Nowadays, hosting is the most crucial part that affects a website’s performance. No matter what type of website you have, you need a good hosting provider, especially if you have an eCommerce website. The first thing we will go over is what hosting actually means.
In order to post your website on the internet, you have to host it first. Consider hosting as an online location where you store your website and all of its content and information. In order for your website to be visible to other people, you need to purchase a domain name. Every time someone wants to access your website, they will have to type your domain name in their browser.
Magento is an open-source eCommerce platform and comes of many types. The main types of Magento hosting are: Shared hosting, VPS hosting, Dedicated Hosting, and Cloud hosting.
Shared hosting means that your website will share the same resources with other websites deployed on the same server.
VPS(Virtual Private Server) hosting means that your website is hosted on the same server, but you have more resources to use for your website. Virtual Private Server hosting plan is ideal for hosting Magento large eCommerce businesses.
Dedicated hosting means that you own a server, and nobody can access it.
Cloud hosting is one of the most popular hosting solutions, simply because your website takes all the resources from a computer network.
Also, the Magento hosting can be managed and unmanaged.
The managed Magento hosting provides you with all the support you need, already has an integrated backup system, and your OS and server setup is managed.
However, unmanaged Magento hosting is way cheaper than managed Magento hosting, simply because you will be responsible for setting up the server, the security, and everything that makes it functional.
Buying guide
As we discussed before, Magento hosting is great for people that want to host an e-commerce store since it gives you full control over your website. It also has great flexibility and scalability. Moreover, any good host for Magento supports Linux x86-64, Apache 2.x/Nginx 1.7.x, PHP 5.4+, and MySQL 5.6+.
However, there are several other things you should consider before choosing your Magento hosting providers. Let us discuss how you can choose the best Magento hosting services for your website!
1.Server location
The first thing that you should consider when choosing your hosting provider is the server location. Depending on the location of the customers you want to target, you have to choose a server location near your customers’ location. This way, your customers will have lower loading screens. For example, if you want to open an eCommerce store and you want to target people from the USA, you should find a Magento hosting provider that has servers near the USA.
2.Speed & performance
Have you ever opened an online store page and you had to wait for the page to load more than a minute? That’s sometimes a good case because you may find pages that crash instantly when you open the page. This is the second thing you should consider when choosing your provider: speed & performance. Having your customers wait even for a minute is bad, because nowadays they can easily find another e-commerce store to buy from.
3.Patching & Security
Another thing you should consider when choosing the Magento hosting is patching & security. This is something really serious, and I will tell you exactly why: how would you feel if your website has to fix a bug, update or improve its security systems while you have a lot of customers navigating on your store? You wouldn’t be so happy. That’s why you should choose a Magento hosting provider that offers great security for your website and knows when would be a good time to patch it.
4.Backups
Backups are also very important for your website. How many times have you lost important data? Even if you lost only one time, it was really frustrating. Imagine updating the source code of your website, making a mistake, and not being able to undo it. That’s why backup is so important, you can fix a lot of mistakes, and you can go back to older versions more stable and with better performance.
5.Support
Without support, your website would probably be dead in a few weeks. So read carefully the type of support your Magento hosting provider offers. 24/7 technical support is the best support you can get. Having a team prepared 24/7 to solve any technical issues that may come up to your store is crucial. That’s why you should choose wisely.
Choosing the Best Solution for Your Website
How should you choose the best solution for your website? If you’re new to this industry, you should consider buying Shared hosting only because your website won’t need so many resources at the beginning, it’s cheap, and you can upgrade it to VPS hosting or Cloud hosting when the website gets bigger.
However, if you have technical skills, you can choose unmanaged Magento hosting because it gives you more freedom and is way cheaper. If you’re new to this industry, you can also look for one-click installation themes that are really easy to use. Also, consider the location of the server, the speed & performance it has, patching & security, backups, and the support your Magento hosting provider offers. Keep reading to find out who has the best hosting for Magento.
Different types of Magento
Before looking for the best hosting for Magento, we will go through the main types of Magento.
First of all, there are 2 Magento editions you can choose from – Magento enterprise edition and Magento community edition. The community edition of Magento is free to use, while the enterprise edition of Magento costs $15.500. I want to discuss the main differences between the community and enterprise edition of Magento.
