image via Magento.com
(This post was originally published on June 12, 2014. We’ve updated it for accuracy and completeness.)
At nChannel, we’re always doing research for our clients. Recently people have been asking, “What’s the best company to host a Magento store?” Unfortunately, the information available is sparse. It seems every guide out there is either poorly written or written by the hosting company itself.
We wanted to alleviate the burden of researching every company for you. So, we’ve compiled a list of all the essential information you need to know when choosing a Magento hosting provider. This top provider list has recently changed since Magento started heavily promoting their Cloud product and we’ve seen some companies stop advertising Magento hosting offerings.
Who are the best Magento hosting providers?
If you would rather skip the explanation, here’s a link to:
nChannel’s Top 8 Magento Hosting Providers
nChannel’s Top Magento Hosting Providers For Small to Medium Sized Businesses
nChannel’s Top Magento Hosting Providers For Large Sized Businesses
However, if you’re looking for a more in depth explanation of why I chose these companies, then keep reading.
Comparing Different Hosting Types
A big differentiator between hosting providers is the type of hosting they offer. The 4 hosting types you’re going to run into are Shared, VPS, Dedicated and Cloud. Each type is going to have its advantages and disadvantages based on performance, cost and level of control. Here’s a quick overview of the differences between each type.
1. Shared
Shared hosting means that your account is sharing resources with multiple other sites on the same server. If you’re just starting out, then shared hosting is usually a good place to start. It requires less maintenance and technical skills as a merchant. You won’t be in charge of security – you’re hosting provider should set up firewalls and other applications. Lastly, shared hosting costs less because you divvy up operational costs with other users on the same server.
As you grow though, you’ll experience problems with the limited bandwidth and lack of control with shared hosting since you’re sharing a server with others. You’ll wanted dedicated resources to handle your large volumes of data. (However, there are cases where shared hosting is preferred over a dedicated server.)
2. VPS
With VPS, your hosting account is on a server with other hosting accounts, but you have more specifically dedicated resources for performance. Resources are divided up evenly across accounts. However, if one account crashes the server, then you all go down.
3. Dedicated
Dedicated hosting means that your server(s) are yours only. You can fully optimize for the specific needs of your website and don’t have to worry about other accounts on the server causing issues that might impact you. While you’ll pay more for a dedicated server, you’ll have more control.
4. Cloud
With cloud hosting, there are a network of servers on which your website can be located. While you may not know exactly which server and which rack your hosting account is on, you’ll receive dedicated resources across the entire network. The main benefit is that you now have additional redundancy against hardware failure on any one server. Also, cloud hosting can be more flexible. In some cases, it can even auto-scale to handle bigger bursts of traffic such as from flash sales, without needing to pay for extra resources year-round.
When deciding between hosting types, it comes down to how big your eCommerce store is and the level of performance you can justify paying for. Just remember, hosting reliability and performance directly impact eCommerce revenue. If your Magento store is slow and often crashes, you’re going to lose sales and your SEO will be impacted.
How to Compare Top Magento Hosting Providers
Beyond type, here are other top ways to compare different hosting providers: price, support, Magento experience, PCI Compliance, and level of management. Here’s what to look for in each of those categories:
Price
Costs are going to vary depending on offered services and hosting types, as you saw above. Consider what you’re willing to pay for and what you can’t afford.
Support
Support is going to be the main differentiator between hosting providers. If something goes wrong with the server, you need to be able to reach someone right away.
Magento Experience
Magento is a big piece of software that takes more resources to run than other shopping carts. And as an open source platform, merchants can customize their store to their unique needs. Make sure you work with an experienced or certified Magento partner. Otherwise, you’re going to waste too much time and money.
PCI Compliant
Merchants don’t often enough consider whether their Magento hosting provider offers PCI compliant shared servers. PCI compliance is not only a matter of security, but a matter of law. For a deeper conversation about what you need to know about PCI compliance check out Mijireh’s article here.
