be 13 times faster.
The hosting service uses Apache 2.4, MySQL 5.7, and PHP 7.0 / 7.1, and along with SSD and RAID for cloud storage. Another primary reason for its wide acceptance is the ability to scale the Nexcess platform automatically.
For $49 per month, it provides support for 20 users, 50 GB space, 10 domains and 1TB bandwidth.
Bluehost
Pros: Best for affordable hosting
Bluehost is one of the oldest web hosting providers that offer Magento hosting with several great features at a highly affordable price. The server response time has always remained high, with requests from many regions taking less than a second to serve.
It performs exceptionally well even under high traffic. It also offers shared hosting, VPS and a dedicated server, making it ideal for various businesses. In addition, it also provides PHP7, HTTP / 2, NGINX cache and unlimited web traffic and disk space.
Pricing starts from $29.99 per month, which can be reduced to $14.95 per month if you get the plan for 36 months.
A2Hosting
Pro: Best for super-fast hosting
A2Hosting promises to deliver 20X faster hosting compared to average speed. Moreover, it offers 99.9% uptime commitment, unlimited email accounts, NVMe storage, 24/7/365 Guru Crew support, website staging and more.
Pricing starts from $20.99 per month, which will cost $14.99 per month for 1 year and $9.99 per month for 3 years.
Cloudways
Pros: Best for hosting a website on top cloud infrastructure
Cloudways is one of the most popular managed cloud hosting providers for Magento, known to use the latest technology. While it boasts developer-specific features like Git, staging environment and collaboration tools, it is also suitable for beginners.
It’s famous for allowing users to host their Magento application with top cloud infrastructure providers. It supports Google Cloud Platform, Vultr, DigitalOcean, Linode and Amazon Web Service.
Pricing starts from $10 per month.
Hostinger
Pros: Best for affordable managed Magento hosting
Hostinger is a world-renowned managed Magento hosting company that offers excellent features at a low price. It’s famous for speed, ease of use, aggressive Magento caching, and decent customer service.
It offers PHP, MySQL and cPanel access to the developers for free. It also provides free domain names. And you get a few unique benefits that no other hosting company offers, such as a minimum of 100 GB SSD storage, free CDN and Google Ads credit.
Though the monthly renewal plan costs $18.99 per month, you can get a discounted price of $9.99 per month when purchased for an extended period.
Find Your Magento Hosting Now
While you are looking for a Magento hosting company, you need to weigh the features they offer. Even if you might have just started or already own a Magento-powered online business, it always makes sense to look out for the hosting services that can meet your needs.
Hosting is just a drop in the ocean of e-commerce business. You might also want to buy a business email or a support center to establish your brand better. If you choose your hosting provider wisely, you can use the time and savings to build up your brand.