The key features that the community edition of Magento offers are: obviously it’s free to use, no yearly license expense, it is perfectly designed for developers and people that want to build their website by themselves, you get a lot of themes and extensions, mobile commerce, a persistent shopping cart that tracks what a potential customer adds in his cart, flexible pricing to easily create discounts or free shipping, analytics and reports, product configuration, SEO and a lot more really good features.
The Magento enterprise edition has all of the features listed above. The Magento community edition has, a list of great key features. The Magento community edition is great if you have a small eCommerce store. Magento enterprise version works with a large number of products, unlike the Magento community version. With Magento enterprise, you get up to 83% improved performance when loading products and also support full page caching, which severely reduces the wait time to load a page.
Magento enterprise also has rollback/backup systems integrated into Magento. Magento enterprise version has way better scalability because the site runs on multiple servers, which gives you the possibility to store more data. With Magento enterprise, you also get faster checkout flow and advanced administration roles, logging, and access permission.
To conclude the main differences between the Magento community edition and the Magento enterprise edition: Magento community is better for small eCommerce stores because you get the main features your website needs and it’s free, while the Magento enterprise is better for big eCommerce stores because it gives you the better overall performance, quick loading on pages and you can add a lot more products and pages.
There are a lot of Magento sites online, but you should choose the hosting platform that offers Magento 2 version.
Magento 2 vs Magento 1 – Worth the Upgrade?
Magento 2 was announced on November 17, 2015, with a lot of new features and improvements. Magento 2 is great for flexibility, boosting your online sales, and fast adaptation. You get customizable data grids, more customization options to streamline workflow and view performance with Magento 2.
An important new feature in Magento 2 is now built-in for both community and enterprise Magento owners. With very little effort, Magento 2 eCommerce store owners can have the same performance built inside the Magento 2. Magento 2 offers great marketing features for the Enterprise stores, and you can schedule marketing campaigns with an easy-to-use interface.
So, is Magento 2 worth the upgrade? Yes, Magento 2 is clearly worth the upgrade. Magento 2 is the most powerful and customizable eCommerce platform available right now. It doesn’t matter if you are an admin user, a developer, or a customer. Magento 2 offers incredible features and functional improvements from the previous version of Magento 1.
If you want to upgrade to Magento 2, you can use Customer Paradigm as your partner. You can also find a lot of new cool extensions for Magento 2 on the internet, such as Magento 2 FAQ extension, one-step checkout Magento 2, elastic search Magento 2 extension, and other really helpful extensions that you can install on your store. Magento’s open-source platform makes it easy to customize your websites the way you want. We’ll go over the best hosting for Magento 2 websites that the internet has to offer.
Top 7 Magento hosting companies
HostGator
About
HostGator was founded in 2002 in Florida. HostGator is a leading provider of Shared, Reseller, VPS, and Dedicated web hosting plans.
They reached the first 100 customers in 2003, and one year later, they had 1000 active customers. In 2008 they reached their first 100.000 customers. Most likely, you may have heard of HostGator before, due to their ads.
However, what really stands out for the company HostGator is its hosting services, offering both Windows and Linux OS for web hosting plans. Every hosting plan comes with unlimited bandwidth & disk space, free MySQL transfer & script transfer, and free website & domain transfers.
Although they have a lot of great features on HostGator, their Magento hosting plans make them the best. Let’s see what other features does HostGator provides.
Features
The best feature HostGator has is the 99.9% uptime guarantee (the maximum you can get from a company), a 45-day money-back guarantee, their customer service support, and the free SSL certificates for maximum security. Another great feature HostGator offers is WordPress hosting, which is an environment specifically designed to cater to WordPress websites that fit perfectly for your website.
HostGator is the best Magento hosting provider, especially if you have an eCommerce website. Their basic plans also offer free email marketing software, which can really boost an eCommerce website, and the cost starts at 2.75$/month. This feature is really easy to use and helps you build your audience via email marketing campaigns and newsletters.
Last but not least, HostGator gives you the possibility to easily transfer your website and domain free and also a one-click installation for your themes. There’s a lot to love about the best overall Magento host.