Managed vs Unmanaged
Another term that comes up a lot when comparing hosting services is whether they’re managed or unmanaged. Unmanaged hosting plans come with no or very few additional services. You’ll basically get a server with an operating system installed. You’re in charge of adding anything else you might need like data backups.
Managed hosting plans, on the other hand, come with any number of extra services such as automated backups, malware scanning, status monitoring, and more.
When reviewing providers, take a careful look at what management services they provide and what they don’t. If you can’t take care of maintenance and management yourself, you’ll want to make sure you pay for a fully managed service. While this is a good list of factors to consider, there is of course more information to look at. The list would grow quite long and could be different from company to company based on your individual needs.
For more simple matters you can make sure the server meets all these requirements, or even check how others optimize their servers. However, our recommendations will be based primarily off of user reviews and these five categories.
Top 8 Magento Hosting Providers
Here’s a quick summary of our list of top 8 Magento hosting providers. Check out in-depth descriptions of each below.
| Provider | Ideal Company Size | Magento Partner | Support | Price | PCI Compliant |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ZeroLag | SMB | Select Technology | 24/7 | Request Quote | Yes |
| Platform.sh | SMB | N/A* | Chat & Email | From $50/month | N/A |
| Nexcess | SMB | N/A | 24/7 | From $19.95/month | Yes |
| AlphaHosting | SMB | N/A | 24/7 | From $10.80/month | Yes |
| MageMojo | SMB/Medium | N/A | 24/7 | From $300/month | Yes |
| JetRails | Medium/Large | Magento Marketplace | 24/7 | From $350/month | Yes |
| Anchor | Medium/Large | N/A | 24x7 | From $700/month | No |
| Tenzing | Large | Silver | 24/7 | Request Quote | Yes |
| *Chosen to operate flagship Magento Enterprise Cloud Edition |
|||||
Best Magento Hosting Providers: Small to Medium Sized Businesses
ZeroLag (by TotalServerSolutions)
ZeroLag offers fully-managed hosting for Magento webstores. They are a Magento Select Technology partner and provide services for Magento Enterprise and Magento Community. Their hosting environments are custom-configured for your business requirements and accommodate businesses of all sizes. Learn more about Zerolag.
Platform.sh
Platform.sh provides cloud hosting for Magento Commerce 1 and 2. PHP developers will enjoy that their main API is Git, you can manage projects within your terminal, and they have built-in composer support. You can start a 30-day free trial with Platform.sh or plans start at $50/month per site. Learn more about Platform.sh.
Nexcess
When it comes to medium sized businesses, Nexcess is by far the favorite among users. They offer reasonable prices, but what’s even more impressive is their dedication to their customers.
I read in many places that when customers dealt with Nexcess it felt more like a small company rather than an enterprise and that their customer service was outstanding. I even saw that Nexcess took the time to answer their customers’ questions in a Reddit AMA. They’ll be able to handle any Magento based questions you have. As far as medium sized businesses go, you’ll be hard pressed to find a better Magento hosting provider. Learn more about Nexcess.
AlphaHosting (by SimpleHelix)
Formerly Simple Helix Hosting Solutions, AlphaHosting is a fully-managed hosting provider that offers shared, cloud and dedicated hosting plans. They currently power 30,000 Magneto webstores and over 100,000 domains. They also offer 100% U.S. based support staff. As of march 2019, Alpha Hosting now offers 24/7 phone support, along with ticketing and emails. Learn more about Alphahosting.
MageMojo
MageMojo specializes in dedicated hosting for Magento webstores only. They use the Amazon Cloud to host their servers. Their plans start at $300/month and include a free migration, 24/7 Magento Expert support, dedicated IP addresses and SSH access. See comments below for positive feedback about MageMojo. Learn more about MageMojo.
Best Magento Hosting Providers for Medium to Large Companies
JetRails (by eBoundHost)
JetRails provides a fully-managed Magento deployments in the Amazon Cloud and on dedicated servers. They’ve been around for over 20 years and promise 100% network uptime. As a fully-managed service, they reduce your operational burden by handling the technology for you. If you’re looking for Cloud hosting, then JetRails, a Magento Marketplace Partner, could be a good option for you. Learn more about JetRails.
