Best Hostings for Magento and What to Consider When Choosing

Hardware

Magento is very resource-consuming, so the more powerful server you can afford, the faster your site will work (though a properly configured weaker server may perform better than an improperly configured powerful one). It would affect both conversion rate and Google ranking.

The most important components of hardware performance are processor, memory (RAM), and disk storage. The processor (CPU) should be robust (surprise). More cores, threads, cache, and higher clock rate will never be too much 🙂

Memory — for Magento webshops, it is not recommended to run with less than 512Mb RAM (desired at least 1Gb). We’d still recommend 2Gb for comfortable work for small or low-traffic stores, adding more while the traffic or number of products grows.

Disk Storage – nowadays, you can hardly find a server with insufficient disk size. The average Magento site would run comfortably with 5GB, but extra space wouldn’t cost much. For example, storing backup or data import files and product images may be needed, so it’s better to order more space. For better performance, it’s desired to use SSD storage instead of HDD.

Server Location

The closer your customers are to the server, the faster the site will load, so you should host a site in the country where your clients are. For sites oriented on the global market, using CDN would be a great idea as static content will be delivered from the server closest to the customer.

Administration & Support

If you have a dedicated server, you can have your system administrator or hosting provider’s staff take care of your server. In both cases, the technical team should be very experienced with Magento setup and troubleshooting. If you would like to do certain server operations yourself, you would need a convenient server control panel, such as cPanel (unless you have good Linux administration experience and can do everything using the SSH command line), provided by many hosting solutions.

When selecting a hosting provider, check their reviews about support staff – responsiveness, competence, reaction time.

Security and Reliability

The hosting provider can offer a firewall, SSL certificate, and DDoS attack protection. Other essential features are server monitoring/alert and backup tools/services – if your provider offers them, it’s great. Many hosting providers provide RAID 0 data storage – which also increases the system’s reliability.

Operating System and Web Server Magento are built to work on a Linux platform, and we would suggest CentOS for a dedicated server because it is an enterprise-level OS. As for webservers – there are holy wars about what is better – Nginx or Apache.

Server Performance Utilities

Magento requires solid caching to perform well, so either your admin or hosting provider should set up the following tools on the server:

• ✅Memcached
• ✅APC
• ✅Redis
• ✅Varnish (a more advanced tool, should be configured very carefully).

It is unnecessary to have all these tools. Sometimes APC will be enough.

Long story short, if we research a traditional classification system, then hostings are divided into:

• ✅ Shared. Cheaper, easier, but less flexible. For example, if you buy shared hosting, you already have something configured with minimal settings. It turns out that you cannot configure some things, for example, choose a different web server — for example, in case you have Apache installed, you can only use it and can’t move to Nginx.
• ✅ Dedicated (which can be physical and virtual). It’s the case if you want something more serious. We often advise customers to choose a virtual dedicated server by default. Still, for some regions, for example, Georgia, where such solutions do not work well, we recommend choosing a physical one.

Many hosting companies provide shared packages within the $5–20/month range. With this plan, your site will share the server resources with tens or hundreds of other sites on the same server: CPU, disk drive, RAM. It means that the performance of your server will depend on how much bandwidth and resources you and your ‘neighbors’ are using.

Apart from the hardware, you also have a typical operating system/server environment with other users, thus limiting your ability to change server settings. For example, Magento requires some PHP libraries, which often are not provided by default.

Theoretically, Magento can survive in this environment but don’t expect it to work fast or handle more than several connections at a time, and forget about Magento fine-tuning.

An important exception is that some hosting providers offer premium shared hosting packages optimized for Magento. Usually, fewer clients or sites per server and additional features you won’t find on shared hosting like LiteSpeed Enterprise servers, SSD drives, Memcached, SSL certificate, etc. Pricing starts from $25.

This type of hosting can be used for entry-level Magento shops with up to several thousand products, a couple of store views, and average traffic. We would suggest the ‘professional‘ package to most clients as having the best cost/value ratio based on the features provided.

🧡 Magecom’s Recommendation: Nexcess

The key to efficient hosting is reliability and trustworthiness. We recommend Nexcess for this reason, as we’ve worked with it on several projects and can guarantee that it meets expectations.

