In recent years, we have witnessed huge growth in online e-commerce stores. The COVID-19 pandemic also acted as a catalyst to fuel this growth by forcing people to switch their buying habits and hop onto the e-commerce bandwagon. Thus, it becomes highly important for the businesses to use the right set of tools for their online businesses. It includes the e-commerce platform as well as the other technologies to cater to their vast and ever-growing customer base.
Magento is one such reputed and popular e-commerce platform. Starting its journey in 2008, the growing popularity of this platform brought it to the notice of Adobe, and Adobe purchased it in May 2018 for a whopping $1.68 billion.
Although there are many e-commerce platforms such as WooCommerce & Shopify available in the market, Magento stands out due to multiple reasons. It is open-source and free at the beginning. It is specified for only e-commerce purposes and covers all the possible functionalities that a business may require. Even its default offerings are enough to serve small and large businesses alike. If you have built your online store on Magento, you have all the essential tools to deliver a pleasant user experience in a buyer’s journey like product categories, recommendations, cart abandonment reminders, and much more.
After the e-commerce platform, the hosting provider is another important thing to define your online business success. A great website hosting makes your site accessible and loads quickly and eventually gives a better visitor experience. However, the reverse is also true.
There are many bad providers in the market which cause the online store to load slowly and lead to high bounce rates. If you are looking for the right hosting provider for your Magento store, then you are reading the right article. In this article, we will go through all the aspects of hosting your Magneto store. Let’s begin by understanding what web hosting is.
What is Web Hosting?
When a website is in the process of development, the web pages are first created on the developer and designer’s computer (termed local). These web pages are then moved to a server for testing purposes. These servers are termed staging servers. Finally, to take the website to live for the audience, hosting is required which can provide storage space on a server on the internet. Once, the website is live by the hosting, it is accessible by the other computers on the internet.
Importance of Choosing the Right Hosting for your Magento Store:
The content and data of the website need to store somewhere. The owner of the Magento store has to pay rent to the hosting provider, but the hosting companies vary a lot. If you don’t choose a good hosting, you will face the following issues:
1. Customers don’t stay on a slower site:
The days of slow internet have gone long ago. Today’s internet users expect to load a website page in 2 seconds or less. Apart from the customer experience, speed also matters a lot in getting a high rank on Google SERPs. That’s because if the site is not fast then the search engines will take time to index and discover the website quickly.
Google searches for pages by branching out from your homepage or sitemap and “crawling” the links. If your site’s load times are slow, your pages may be excluded from Google’s index.
Utilizing a reliable hosting company ensures to manage the volume you may expect. It includes sudden traffic spikes and other factors that affect performance like caching and Content Delivery Networks.
2. Customers can’t access vulnerable sites
Before going live, an e-commerce site owner should implement the proper security measures to prevent the store from any cyber fraud or getting hacked.
Every web browser has its own set of security features for better security. Chrome the most widely used browser is focused to keep users safe as they surf the web. If your site is not HTTPS encrypted, then it will be considered “not secure” if your target audience is browsing through Chrome. Seeing “unsecure” in the URL bar will not lead to gaining consumer trust in your brand.
To get “https” in your site URL, you will require an SSL certificate. Without an SSL certificate, Chrome will warn the users that the “Site is not secured”. Additionally, an SSL certificate will also boost the site’s speed.
While some online merchants fear that adding an SSL certificate is costly & complicated, a good hosting provider includes it in its package.
3. Downtime is not affordable:
Obviously, there will be no sales on the site, if the customers can’t access it. The amount of revenue you may lose during one hour of downtime depends on what time the site gets down along with your daily sales volume, traffic, and the number of people impacted.
Gremlin calculated that for every minute of downtime, Amazon would lose $220,318.80 while Costco.com would lose $11,082. If this is happening frequently, it will tarnish your brand image and sink your business. In certain hosting, there is a scheduled planned maintenance which makes the site down. It can be manageable but unplanned downtime is a threat as you can lose your high-time sales due to this unplanned downtime.
While considering an e-commerce hosting provider, check its reviews and find its reputation regarding downtime.
Important Considerations in Choosing the Hosting Provider for your Online Store:
Some hosting providers that provide an affordable plan are really luring but it is important to do some research before finalizing. The web host should also be able to grow with you. It is possible to migrate from one host to another but it can be a hassle for you as well as for your customers. Thus, choose the best hosting provider upfront so that you can familiarize yourself as you scale up.
