The holiday season is right here! Make sure your Magento eCommerce store doesn’t upset your holiday plans. Spare 5 minutes to check out this best Magento hosting guide so that you don’t have to be bothered about your e-store during your celebrations.
Introduction
Imagine you’re hosting your Christmas Eve, and you get a call, “check your inbox, boss”! And you see a flurry of complaints from your angry customers about erroneous checkout when adding items to the cart, slow page loading when searching products, and more. Festive vibes are all consumed by tension in the air! You may criticize your e-commerce platform for all that happened, but it’s actually the backend infrastructure. You could have prevented this if you had chosen Magento hosting as your hosting provider.
Wondering, what makes us say this with confidence? Magento hosting, itself. Let’s get to know Magento hosting in detail.
What Is Magento Hosting
Magento hosting, as the name implies, is the type of web hosting that specifically hosts websites or applications built in Magento. While you can host your Magento website on any hosting platform, there are still chances your ‘other’ option may not do justice to your e-commerce store completely. Slow loading Magento store, poor security, etc, are concerns that often arise when you choose to host options other than Magento hosting for your Magento e-store.
Magento Hosting Requirements
Half of your idea of an e-commerce store has already succeeded if you decided to choose Magento. Choosing to get the best Magento web hosting guide can further ensure that your e-business won’t fail within the first 120 days and you will reap 100% success in the long term.
Well, Magento hosting indeed offers many benefits over any other hosting type. But it is maintenance-intensive and requires special hosting requirements to perform at its peak.
The foremost requirements for Magento hosting are LNMP and LAMP solution stack.
LNMP stands for:
- Linux operating system
- NGINX Server
- MySQL relational database management system
- PHP programming language
To fulfill these requirements, the Magento server should meet some or all the standards below:
- Linux Kernel x86-64
- Apache 2.x or NGINX 1.x Web Server
- PHP 7.3
- MySQL 5.7
- Composer
Apart from these, the other factor influencing the performance of your Magento shop is the RAM. So, for a small e-commerce business, we suggest,
- At least 8 GB RAM dedicated to Magento,
- SSD storage
Remember, your website’s performance is directly proportional to your user experience (UX), which plays a significant role in driving traffic and sales for your business. Hence, you should ensure to meet these standards to leverage the best Magento hosting experience for your e-store.
Benefits of Magento Hosting
Here is why you should go for Magento hosting specifically for your Magento store:
- Easy Installation
It is both quick and easy to install Magento to your web hosting account. For instance, with Hostgator, you can install the application in just one click once you are signed in to your account.
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrqL6090q3s
- Improved Performance
One of the frequent issues with the Magento development platform is poor performance, which may lead to problems like slower loading pages. This is basically due to the underlying infrastructure or the inappropriate hosting platform, to be specific. Choosing the right Magento hosting provider and plan can prevent performance issues while providing the power and bandwidth your Magento website needs.
- No Compatibility Issues
Making the wrong choice when it comes to choosing a hosting platform for your Magento website causes compatibility issues between the platform and the plan. But powering your Magento website with Magento hosting and the right hosting provider leaves no room for such issues.
- Better Security
You cannot afford to compromise the security of your online store. Choosing a web hosting platform as Magento ensures your online store is secure. Make sure to choose a Magento hosting provider that offers strong firewalls to protect your site from hackers. Also, look for a hosting plan with additional security features like the SSL certificate and security software to add when needed.
- No Hidden Fee
Your existing hosting partner might have charged you an upfront cost along with additional hidden charges when adding new apps to your account. But with Magento hosting, you can be assured that you don’t have to pay anything extra for using Magento with the plan you buy.
Choosing The Right Magento Hosting Provider
Your hosting provider will provide you with the infrastructure and several hosting services for the efficient working of your Magento shop. If you fail to choose the right Magento hosting providers, you may experience consequences like customer drop-offs and revenue loss.
Here are 5 key areas to focus on:
- E-store Size
Magento is an ideal platform for all business sizes: start-ups, small, mid-sized, and even large-scaled. So, the hosting provider you choose largely depends on the size of your online business. How? The larger your business, the more resources you will need to host and manage your e-store. For instance, if you drive a lot of traffic to your store, a shared hosting plan may not be worthwhile.
- Scalability
According to web hosting trends, web hosting is among the fastest-growing industries today. Increasing internet users is one of the top reasons behind this. As such, expecting a surge in the traffic on your e-commerce website is quite obvious (assuming your product line is in demand). To accommodate and manage peak traffic on your site, you may need to scale up your server. When exploring your options for Magento service providers, choose one that offers a setup that scales in and out automatically, depending on the site traffic. This way, you will never fall behind the demand, save significant costs by avoiding being over-provisioned, and prevent performance issues.
- Support
It is certainly the biggest differentiator for hosting providers. You may need immediate assistance any time of the day if you are running a real-time business and catering to a huge customer base. As such, you should look for hosting providers who are readily available and respond quickly to your queries. Also, consider the support channels they are available on, before making a decision.
- Website Performance
Website speed plays an important role when offering a remarkable user experience. Your customers, and even you as the site owner, have the patience to stay on a site that loads extremely slow. Sites that aren’t properly optimized tend to load slower. Hence, you should optimize your web pages and intelligent caching for website efficiency. Look for a hosting partner that offers affordable (or free) content delivery network (CDN) services.
- Cybersecurity
This is the most important factor if you are looking for the right hosting provider for your Magento site. You should find a hosting provider with its own security features because Magento’s security will not protect your hosting environment. If you fail to secure your site’s hosting environment, chances are intruders & hackers will attack the application layer and backend of your site and amend your filesystem or insert malicious code into them. Make sure the Magento hosting provider you choose offers sophisticated cybersecurity measures to prevent all types of cyberthreats. Also, they should appoint a dedicated SecOps team that monitors security feeds and implements fixes to protect your site against vulnerabilities.
Conclusion
There’s a lot you will invest in running your Magento e-store. So make sure to develop it to its full potential so that it delivers the desired results. Remember, website performance & security are two crucial factors behind the success of your Magento store. So, look for a Magento hosting plan that helps you manage them.