Support
HostGator offers a wide customer support range 24/7/365, including phone, live chat, and ticketing via email. It is critical for customer support to be addressed swiftly, and this feature is necessary for any of the best Magento hosting websites.
The Support portal includes a lot of useful tools, like HostGator getting started, Optimization, Design Tools and Security. You are one click away from getting the best customer support tools a web hosting provider can get you.
HostGator also provides a toll-free phone number, and you can talk to someone from the support department in less than a minute. However, if you don’t feel like talking to someone, you can use the live chat to explain your problem and get the right solution from it in no time!
Cloudways
About
Cloudways is a fully managed Magento hosting solution platform that empowers businesses with simplicity, freedom of choice, and performance. The platform is built on best-of-breed technologies and a great leading infrastructure that creates a smooth managed cloud web hosting experience.
The platform is easy to use, and you can easily go live in just a few minutes with your e-commerce website. Cloudways also gives you the possibility to build and manage your web apps more efficiently. Last but not least, they also say that they are committed to delivering fast performance, great server, and website security and scalability. Let’s check up on some of their features and support!
Features
Cloudways offer a variety of features. You have the least restrictions and more freedom to build your eCommerce platform, and you have control over your applications and servers, auto-scaling performance for less load time, transparent pricing that fits every pocket, and the option to extend your server disk space.
Another great feature Cloudways offers is Free Magento Full Page Cache which gives you one of the fastest Magento managed hosting stacks. This will significantly improve your eCommerce Magento store.
Their hosting plans offer SSD storage Magento hosting that is 3 times faster and has increased stability and performance. They also offer auto-healing managed cloud servers, so you don’t have to worry about your website crashing. Their CloudwaysBot send you real-time notifications of different events, and you can pay as you go, meaning you pay only for the resources you consume, free migration to Cloudways, free SSL certificate, and unlimited applications. The plans’ pricing starts at 10$ per month.
Support
Their team offers support 24/7 365 days for any Magento hosting plan you choose. You can also choose between three levels of support: Standard, Advanced add-on, and Premium add-on support.
The Advanced and Premium support has a few key features: plugin/theme troubleshooting, server error investigation, a private slack channel that connects you with the senior engineers from Cloudways, and phone support for in-person support.
The Standard support is free if you choose Cloudways for hosting your website. The Advanced support pricing starts at 100$ per month, and the Premium starts at 500$ per month. For the Advanced and Premium support, you get Alerts when something is wrong with your store/website, and Cloudways also starts a Proactive Investigation to see what’s causing the problem.
A2 Hosting
About
The company known as A2 Hosting was founded back in 2001 by Bryan Muthig. It was initially released as a hobby, and now they offer their hosting solution worldwide. They first started in a two-room office in Michigan, and now they have offices all around the globe.
They first started with the Shared web hosting plans that scaled to a complete product line, including Reseller and Dedicated server solutions.
A2 Hosting is among the best Magento hosting providers if you’re looking for a fast hosting provider. A2 Hosting’s plans offer a variety of hosting types: shared hosting, reseller hosting, Virtual Private Server hosting, and dedicated servers.
Features
Their prices range from 2.50$ for a shared Magento hosting and can get up to 82$ for a dedicated server. A2 Hosting for Magento is currently at a discounted price for a limited time, so make sure you check the prices before buying it. The main hosting features that make A2 Hosting one of the best Magento hosting providers are 20 times faster turbo servers that have better SEO rankings and higher conversion rates, 24 7 support that is available 365 days, free account migration, day money-back guarantee if you’re not satisfied with their Magento hosting services and a 99.9% uptime servers.
They also provide free SSD storage that is 300% faster than a normal HDD, free SSL certificates, and global data centers for better performance and speed.
A2 Hosting offers the best security features for Magento, and you can choose between free SSL, wildcard, premium SSL, and Advanced SSL.
Support
A2 Hosting’s line of support is available, as I said before, 24/7/365.
You also have multiple choices when it comes to the support center: you can call them and explain the problem you have, you can chat live with one of the team members, or send an e-mail to the company.