Anchor
Anchor is a Magento hosting and deployment system that ensures your Magento webstore stays up and running. They provide fully automated code deployment, simple self-service roll back and environment cloning. Customers only need to issue a single command to deploy your Magento code into one or more sites. Their plans start at $700/month. Learn more about Anchor. Please note that Anchor is out of Australia and seem to primarily focus in that region.
Tenzing
Tenzing provides hosting for Oracle, SAP Hybris and Magento. They optimize hosting on bare metal infrastructure as well as scalable cloud hosting in the Amazon Web Services Cloud. With Tenzing, you only pay for the infrastructure you use, allowing for scalability during your busy periods. They are a Magento Silver Partner. Learn more about Tenzing.
Last but not least…
The right Magento hosting provider for you is going to come down to exactly that, you. Different people will have different expectations for their providers. These providers are simply the best place to start. Don’t immediately sign into any long term contracts. Try whichever provider you think will work best, and if you like it, great! But if your store is running slowly or the support is lacking, you can always switch providers. Many of the companies even offer free migrations from one provider to another.
And as always, when you get your store up and running, don’t forget to integrate it with your ERP system, Amazon, eBay, and more.
As for my experience, Magecom is a good development company specialized on magento platform. They provide quality development service with best integration and support service worldwide. I hired them for my webstore and I am satisfied with their service.
Totally agree with your list. We made our own list of UK hosting providers for UK. You can check it here https://www.mavenecommerce.com/blog/best-uk-magento-hosting-providers/
I’m running my magento at Versio, thay are fast and give great support. I have my shop a few years and the magento hosting starts at 4,99 a month. Very good. You can find it at: http://bit.ly/1RK59ri
[…] Top 5 Magento Hosting Providers | … – The best companies to host your Magento store. A guide to the top things to look for & avoid from Magento hosting providers. Must read! […]
Here in Spain we have the provider http://experta.pro and we have amazing performance, you can see on http://es.intertaping.com
Nexcess has been getting worse. The last straw was when I get a message at midnight ‘sorry we deleted your site, how would you like to proceed?’ At this point I’m having up to three Nexcess problems in one day. They’re also making it difficult to leave!
I personally like Rackspace and Cloudways for magento hosting. Especially Cloudways since they are offering one click installation feature and Varnish, Memcached, Apache and Nginx stack. They also recently announced support for Magento 2, which is now available in their console.
I’m hosting my Magento on a VPS at Digital ocean, i can scale it when my website grows and get bigger.
It starts from $10 a month for 1 GB memory and 1 CPU, 30 GB SSD hardisk, realy fast. You can order it with my link and
get $10 credit: http://do.co/1VhGD3N
Please check this benchmarks of Magento 2 with PHP 7 on Cloudways. Good Results compare to others provider.
Source: http://www.cloudways.com/blog/magento-2-with-php-7-on-cloud/
I have my Magento store on ecomlane.com. Reliable and fast VPS. I’ve been live for 10 months and have never been down.
I have good experience with Nexcess and SiteGround, uptime and hosting performance is good. I will upgrade to VPS plan when my site reachs 2000 visitors/day
I found that this review is good for choosing Magento hosting because it’s based on hosting performance http://magentoexplorer.com/the-5-cheap-best-magento-hosting-companies-compared
I work at Cloudways. I really liked the detailed Magento hosting performance review.
Cloudways specializes in providing managed cloud hosting servers that are especially optimized for Magento. Our platform enables Magento developers and merchants to easily host their apps and stores on five popular cloud hosting infrastructures including DigitalOcean, AWS EC2, and Kyup etc.