1. Encryption:
In the e-commerce industry, security is the utmost priority when comparing the top hosting companies. But this is not the only deciding factor. Generally, the hosting providers claim to provide these security features:
- Firewalls
- SSL Certificates
- DDoS protection
- Spam filters
- Domain name privacy
- Virus protection
E-commerce sites are most prone to hacking as they have sensitive data of users like the debit/credit card information along with personal details. They may inject code into your website that infects visitors’ computers with viruses or hijacks advertising space. They can steal your passwords or encrypt all of your files and demand a ransom to unlock them.
2. PCI Compliance:
Generally, the hosting providers come with PCI compliance. When you are managing huge amounts of personal & financial data of users, a breach can be hazardous. Also, don’t think you are too small or too big to get it to happen to you.
You will be surprised to know that up to 90% of the logins in e-commerce sites can be fraudulent. Almost 20% of the buyers if come to know about any breach in a store will immediately stop buying from that store, and 30% of the buyers start buying from that company.
Online retailers should be PCI DSS compliant to protect customers’ information. The right web hosting provider ensures PCI compliance so that you don’t have to worry about it.
3. Memory Size:
An online store consists of lots of data including content and heavy images. With so many huge-sized files you must not want that it affects your store performance and customer experience. The major factors responsible for the slow-down of the websites are videos, high-resolution images, and PDFs.
The hosting provider should be capable of managing the bandwidth of all of your files size.
4. Backups:
Although an e-commerce website development company like ensures to reach the maximum security level and prevent any occurrence of data breach and hack, still a backup is essential to make your site running if things go wrong.
Apart from the data breach, you require backup in case you want to make major changes in the site or update, or any code goes wrong. Without the backup, you may lose all of your customer, order, and product data.
It is better to take the backup regularly, daily backups aren’t-out-of-the-question. These backups should be stored separately and be easy to access if you need to restore your site. If the hosting provider backs up its entire platform, you don’t have to do it manually.
5. Limitations in Account:
To make the most out of your hosting, do proper research and make sure to read the fine print. Check the features that you will get in each plan and if you can upgrade in future in case you want to scale up. Make sure you know exactly what each package includes:
These are some common limitations you may encounter during the comparison of your e-commerce hosting plans:
- Separate payment for the SSL certificates
- Limited file storage
- Additional charges if you don’t use the payment processors of the hosting provider
- Limits on sales volumes
- Poor reporting options and analytics
Types of E-commerce Hosting:
We can derive the hosting types into 3 different categories. E-commerce beginners and small retailers generally don’t host their own sites. The reason is web hosting solutions are more affordable and give multiple benefits.
1. SaaS Hosting:
SaaS (Software-as-a-service) is a type of cloud-based hosting. SaaS makes use of online-accessible, cloud-based software from a third party. By using a SaaS host, you can focus on expanding your business instead of worrying about the IT problems that would arise if you were self-hosting. In the SaaS hosting, the host will manage:
- Applications
- Data
- Runtime
- Servers
- Storage
- Networking
The software can be used anywhere as long as you have an internet connection. It generally consists of shopping carts, hosting infrastructure, software licences, and apps that let you integrate the system with accounting and reporting software.
Nothing needs to be downloaded to your local computer. There will be a monthly fee to use the software.
Thus, you don’t have to worry about any hidden charges. The subscription will cover everything from maintenance to security. Also, the SaaS platforms require almost negligible input from your end.
2. Self-hosting:
In the self-hosting, you have to own the physical servers. It can be a feasible option for the larger corporations such as Amazon, this option is out of the course for most online retailers. Although the self-hosting option gives complete control over what you do with the servers, it is of no use until you have the IT knowledge of how to leverage that flexibility.
You would be responsible if anything goes wrong from hardware malfunctions to software glitches. Also, it is a very costly alternative to the 3rd party hosting provider option.
3. Other hosting options:
Another cloud-based hosting option is infrastructure-as-a-service or IaaS in which you pay as per your usage. It is quite reliable & safer and you can also scale up with your growth.
In IaaS, a merchant generally pays one company to license the software and another party hosts the website. You will have full control over the infrastructure but you must know what features you require.
You control the runtime, middleware, operating systems, and data. Networking, virtualization, and servers are all handled by the provider.
This cloud computing model may be the most adaptable, but it’s also the most difficult to comprehend. If you are unsure of the capabilities you require up front, you may experience sticker shock because everything is billed based on usage.
When workloads are heavy, an IaaS provider may also encounter performance problems. An alternative to cloud computing is Platform-as-a-service or PaaS.
PaaS delivers software and hardware on the internet. To build applications, the users have to log in to a specific platform and control panel. Generally, the developer community use PaaS . They don’t have to begin from scratch or deal with extensive coding.
