How to Choose The Best Magento Hosting?

If you want to host your Magento store, you will require a powerful cloud hosting provider. With a solid hosting service provider, your web store can handle unprecedented traffic spikes. A powerful hosting service provider can also help you minimize server downtime. A managed hosting platform takes care of server management issues and provides you the flexibility to focus your energies on achieving your business goals.

Many Magento hosting service providers claim to be the best and that is the real challenge. Not every Magento hosting provider will cater to your business needs. Therefore, it is better to give considerable thought before making any decision to choose the best Magento hosting service provider. Remember one thing more. Don’t go for the so-called Magento hosts that claim to provide services for a low price.

Table of Contents

• What To Consider In The Best Magento Hosting Provider
  • Security
    • Dedicated Firewalls
    • SSL Certificate
    • Two-Factor Authentication
    • IP Whitelisting
  • Uptime
  • Compatibility
  • Speed
  • Technical Support
  • Pricing
• Conclusion

What To Consider In The Best Magento Hosting Provider

In this section, I will highlight a few important aspects that you, being a store owner, must consider when it comes to opting for the best Magento hosting provider.

Security

Security is one of the important concerns for Magento store owners. Today, online stores have become vulnerable to online attacks including, credit card information theft, fake transactions, etc. To counter these cyberattacks, online store owners must be well prepared. When you decide to opt for the best Magento hosting provider, you must ensure that the package you are getting, offers:

Dedicated Firewalls

Being an online store owner, when you decide to opt for the best Magento hosting, you must ask the service provider if they offer dedicated firewalls. The dedicated firewalls protect your online store against any dangerous online attacks.

SSL Certificate

Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificate has become a necessity for every website. Even Google now identifies a website that is not protected by SSL certificate with a Not Secure tag. If you run a Magento store, It is high time to opt for an SSL certificate to ensure that your store remains safe. Both free and paid SSL certificates are available. If you are searching for the best Magento hosting service provider, do remember to check if the hosting service is offering the SSL certificates.

Two-Factor Authentication

The two-factor authentication, commonly known as 2FA, is an additional security layer that helps you avoid any unwarranted attempts to access your Magento hosting service account. The dual check mechanism ensures that no one breaches into your account.

IP Whitelisting

With the IP Whitelisting feature, the Magento store owners can have a set of trusted IP addresses which they can use to access their web stores. This particular feature also helps them to block any other IP addresses to ensure a secure SSH/SFTP connection. If you are using a managed Magento host, you can add any IP address that you want to whitelist and save it in the system.

Uptime

If you are running a Magento store, you must ensure that your store has 99.99% uptime. It is a fact that the slightest of downtime can lead you to lose potential customers to your competitors.

Compatibility

Magento is a robust and open-source CMS. The Magento developers tend to roll out new versions periodically.

Compatibility is one of the most important aspects to consider for Magento store owners. When it comes to choosing the best Magento hosting for your online store, you ask the hosting provider if the support for the latest Magento version, i.e. Magento 2.3.2, and PHP version 7.x is available.

One of the major advantages of hosting your online store on Managed Magento hosting is that it provides you with powerful stack that improves the performance of your Magento store.

Speed

Speed and performance are two of the most important factors that Magento store owners must consider when it comes to deciding on the choice of the best Magento hosting service. The question is: Why speed is important for a Magento web store? It is a fact that if a web page takes more than three seconds to load, the visitor will leave the website and will navigate to another website that loads faster. Consequently, you will face a potential loss in your sales and revenue. Hence, for Magento store owners, speed is of utmost importance.

A managed Magento hosting can help online store owners address this speed-related issue by providing an optimized stack, that comprises of advanced cache mechanisms like Varnish, Redis, and Memcached to reduce database operations required for each page request. Moreover, to improve page load time, a managed Magento hosting service provides a combination of Apache and Nginx web servers. With so much to offer, you can’t refuse the Managed Magento hosting service package. Go for it now.

Technical Support

Here, I must share some important statistics about the importance of customer support services for online businesses.

“Speed of response (89%), speed of resolution (89%), and friendliness of representative (82%) are seen as the most important aspects of the customer service experience, regardless of channel.”

Now, these are staggering numbers. Customer Support Service plays a vital role in the success of online businesses. Fortunately, managed Magento hosting service providers, like Cloudways, offer 24/7/365 expert technical support to address your hosting-related issues. Moreover, Magento store owners can use a ticket-based system to communicate their server-related issues to the team. Also, the expert cloud engineers can help you migrate your Magento store to Cloudways - a managed hosting platform - with ease. (Note: One migration is free).

Pricing

When it comes to selecting the best Magento hosting service for your online store, pricing becomes a major factor that can impact your decision. There are many Magento hosting service providers that claim to offer the best price. This is generally not true. I recommend you not to fall for the ‘cheap’ price trap. Paying a little extra to get all the benefits of managed hosting is not a bad idea, as it will go a long way in producing the results that you, being a Magento store owner, desire to achieve.

Conclusion

No matter how the ecommerce industry evolves in the coming years, Magento is here to stay. With the latest Magento 2 version, this open-source CMS has gained more ground, and is actively helping merchants run their online stores without any hassles.

If you want to take advantage of Magento 2, you must opt to host your online store on a Managed Magento hosting service provider like Cloudways. Why? Well, being a managed cloud hosting platform, it offers a user-friendly interface, coupled with optimized Magento servers. Also, the powerful technology stack that includes advanced caches and databases, ensures optimum performance, speed and 99.9% uptime.

One thing more, Cloudways offers Magento store owners the freedom of choice to host Magento servers on any of the top five Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers, namely Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Engine (GCE), DigitalOcean, Linode, and Vultr.