Another great feature you can find on their website is the hosting reviews section. You can find what other people say about their hosting services and compare customers’ opinions with the company’s offer.
You can also find the most asked questions they tend to get about the hosting services, and you can easily find the right answer to your question.
SiteGround
About
SiteGround first appeared in the Magento hosting industry in 2004. They are well-known for their exceptional employees, their great work environment, and the services they offer. SiteGround has offices in North America, Europe, in Australia, and in Asia.
They offer a wide range of hosting plans, like web hosting, WordPress hosting, Magento hosting, and Cloud hosting.
The best thing about their platform is that Google Cloud powers it for powerful hosting services, high performing e-commerce, and they use 100% renewable energy match. Images are stored and cached via Google Cloud, so you don’t have to worry about losing your data.
Pricing plans at SiteGround start at 6$ a month for a start-up store and can get up to 14$ a month for web hosting, where you have unlimited websites, free SSL, unlimited databases, and a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Features
The key features SiteGround offers are the high redundancy and availability, using multiple power feeds and uninterrupted network connectivity, low latency and fast connectivity because they use Google as their main data center, green-friendly hosting plans, and multi-layered security.
Another great feature SiteGround has is the daily backups that keep up to 30 copies for each account. This helps the customers resolve most of the site issues with a 1 click restore.
The AI anti-bot system is what makes SiteGround really special. They managed to create a bot that can effectively block millions of security threats every day. The safe staging tool allows you to develop your Magento store safely by testing any changes on a copy first before going live.
Support
SiteGround offers a 24 7 support center using live chat, phone support, and helpdesk tickets that are solved in about 15 minutes. They also have instant self-help that constantly gives help on every page, a smart AI chatbot that can solve specific issues, and automated solutions that provide an instant solution if a similar problem was already solved.
Another great support feature they offer is the quick response time, usually in about 15 minutes. SiteGround has well-prepared people ready to solve any problems, and 90% of the problems are solved at the first contact.
The review section can be checked on their website, and you can also see the name of the person that wrote the review, the problem he had, and also the website that he got help with.
Bluehost
About
Bluehost is a leading web hosting solution company founded in 2003. The company offers a wide range of solutions, starting from complete web solutions and extensive tools to expert support.
Bluehost offers the standard types of hosting plans: Shared hosting, Virtual Private Server Hosting, and Dedicated hosting. Besides the standard ones, they also provide WordPress hosting, Managed WordPress, and eCommerce hosting.
Their basic package includes a free domain name for 1 year, a free SSL certificate, 1 click WordPress install, and 24/7 support.
Bluehost gives you access to hundreds of free and premium website themes great for your Magento store. This way, you can customize your Magento store really fast, easy to use, and more attractive.
Features
Bluehost offers a variety of hosting features, such as already built-in security, fast web pages, e-commerce features for your Magento online store, and world-class technology.
One of the best features Bluehost offers is the free website scripts. You don’t have to worry anymore about implementing new scripts or testing them. You already get message forum scripts, form-mail scripts, social networking scripts, and mailing lists that are perfect for targeting specific people on your Magento online store.
The cheapest hosting plan they offer is 2.95$ a month, and the most expensive one gets up to 120$ a month if you choose the dedicated web server hosting plans.
You can also get advanced features, like an unmanaged dedicated server hosting plan if you want open-source code, an improved control panel that makes it easier to use, and multi-server management if you need more than one hosting service. You can manage them all in one place.
Support
Every hosting plan includes a 24/7 support service that can be contacted by phone and live chat.
Depending on the hosting plans you choose, you will get a greater support level. Choosing the shared hosting will give you the basic support plan while choosing the Virtual Private Server hosting will give you the best support specially designed for your server. Dedicated web server hosting includes real-time notifications about your online store and 24/7 server monitoring.
Although the Bluehost platform offers good support for an online store, it might not be one of the best Magento hosting providers for you because they mainly use WordPress for e-commerce websites.
Hostinger
About
Hostinger is a Lithuanian web hosting platform created and present in the online market since 2014. It has several offices in the US, Indonesia, and Brasil. Hostinger has about 30 million active users and is one of the biggest free web hosting providers with really low prices. If you want to get the best prices for your online Magento store, Hostinger has, without a doubt, the best prices.