The service providers are available 24/7 to help clients in every way possible. These are UptimeRobot stats of one of our websites hosted on Nexcess. 100% uptime looks impressive (and it mostly is).

 

The Nexcess CDN helps reduce the load on the website’s origin server. It is because the static content is served from a different server than the one hosting the website or web application itself. Servers are placed in Europe, North America, and the Asia Pacific.

All plans come with automated daily backups stored on off-site servers for up to 30 days.

While working on the project, we roughly divide sites into small, medium, and large in order to make them easier to distinguish. Based on this, we already understand the cluster, its settings, and the pricing.

Architecture	Small	Medium	Large
	amount of products: 1,000 concurrent users: 1-10	amount of products: 1,000-20,000 concurrent users: 10-100	amount of products: > 20,000 concurrent users: >100
Nexcess	Managed shared Magento hosting	Managed Magento hosting dedicated or VPC	Managed dedicated Magento cluster
Price	$49–$69.30/month	$179–$849/month	$1,499.95–$8,999.95/month

Physical Dedicated Server

Unlike shared hosting, a dedicated server means that your site is the only site on the server and doesn’t share the hardware resources with others. You are free to set up any operating system environment, web servers, caching, and database utilities, change any settings, and customize everything you want. Often hosting providers offer control panel and setup help.You should consider a dedicated server solution if you have many products, several stores, or a high number of daily visitors. However, if your business grows, you might need to upgrade the server in the future (some hosting companies provide upgrade features, while others might only offer migration to more powerful hardware).

🧡 Magecom’s Recommendation: Hetzner

The key to efficient hosting is reliability and trustworthiness. We recommend Hetzner for this very reason, as we’ve worked with it on a number of projects and can guarantee that it meets expectations.Hetzner specializes in providing its customers with virtual hosting and renting dedicated servers. At the same time, the client can count on basic tariff plans and choose between Dedicated Root Servers.

Like many hosting companies that own their data centers, Hetzner offers its customers a colocation service. You can be sure that your equipment will be in the first category.

Hetzner hosting allows customers to register their favorite domains in popular domain zones (national and international).

In addition, Hetzner also offers several other valuable services, including the sale of SSL certificates and search engine optimization.

While working on the project, we roughly divide sites into small, medium, and large in order to make them easier to distinguish. Based on this, we already understand the cluster, its settings, and the pricing.

Architecture	Small	Medium	Large
	amount of products: 1,000 concurrent users: 1–10	amount of products: 1,000–20,000 concurrent users: 10–100	amount of products: > 20,000 concurrent users:>100
Hetzner(Dedicated Physical) Eastern Europe, Asia	Assuming we do not create a cluster Virtual dedicated instance	Assuming we do not create a cluster Bare metal dedicated server I7 intel with 64GB RAM	cluster that contains “n” dedicated servers
Price	$17/month	starting from $46/month	starting from $1,000/month

It shares the physical server’s resources with several other sites. It is a part of a dedicated server with its own node/resource pool. Each server with its operating system can have several VPSs, which a particular user controls. So for a client, it looks entirely like a dedicated server and has all its features except, maybe, upgradeability.

Small businesses often choose this type of hosting that needs settings flexibility and decent performance but can not afford a dedicated server.

🧡 Magecom’s Recommendation: Amazon Web Services

The key to efficient hosting is reliability and trustworthiness. We recommend Amazon Web Services for this very reason, as we’ve worked with it on a number of projects and can guarantee that it meets expectations.

If the business region is Europe, USA, Middle East, Pacific Region, we most often recommend Amazon, which offers businesses a wide variety of hosting options for their ecommerce sites at a low cost.

🛒 Case Study. We successfully created a highly loaded architecture based on AWS for one of our clients, a French women’s clothing store. Now it works well when it’s loaded with 10,000+ concurrent users. You can learn more details on the separate case study page.

While working on the project, we roughly divide sites into small, medium, and large in order to make them easier to distinguish. Based on this, we already understand the cluster, its settings, and the pricing.