Best Magento Hosting Providers in 2023:
After understanding the criticalities and importance of hosting, it is time to look at the best options for hosting for your Magento store:
1. Hosted e-commerce platform:
In the hosted e-commerce platform, you get the platform integrated with hosting. In the Magento, you can get Adobe Commerce Cloud which is cloud-hosted. This means that Adobe provides hosting as part of the cost of licencing the product. The primary difference between cloud hosting and SaaS is that the merchant is still responsible for upgrades and maintenance.
Keeping up with the security patches and version updates required to have the most up-to-date secure version of Magento, or in this case, Adobe Commerce Cloud is time-consuming and labour-intensive. It is also work that should be done by Magento-certified developers.
2. SiteGround:
After the hosting by Adobe itself, we believe SiteGround is the next best hosting. All hosting plans from SiteGround include next-level technical support, Magento assistance, and security measures. You can choose any of their hosting plans.
The cheapest option starts at about $5 per month. The Magento starting plan’s hosting features include 10GB of storage space, 10,000 monthly site visitors, and free backups.
Key Features:
- Reliable Customer Support: Customer care is available 24×7 through phone, chat, and tickets for Magento queries. On-site chat provides instant responses while support tickets are often answered in less than 10 minutes.
- Security: You will get a free TLC certificate with any Magento hosting plan you choose. Thus, you will get a secure Magento store with SiteGround.
Pros:
- 99% Uptime: With SiteGround, your Magento site will experience nearly no downtime. When there is an outage, monitoring software notifies you. The majority of issues are resolved quickly.
- Faster Speed: The average loading time of the site is 1.3 seconds. Thus, you get a fast site for converting visitors into consumers and dominating the search engine results pages (SERPs).
- Multiple Data Centers: There is a data centre by SiteGround on every continent. You can choose the location of your data centre, guaranteeing that your target audience receives fast load times.
- Free Magento Installation: It is easy to install Magento on SiteGround. The support staff can do it for free.
- Standard Security: You get a free SSL certificate for any domain you purchase through SiteGround. It saves nearly $15 per year.
Cons:
- Storage limitations: They limit the amount of data you can save on your website. You will need to upgrade to the next plan if you want more storage.
- Renewals are expensive: After the first year, the Magento plans become more expensive. Renewals range from $14.99 to $39.99 per month.
3. MageMojo/Webscale:
Currently known as Webscale, Mageojo is one of the best Magento hosting companies you can get today. Whatever the issue you face in your Magento 2 store, the technical team would be able to handle and manage it.
Key Features:
- User-friendly interface: The admin interface of Webscale is easy to use. You can manage the site, invoicing, and much more from the control panel itself.
- Cloudfront CDN: Cloudfront CDN is an exceptional feature of the MageMojo. The CDN is hosted by Amazon Web Services and saves a cached version of your website on servers all over the world. The CDN speeds up your site’s load time.
Pros:
- Fast Servers: Fast servers are the USP of Magemojo. The site will get load faster than your competitors with other Magento hosting. You will also get a dedicated server, IP address, and ample SSD storage.
- Automated Backups: It will conduct an automated backup of your site. The saved version is readily available in case anything goes wrong with the live site.
- Free CDN: You get a MageMojo CloudFront Cloud CDN to ensure the fast loading of the website regardless of the location of your customer.
- Fast Customer Support: The customer staff of Magemojo is really fast and solves queries on the first encounter.
Cons:
- Expensive Entry plan: The only con of MageMojo is that it is quite expensive. Its cheapest plan starts from $98 per month.
4. Cloudways:
Cloudways is having a good reputation in the hosting industry. It can be a good choice who is seeking Magento hosting. PaaS hosting is a comparable factor for Cloudways from other hosting providers.
Key Features:
- Automatic Backups: Cloudways takes regular automatic backups of your site. Thus, you can restore a saved version of your site if the site issues any major issues.
- Real-time Server Monitoring: Cloudways monitors the performance of your site and also gives you notifications about any issues in the server.
- Customer Support: Just like any other hosting provider, Cloudways also provide reliable customer support to resolve any arising query.
Pros:
- Cloud Hosting: Cloudways stores numerous copies of your data on different web servers. If the main server fails for any reason, your site’s data will be safe on the cloud hosting. This is a critical failsafe feature.
- Self-Healing Servers: If the site goes down, the Cloudway uses an auto-healing feature to reduce downtime. Thus, till the site gets fixed, you can represent a cached version of the site to the visitors.
- Impeccable Customer Support: Customer support is reachable through live chat, phone calls, or tickets.