It would be great if you could test the Cloudways platform and provide your valuable feedback. 🙂
Nexcess has an Android app as well https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.wNexcessWebHosting
Well, you should do another article, and give it a try others like SuperHostingest, which for me is the best hosting, they have plans of unlimited hosting, domain and SSL for less than 5 dollars the month. They have 24/7 support, money back guarantee, pretty good dedicated servers from 108$ and more. Test some more hostings and give this article an update. 🙂
Yes, superhostingest.com is the best
I have to completely disagree with this assessment. As a long-time Magento developer and author (I’ve written 3 books on Magento: search for me on Amazon), I cannot imagine using anyone other than a company specifically focused on Magento hosting. We put all our clients on MageMojo. If you’re using one of the big players, you’re overpaying, and if you go with a budget provider, you will never experience the level of performance you need.
MageMojo is our preferred (and I get no financial benefit from this plug) because their support staff lives and breathes Magento. Many worked at Magento, as well. They respond to *any* issue we have 24×7, usually within a couple of minutes, too. They use a special hypervisor type of server configuration whereby even though you may be on a shared box, you are not sharing resources. They use SSD’s standard, too.
Unless you’re doing $50MM or more a year, you’re either going to pay too much or get too little. Believe me, we have actually tried most of them over time, or our clients have, and we always come back to MageMojo.
I have yet to have a client move FROM MageMojo. I have had others move from RackSpace, Nexcess and many others.
Remember, you get what you pay for.
I would have to disagree with not only this post but this comment. I’ve had many clients move off of magemojo due to their canned support responses and failure to eliminate reoccurring hosting problems that affect ecommerce business revenue. Every host has their issues, what matters the most is the path they take to resolve and improve their service.
Very informative article, thanks! Indeed, LiquidWeb is a far more expensive than other hosting providers but it offers a lot of options. It might be good to read this review if you can’t make a decision and choose a hosting provider that will be the best for you.
What is the approximate definition for Small, Medium and Large businesses when it comes to these providers and their plan descriptions? ie: daily number of orders or monthly traffic?
John Haselden this is such a great information you have shared with us. Magento is the most preferable platform in the ecommerce market. It is also one of the robust and powerful platform and also the first choice of most developers and organizations. Magento needs hosting services for your online store. There are lot of hosting providers but we always find difficult while choosing which one is the best in terms of hosting provider. Few of the known hosting providers including
1. Siteground
2. IdealHost
3. A2hosting
4. Eleven2Hosting
5. InterServer
6. TMD Hosting
Source : https://magenticians.com/best-magento-shared-hosting/
In order for an ecommerce website to grow bigger and to have more visitors (potential clients), it needs a stable host that will keep it up and running all the time. When I was looking for magento ecommerce hosting I was looking for one that gives option to easily upgrade or downgrade the plan when needed. Security and fast speed are also top priorities when looking for hosting. That’s why I recommend you always choose a plan that includes SSL certificates, CloudFlare CDN and SSD storage. You’ll notice the difference.
2nd that for MageMojo! Been with them a couple years now after moving from a great host but one that didn’t specialize in Magento. What a difference in performance for the same price. Support always terrific too. Just wish they had live chat support.
Have to say I didn’t take this article too seriously once I saw it excluded MM
[…] nChannel’s Top 7 Magento Hosting Providers […]
This is very comforting, Im about to start spending more on our hosting to go with them but I really feel it’s going to make a difference
[…] Fonte […]
Avoid MageMojo at any cost now.
1. Billing system based on sessions count via GA is glitchy and always trying to charge you much more than you actually owe them.
2. Important terms of service are hidden.
3. They will charge you for all remaining unused time of contract the moment you tell them to cancel the service. I was charged for remaining 19 months (about $1800). I had no any chance to learn these terms when I entered this contract since they did not provide it anywhere personally to me or publically to everyone.
I consider them now as average company with dishonest behavior. At the moment I’m posting this info they just stopped to respond my messages for 5 days already.
Very useful article.
If you are going to make an eCommerce store, then try considering Magento hosting. Being a popular CMS for eCommerce stores, it brings hundreds of benefits. Magento hosting comes with advanced security features that protect your digital shop from hackers and intruders. It comes up with reliability and scalability to give up to 99.9% of the time. The control panel has various options for personalization. It means that you can customize the working of your site according to your taste.
Navicosoft offers good, cheap magento hosting services.