Magento is the market leader in the eCommerce platform with nearly 30% market share and also the world’s favourite platform to build eCommerce stores.
Since Magento 2 is highly complex software, many Magento hosting providers even offer installation along with the hosting services to assist in setting the up of the store. Don’t be superflux in joy. The IT installation depends on the type of hosting you are buying.
In layman’s term, Magento hosting is an ideal solution to host your Magento 2 developed eCommerce store to offer a fast, reliable and secure website to your visitors.
There are basically 4 types of Magento hosting: Shared Hosting, VPS Hosting, Dedicated Hosting and Managed Hosting.
What Hosting will be best for your online store hugely depends on your budget and requirements? After you evaluate what you want from your store, you can decide which option to go for because certain factors like cost and infrastructure come into play.
Shared Hosting
Shared Hosting is the cheapest and is often suitable for small level eCommerce online stores.
Imagine living in an apartment complex. You are living in your room, along with many people living in theirs, all under one roof. You have to share the resources with each other, like a guest room, couches, TV, Refrigerator, parking lot, backyard etc. Shared Hosting is similar to it. You have to share the hosting elements and resources with everyone, including CPU time, memory, and disk space.
And you can’t change anything on the server as it will impact other hosting websites. You can only use what the hosting provider has to offer to run your online store. This plan works until you don’t turn out to be big and feel a need to shift from this to VPS or dedicated hosting.
VPS Hosting
VPS Hosting or Virtual Private Server Hosting is similar to shared Hosting but varies on certain accounts.
Imagine yourself living in a rented condo. There are only a handful of condos per building, and you are responsible for your own condo, including its repair and maintenance. You are free to use it as the way you want (as per contract), but eventually, its wear-and-tear is entirely your responsibility.
Moreover, your allotted resources aren’t shared with anyone but you. For instance, in a building, there’s a finite space to allow residents in the form of a condo. Whether you rent or buy a condo, your space and resources are yours only and your sole responsibility. Similarly, resources such as CPU time and memory are shared by everyone in VPS hosting, but portions of those are allotted to each account that no one else can use, other than the account holder.
Dedicated Hosting
Dedicated Hosting means you are the sole owner of the server, and no one else can host a site on there without your permission. You can host as many sites as you want as per the dedicated hosting requirements.
Imagine owning a house. The land and the house on it belong to you. You can construct more storeys’ as per your need and requirements because eventually, you are going to oversee them and will be responsible for each and everything.
You have to see which dedicated hosting you need to go to. They come in different plans to suit your requirements and budget. If your website is massive, then you might need a couple of dedicated servers to host your website without producing any errors and scaring your visitors away from your web store.
Managed Hosting
Most people confuse dedicated hosting with managed Hosting and consider them the same. Now, there’s a difference, and that’s the IT administration provided by hosting providing company to set up and configuring hardware, technical support, patch management, system maintenance, monitoring, and updates.
Besides these, it entirely depends on the hosting provider to include other services like backups, load balancing and disaster recovery, vulnerability scans, intrusion detection (ID) and DDoS (distributed denial of service) prevention and mitigation.
Note: The pricing of managed hosting differs from the dedicated hosting.
Now, how will you know when it’s time to move to the next level of hosting if you are starting your website from shared Hosting?
SERVER RESOURCES
Since you are allowed some CPU time and memory from the Hosting, your traffic will tell you when it’s time to move. When a certain bandwidth starts touching, it’s the right time to shift from apartment to your own condo or to a house.
It, however, entirely depends on how much people love visiting your website pages. The possible times when you know when to switch from an apartment living to a condo are;
- A Growing Family
When you are living in a small room that serves the needs of two people max, and you are expecting your future child soon, or your parents are coming to stay with you as their retirement is around the corner, then it’s time to think for a bigger space; a condo. Yes, you can move to a house, but you will eventually need to have a budget for that.
Condo, however, is way cheaper. As discussed earlier, when your website becomes popular, it demands more CPU time and memory – and VPS hosting is your best bet.
- Customizations
Living in an apartment doesn’t give you permission to change anything over there. For instance, you want to use wallpapers on the wall and make it more decorative but can’t do it. However, in a condo, you can do it as you want, until and unless you don’t harm the property.
Sometimes, you require software to upgrade your website with certain functionalities, but sadly, it’s not available in your shared Hosting. However, upgrading to VIP hosting gives you the freedom to use the software within your allotted space as you can install your desired software.
WHEN TO MOVE FROM VIP HOSTING TO A DEDICATED HOSTING?
Talking about the condo analogy, moving to home gives you complete freedom to do whatever you want. You get the freedom to do certain things like using your desired software, but still, there are limitations to what you can do.
For instance, you can’t set-up your own GYM or can’t play a band there. The nose will certainly annoy people living in the other condos of your building, and they may end up complaining about you to the building officials to halt your activities.