Cons:
- No cPanel or Plesk: You don’t get the standard cPanel or Plesk with Cloudways. It can be highly inconvenient for certain developers.
5. HostGator:
Hostgator is one of the most affordable Magento hosting companies. More than 800,000 store owners use the company’s hosting services. They provide VPS, shared, and dedicated hosting services. This Magento review will concentrate on the recommended VPS Magento plans for eCommerce Magento store owners.
The plan of VPS starts at $19.95 per month which includes 2GB of RAM, 120GB of storage, and unmetered bandwidth. On the other expensive plans, you can host any number of websites.
Key Features:
- Money Back Guarantee: If you are dissatisfied with HostGator’s services, you can get your money back within 45 days.
- Free SSL Certificate: HostGator will provide you with a free SSL certificate to assist you to secure your Magento store. The certificate will protect your data and enable you to make online payments over the site.
- Free Site Transfer: You get a limited number of free transfers within 30 days of signing up.
Pros:
- Highly Secure: HostGator is a very secure hosting and it also provides a free SSL certificate.
- Good Uptime: There will be the rarest of rare occurrences when your site will go down. You don’t have to be concerned about losing visitors due to low search rankings or a poor user experience.
Cons:
- Poor Support: Although HostGator excels in certain factors, it lacks excellent support.
- No backup feature: Hostgator doesn’t offer automatic backups as standard.
6. A2 Hosting:
The uptime and loading speed of A2 Hosting is among the best in the industry. The Magento sites are hosted on their Turbo Boost and Turbo Max plans. A2 is your best option for security features. Unlimited storage, free site migration, and automatic backups are included in the Turbo Boost plan.
You will also have access to 2GB of RAM. This package begins at roughly $10 per month. A2’s Turbo Max package, on the other hand, starts at roughly $15 per month. The Turbo Max plan includes the same benefits as the Turbo Boost plan, as well as 4GB of RAM.
Key Features:
- Rapid Customer Support: The support is available 24×7 through e-mail, phone, chat, and tickets. They will quickly resolve the problems.
- Security: As we mentioned above, A2 is really reliable for hosting purposes. You will get the SSL certificate which ensures that the Magento data is always secure.
Pros:
- Speed : Over the last twelve months, A2 had an average loading speed of 268ms. Visitors will have a better site experience if your site loads quickly. You’ll also have a better chance of ranking higher in the SERPs.
- One-click installation: In A2 hosting, you get the Magento software preinstalled on shared hosting accounts.
Cons:
- High Renewal Rates: The initial costs for A2 hosting are reasonable, however, the renewal costs are much more. In addition, if you don’t cancel the service 15 days prior to the end of the contract, your A2 hosting plan will renew itself automatically.
7. Hostinger:
For Magento users, Hostinger provides some of the most affordable web hosting packages available. They provide several web hosting services at various price points.
You get access to 100 GB of bandwidth, with unlimited data transmission available with the most expensive package. Depending on your desired price bundle, storage can be somewhere between 10GB and 100 GB. Pricing for Magento hosting begins at less than $10 a month.
Key Features:
- Fast loading: The average loading time of Hostinger is less than a second. A faster website always tends to give a better buying experience.
- Domain Name: All Hostinger web hosting payment plans come with free domain names for the first year.
Pros:
- Discounts: Hostinger frequently conducts promotions and discounts for its clients.
- Unlimited Features: By registering with Hostinger for Magento, you may use features like unrestricted bandwidth and emails.
Cons:
- Lower Uptime: Other hosting platforms provide amazing uptime, but Hostinger does not. It has a 99.74% uptime average. Even if it’s lower than some of the other businesses on this list, that number is still pretty high.
8. GoDaddy:
GoDaddy’s VPS, Business, and shared plans include one of the top Magento solutions. The shared and VPS options begin at less than $10 monthly, while the Business plan begins at about $20.
Key Features:
- Security: SSL Certificates are included with every package. By doing this, you can process payments on your website and keep it safe from hackers.
- Good Uptime: GoDaddy guarantees 99.99% uptime. This means that the functionality of your Magento website will stay nearly constant. You could lose potential clients if your website is down.
Pros:
- Domain Name: You get a free domain name in GoDaddy with all yearly plans.
- 24×7 Customer Support: In case of any issue, you can reach them through calls or chat.
Wrapping Up:
In this article, we have gone through all the aspects of hosting along with the details of the best hosting providers. At Ceymox Technologies, the best Magento development company in India, we are having expertise in developing e-commerce stores from scratch. Let us know your requirements.
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