Their cheapest offer starts at only 1$ a month, including the web hosting and a domain name.
You can easily create a new website with Hostinger, or you can migrate your already existing website for free. You can also choose between single shared hosting, premium shared hosting, and business shared hosting. Hostgator offers Magento hosting on its shared plans, which start at only 2$ a month.
Features
Hostinger has great features if you want to open a Magento online store. The eCommerce hosting package is great for smaller Magento sites that can always be upgraded to the eCommerce+ package if you have a big Magento store. You can easily start building your Magento online store with the designer-made templates they provide, a great shopping experience on any device, simple inventory management, and hundreds of payment options.
Their hosting services plans help run tailor-made ads on Facebook, Google Shopping, and other platforms. You can easily track your Magento store growth with built-in reports and sales tracking. You also get a lot of tutorials on the website.
Each plan includes unlimited bandwidth, unlimited storage, free domain, unlimited e-mail accounts, and unlimited websites.
Hostinger is a great hosting solution for a new Magento online store due to the variety of features they offer.
Support
A lot of web hosting companies offer crappy customer service that makes you feel uncomfortable using them or rather frustrated than happy. Hostinger offers one of the best support interfaces in the industry.
Their customer support line is available 24/7 via chat, e-mail, online tickets, or knowledge base. They do not offer phone support, but that’s not a problem because they give the customer access to the knowledge base, which is a pretty cool feature to have.
Describing the way they communicate with the customers and the way they reply, you will only feel better after talking to the support team from Hostinger.
FastComet
About
FastComet appeared on the market in 2000 and is a web hosting company based in San Francisco. Their first cloud hosting service was released in 2013 for more than 50.000 stores and small businesses.
They are operating in 11 data centers around the globe. Their main focus is on the SSD Cloud hosting services, such as shared hosting, Virtual Private Server hosting, and dedicated hosting. The best feature that people love about FastComet is their data centers’ location and the availability this feature offers for websites all around the globe.
The hosting plans offered by FastComet are all based on a cPanel control panel that gives you the one-click installation possibility with their auto-installer tool.
Features
FastComet is a great start for small businesses and online Magento stores for shared and cloud hosting and offers a lot of great features.
Especially the shared hosting plans have a lot of great features: SSD storage, free site migration, free SSL certification, and Cloudflare CDN, free domain, daily and weekly back-ups, and a lot more.
FastComet offers a 45-day money-back guarantee, better pricing than other companies, hack-free Protection, and real 24/7 technical customer service. It’s not a pay as you go type of service, where you can’t use more than what you have paid for.
Compared to other companies like GoDaddy, HostGator, or Bluehost, FastComet has the lowest starting price, which is $2.95 a month, and you also get a lot of free features: malware scan & report, SSD only servers, daily backups, multiple server locations and security features like SSL unlimited for life.
Support
FastComet has a 24/7 available support service that can be reached by phone, live chat, and e-mail. The FastComet phone number is toll-free. The easiest and fastest way to reach them is with live chat. The response time will be in less than 10 minutes.
FastComet also offers a knowledge base for those customers that want to solve the problems themselves or want to learn more about eCommerce platform problem-solving.
If you’re the type of person that likes knowledge and you want to learn more information, you can check their tutorials and how-to guides.
FastComet’s customer service is one of the best you can find on the internet with friendly and professional specialists.
Conclusion
In this article, we discussed what Magento is, which type of Magento you should use if you want to open an e-commerce store, and what is the best Magento hosting websites you should use.
We discussed the main differences between Magento 2 and Magento 1 and why you should choose Magento 2 for your website. We talked a bit about the best hosting Magento platforms you can use, which are: HostGator, Cloudways, A2 Hosting, SiteGround, Bluehost, Hostinger, and Fastcomet. Choosing the best Magento hosting platform is not easy. Still, it would be best if you considered how big your e-commerce store is, the plans’ pricing, and your website’s overall performance and scalability.
We hope this article was really helpful for those of you that want to open a Magento store and can’t find the optimal hosting solution for their website. Just follow the steps we went through in this article, and we are sure you will find the best hosting for your Magento store!