Architecture	Small	Medium	Large
	amount of products: 1,000 concurrent users: 1-10	amount of products: 1,000-20,000 concurrent users: 10-100	amount of products: > 20,000 concurrent users: >100
Amazon Web Services	Assuming we do not create a cluster t3.large-t3.xlarge 2-4 CPU 8-16GB RAM all services inside instance	Assuming we do not create a cluster t3.xlarge-c5.4xlarge 4-16 CPU 16-32GB RAM additional services: opensearch (elasticsearch) elasticache (redis) RDS (MySQL)	cluster n*c5.2xlarge additional services: opensearch (elasticsearch) elasticache (redis) RDS (MySQL) EFS (mount storage) ELB (Load balancer) CodeDeploy
Price	$60–$100/month	starting from $400–$700/month	starting from $1,000/ month

Cloud hosting provides server resources for the websites from extensive underlying networks of physical web servers, thus increasing or reducing capacity rapidly when needed.

Cloud hosting can be universal or Magento-optimized. Universal hosting providers include such well-known companies as Amazon Web Services (EC2) or Linode; they are unmanaged, so you will need a system administrator to configure or manage it. Magento-optimized cloud hosting solutions are pre-configured for the best Magento performance, can have a bunch of software tools for the best Magento performance (caching, search, backups, CDN, etc.), and are fully managed, so you don’t need a system admin.

🧡 Magecom’s Comparison of Cloud Hostings for Magento

Let’s compare three big cloud hostings – Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.

As a cluster we would like to use:

• ✅ M2 instances with 4CPU 8Gb RAM
• ✅ Database with 2CPU 16Gb RAM
• ✅ Elasticsearch 2CPU 16Gb RAM
• ✅ Redis 2CPU 13Gb RAM

Amazon Web Services	Instances – c5.xlarge – $0.17 * 2 RDS – db.r5.large – $0.29Opensearch – r5.large.search – $0.186 Elasticache – cache.r6g.large – $0.206	$1,022/hour	$735,84/month
Microsoft Azure	Instances – A4v2 – $0.286 *2 Azure MySQL – 2CPU 20Gb – $0.237 Azure Redis – C4 – 13Gb – $0.21 Instance with self installed Elasticsearch – A2m v2 – $0.119	$1,139/hour	$820,08/month
Google Cloud	Instances – c2d-highcpu-4 – $0.1499 *2 MySQL – 2CPU 16Gb – $0.1946 Redis – 16Gb – $0.299 Instance with self installed Elasticsearch – c2d-highmem-2 – $0.1225	$0,9159/hour	$659,44/month

With a savings plan for 1 year or 3 years, the price can be reduced from 30% to 60% in all mentioned cloud providers.

Cloudways

The Cloudways platform offers various features that simplify Magento deployment and administration for all users. The list includes SFTP and SSH access, 1-Click SSL certificate installation, CDN, automatic backups, monitoring, and hosting StackhunderStack.

One of the best things about Cloudways is cloning servers since Magento developers who work with many projects simultaneously usually need to clone a staging server for development purposes.

Price: starting from $12

A2 Hosting

It’s an example of a high-performance and speed-focused hosting company with excellent support. The uptime and loading speed are among the best in the industry. They host Magento on their Turbo Boost and Turbo Max Plans. When it comes to security features, it’s a good solution too. The Turbo Boost plan comes with unlimited storage, free site migration, and automatic backups.

This company has good customer support: If you have any concerns, you can reach A2’s customer support staff via phone, email, ticket, or live chat. Expect to get an immediate response when you send a message.

Price: starting from $59.99 for hosting a Magento store.

Hypernode

The solution is fully managed, which takes care of the maintenance and safety for users. Features and tools are constantly being developed, such as brute force protection, automatic protection against unwanted bots, various caching methods, etc. All of these features contribute to the performance and security of your Magento store and are deployed across the platform.

Hypernode supports all available Magento versions. Hypernode Magento hosting pricing is divided into development nodes and production nodes. All plans include a dedicated IP, automated backups, your choice of server location, Magento development tools and MageReport Premium.

Price: development nodes starting at €155/month; production nodes starting at €109/month

Choosing the right hosting is not an easy task and the key to your success. You can’t go wrong with any of the above, and best of all. Most offer a trial version and money-back guarantee, so nothing is lost. You can choose a hosting platform with as many features as you need. Thus, you will pay off and easily create a site in Magento. If you need advice or help, you can always contact us.