Shopping online has become a dominant trend and it is a fact that online stores have already started to replace brick-and-mortar stores.
Now in order to build a successful online store, you need a robust ecommerce platform that offers a range of features that facilitates building, deploying and maintaining online stores. In my opinion, Magento offers the best fit for all online business ideas.
Magento is a top-shelf ecommerce platform and delivers amazing performance regardless of the load. The platform is ideal for building everything from a single-brand to multi-store setups, and offer enough speed to beat the competition.
Now picking Magento as the ecommerce platform of choice is half the solution. You need a good Magento hosting to handle the volume of user-generated requests without compromising on the performance of the ecommerce store.
Fortunately, selecting the right hosting solutions is a simple matter of checking out the following factors:
Table of Contents
Performance
The performance of the hosting server depends upon resource allocation, the level of server optimization, the stack and the overall server uptime. In many cases, ecommerce sites are properly optimized but still face performance issues because of either (or both) lack of server resource allocation, an unoptimized hosting stack or lack of cache to speed up stack performance.
This usually happens when ecommerce store owners opt for shared hosting solutions where resources are shared among the hosted stores.
Security
A typical ecommerce store has a lot of sensitive information about customers, payment methods and other confidential data.
Platform security is an essential requirement to protect the stores against external (and internal ) attacks and ensure the security of the store data. At the minimum, the hosting solution should provide security measures such as SSL certificates, dedicated firewalls, and 2FA.
Compatibility
Compatibility between the ecommerce platform and the hosting stack components is a serious issue and an important factor in choosing the right hosting solution. In general, popular ecommerce platforms such as Magento demand a LAMP (Linux, Apache MySQL/MariaDB, PHP) environment.
It is the job of the hosting provider to ensure this compatibility so that Magento store owners can focus on the platform rather than worrying about issues generated by incompatibility issues.
Scalability
A budding ecommerce store does not require many resources and this induces many store owners to ignore future growth requirements. This is a serious concern because as the store grows, it requires more and more server resources for sustained operations. The scalability of the platform is an essential factor that should be taken into account when selecting a hosting solution for your Magento stores.
Support
No matter how good you are with technical issues, there are always issues that you don’t have time to fix. In such cases, the level of support delivered by the hosting providers is a make-or-break factor. You need support that is available round the clock and is knowledgeable enough to resolve your issues within a reasonable time frame. When selecting a hosting solution for a Magento store, always check out the reviews and check social media channels for the opinions of the existing users.
Data Center Location
User experience is an important reason behind the success of Magento stores. To ensure this, the location of the data center that hosts your server is very important. The closer the data center to the intended target audience, the lower would be the latency. As a result, the users would experience faster page load speed.
Additional Functionalities/Options
Hosting is a highly competitive industry and every provider tries to offer additional benefits to attract more customers. While the exact mix of options differs from provider to provider, at a minimum should include free SSL certificates, 1-Click application installation, and security of the server and the application.
Pricing
In the end, it’s all about money. Every service offered by the hosting provider is charged directly. In some cases, you have to pay a fixed amount to the provider, regardless of your usage. The best solution for this is a pay-as-you-go model in which a user only pays for the resources which they consumed in a billing cycle.
The Solution – Managed Magento Hosting
If you have gone through the above list, it is clear that shared hosting solutions are unable to provide all the right elements for the success of Magento stores. Now you as a Magento store owner, you have two choices – VPS or Cloud. In a VPS hosting solution, you have a dedicated server for your store. If the server fails for any reason, the store faces downtime. In contrast, a cloud server is a virtual server solution built with failover processes that guarantee minimum to no downtime.
The problem with both VPS and Cloud-based solutions is that of management. You as the server owner are responsible for server management and security. This is a tough challenge for many Magento store owners who have either limited time or technical skills.
The good news – there is a great solution that delivers all the power of a cloud server without the management headaches.
Introducing Cloudways
Cloudways is a managed cloud hosting platform built for performance. It is the perfect solution for all Magento stores because the platform takes care of all the server level issues (including security and updates). If you are serious about Magento stores, Cloudways is a great option that takes away all the headaches about managing Magento hosting solutions. The managed Magento hosting is further optimized by caches for both Magento 1 (Full page cache) and Magento 2 (Varnish).
On the Cloudways Platform, you can launch a cloud server AND the Magento application within minutes. Once the store is up and running, you can install a free SSL certificate (or bring your own certificate), scale server resources in a click, whitelist IP addresses for SSH and SFTP access and similar host of features that enhance your Magento store hosting experience.
Can’t believe that you get all of it in one managed hosting solution. Take a free trial and test it out yourself.