Now look at this way; your friend wants to move in with you as he’s broke and doesn’t have a space to live. You can’t allow him to move as you have no space for him in your condo, and you can’t build an extra storey to help in his hard times. But with the house, you can.
You can build as many storeys’ as you want (civil laws differentiate from place-to-place).
When you moved to a condo, you were happy; but now, you have more members in your family, and your condo can’t host everyone with good space.
Your home gives you extra bathrooms, rooms, a big hall and backyard to play with your kids, dogs and can host a BBQ party. VPS is best for mid-sized eCommerce stores. They can host many sub-domains, too, but that doesn’t make it’s great for big web stores.
The CPU time and memory stay limited that restricts companies from running its online store on VPS hosting for a longer time. Often it’s noticed that when a person runs a busy website (traffic), then it creates a problem for other websites because the pressure starts getting on the server and eventually, all websites hosting on it suffer.
With increasing popularity, your traffic will eventually grow many folds, and that will force you to shift to dedicated Hosting, where you are the sole owner of all the CPU time and memory, and you don’t have to compromise with anything, anymore.
WHICH HOSTING PROVIDERS ARE BEST IN THE INDUSTRY?
Kinex Media is a globally renowned Magento development service provider that understands what service provider will remain best for your online store.
Undeniably, every eCommerce store has different needs and budgets that can’t be complemented by others just for the sake of saving money and resources.
We understand our client’s idea, vision and gather all the information to properly understand what the website can turn into in the future. It involves detailed market analysis because it helps us to suggest which type of Hosting will be suitable for your online store, without needing to switch from Shared to VPS or from VPS to Dedicated Hosting for a good amount of time.
What are the best Magento Hosting Providers that We Recommend?
As per our industry experience, following some the 4 listed hosting service providers are the best;
NEXCESS
Nexcess is a leader in providing next-generation Magento hosting at competitive prices. They have groomed countless businesses by offering SIP (secured Isolated Platforms) plans that are stable, secure, and scalable built-in Magento 1.x and 2.x hosting solutions. Comes with the great built-in features, you can optimize your Magento store on Nexcess server to skyrocket your eCommerce sale and extend the roots of your web store.
Shared Hosting: Starting from $19.95/Month
Dedicated Hosting: Starting from $549.95/Month
SiteGround
Founded in 2004, SiteGround paved its way to becoming one of the most secure, reliable and trusted Magento Hosting service providers with countless clients under its belt. The Magento Community Edition of the company offers a realistic and secure Magento hosting service that is powered to enhance yours and your customers’ shopping experience by many folds.
Shared Hosting: Starting from $4.95/Month
VPS Hosting: Starting from $80/Month
Dedicated Hosting: Starting from $229/Month
A2 Hosting
Incorporated in 2003, ‘A2 Hosting’ offers features that developers love and are business-friendly. Keeping close attention to the emerging technologies and marketing trends, ‘A2 Hosting’ brings relevant and universal changes to the server to support the current and upcoming changes for the perfect turnout to your eCommerce store efforts.
Liquid Web
Liquid Web is serving in the Web hosting industry for over the last 17 years and is widely known to fuel the business with fast loading, secure, reliable and powerful Magento hosting platform. The company has built a strong infrastructure with the mission to power mission-critical websites and applications and is committed to offering a realistic and memorable experience not only to businesses but to shoppers as well.
SONASSI
As Magento optimized hosting, Sonassi markets itself with top-of-the-line apps and strong technical staff. Sonassi is now owned by Iomart, is operates Magento 2 websites using its cloud infrastructure is data centers. Unlike AWS, they arrange dedicated private networking with bare-metal hardware. It is a good choice for large stores, as it provides at least 32 GB of RAM, 200 GB of SSD storage, and 8 CPU Cores.
RACKSACK
Rackspace provides fast, scalable, and secure cloud computing technology in common with AWS. Their cloud servers are located at US, Asian, and European data centers to ensure global scope, size, and agility.
Rackspace has an option for completely managed Magento cloud hosting for the AWS network in addition to unmanaged cloud servers. This ensures you can use the Amazon Web Service facilities without the difficulty and cost of running it yourself. Rackspace engineers will collaborate with the company to design, run, protect and optimize the AWS cloud using the managed cloud/
BLUEHOST
With Magento websites, BlueHost has two separate hosting choices to choose from: VPS hosting and dedicated hosting plans. It goes with domains, backups, auto-scalability and multi-server management, no matter which of the plans you pick. Other essential features include a CDN, special Wifi, security against spam, and more. In addition, Bluehost has incredible support; you can use chat, email or call to contact 24/7.
Both options have three planes for pricing: Normal, Enhanced and Ultimate. You can pick one of these according to your store’s requirements.