What is Magento?
Magento is an eCommerce platform that is built on open source technology. It provides merchants with total control over the content, looks, functionality of their online store. It also gives them powerful marketing features, catalog management tools, and search engine optimization.
Magento is so popular that about twenty percent of all online stores in the world use it. This is due to its flexibility and ability to expand depending on the requirements of the store owners. You can use Magento if you have a couple of products and still be able to expand to thousands of products and still have your online store functioning well.
So now you have decided to use Magento for your online store. The next thing you need to think about is the hosting for your online store. Which hosting should you choose? What should you look for when deciding on the hosting company for your store? In this post, we are going to discuss the best hosting providers for Magento.
What to Look for in Magento Hosting
No matter the size of your Magento store, you will need to make sure that your hosting provider meets the following;
Compatibility
This is one of the most important things to consider when choosing your Magento hosting. You will definitely run into problems if your server does not meet the requirements of your Magento store. To make sure that you do not get compatibility issues, check at your Magento hosting requirements and compare them to the specifications that come with the hosting provider.
You should also look at recent technological changes and upgrades. For example, we have more users upgrading to PHP 7.x from PHP 5.x. Actually, Magento 2.0 and higher recommends the use of PHP 7.x. This reiterates the need for one to look into the future and try as much as possible to meet the changing technological needs.
It is, therefore, a requirement to check with your hosting provider to make sure that they meet all the compatibility requirements.
Security
As much as you can try to keep your Magento store secure and very hard for a hacker to break into, it is the responsibility of your Magento hosting provider to provide server security. It is therefore important to make sure that the hosting provider you choose has its own security features.
To access how secure your Magento hosting provider is, you need to make sure that they are running the latest software – new software releases fix bugs and security threats. Also, make sure that they have a decent anti-virus protection strategy and a firewall working well. You can definitely ask these questions before choosing the Magento hosting provider.
Technical Support
Most hosting providers promise to provide technical support around the clock, but there is a catch. Before I tell you what the catch is, it is important to make sure that you get a Magento hosting that provides you with sufficient technical support. Imagine a situation where your Magento store breaks down due to an issue on the server side that you cannot repair on your own. To make this worse, imagine a situation that is is an international holiday or maybe on the weekend when this happens! Will your store stay offline until people resume work to help you take care of the issues?
Your Magento store should have technical support that is available all through. Most hosting providers will offer you this, but then this depends on the plan you choose. That is the catch. Sometimes, you will have to pay more for better features, including technical support. It is, therefore, vital to make sure that the plan you choose offers a round the clock technical support.
Speed
What do you do when you visit a website that takes ages to load? Most of the time, you will definitely leave before getting what you are looking for. The same thing applies to visitors who visit your Magento store and realize that it is slow to load. Sometimes, a Magento store that is not properly configured can be slow. What if it is properly configured and still runs slow? There might be several reasons, but sometimes it could be an issue with the server.
A hosting provider that is slow to respond or overloaded will definitely affect the speed of your Magento store. It is, therefore, important to make sure that you choose a hosting provider that takes care of its infrastructure to provide its users with the best speeds for their websites.
Server Location
Most people do not know where their servers are located. It is important to make sure that you choose a hosting that is near your target audience. This will make sure that you have faster loading speeds. It is also important for search engine optimization.
Best Magento Hosting
We are now going to list the best Magento hosting providers that meet most if not all of the above points.
SiteGround
SiteGround, founded in 2004, is one of the most famous web hosting providers we have today. They are known for making hosted eCommerce sites secure and fast due to their in-house security and speed features.
SiteGround offers some of the best features such as one-click staging, GIT version control, automatic upgrades among others that you will definitely need for your Magento store. The company is known globally and they have servers in different parts of the world including USA, Asia, and Europe. This is important in making sure that you choose a location that is closest to your target audience.
SiteGround offers a wide variety of hosting plans. They have cloud hosting, shared hosting, and dedicated hosting plans. Shared hosting is totally okay for small Magento stores that do not have high traffic. Such a small store can share resources with other websites hosted on the same server.
If you want to use resources of a number of servers on cloud, then SiteGround has the cloud hosting for you. This is a good plan for a constantly growing Magento store whose traffic is rising on a daily basis.
Dedicated hosting is for those that want a server only for their Magento store. This plan is a little bit more expensive but it gives the Magento store owner total control over the store.
Finally, with SiteGround, you can be assured of customer support that is good on all plans. You can easily talk to them when you have issues and they will help resolve the issues.
SiteGround Pros
- Responsive support through phone, email and live chat.
- Different server locations for you to choose from.
- They offer free SSL certificate and Cloudflare CDN on their plans.
- Their servers are fast enough for Magento stores.
SiteGround Cons
- Storage is limited on most of the plans.
- The prices tend to get higher on the second payment.
SiteGround Pricing
| Plan | StartUp | GrowBig | GoGeek |
| Pricing Per Month | $ 3.95 (Regular $11.95/mo) | $ 5.95 (Regular $19.95/mo.) | $ 11.95 (Regular $34.95/mo.) |
| Websites | 1 website | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Storage | 10 GB | 20 GB | 30 GB |
| Visits Per Month | 10,000 | 25,000 | 100,000 |
Cloudways Hosting
Cloudways was started in 2011 and has grown exponentially with multiple data centers all over the world. It makes it easy to launch a Magento store within just a few clicks, comes with an attractive graphical user interface and simple server deployment steps.
Cloudways comes with a number of features that make it among the best hosts for your Magento store. Their servers are very scalable to a point where they have a feature called Verticle Scaling that makes it possible for you to change your server’s size through the graphical user interface. This is important in situations where you have a sudden surge in traffic to your Magento store.
Even though Cloudways offers you multiple server locations, which is good in choosing the one that is closer to your target audience, they also have the Cloudways CDN addon that will also help you in improving the time of page-load of your Magento store.
On Security, Cloudways offers several security features including a firewall, IP whitelisting, application isolation, database security and two-factor authentication. With these, you can be assured that your Magento store will be properly protected.
Cloudways Pros
- Ability to launch multiple Magento applications on one server.
- They provide an easy backup process.
- You can easily change the size of your server depending on your Magento store growth.
- Free SSL certificates.
- An easy way to monitor the performance and health of your Magento store.
Cloudways Cons
- Cloudways does not have any file manager. You will have to use an FTP client for accessing application files.
- They do not offer access to the root of the server.
Cloudways Pricing
| Plan | Storage | Bandwidth | Price Per Month |
| DigitalOcean Starter Plan | 20 GB | 1 TB | $ 10 |
| Vultr Starter Plan | 25 GB | 1 TB | $ 11 |
| GCE Starter Plan | 20 GB | 2 TB | $ 33.30 |
| AWS Starter Plan | 4 GB | 2 TB | $ 36.50 |
| Linode Starter Plan | 25 GB | 1 TB | $ 12 |
| DO 2GB | 50 GB | 2 TB | $ 22 |
| Linode2GB | 50 GB | 2 TB | $ 24 |
| VULTR2GB | 55 GB | 2 TB | $ 23 |
| DO4GB | 80 GB | 4 TB | $ 42 |
| Linode4GB | 80 GB | 4 TB | $ 50 |
| VULTR4GB | 80 GB | 3 TB | $ 44 |
| AWS Medium | 20 GB | 2 TB | $ 87 |
Bluehost
Bluehost is one of the oldest hosting providers that has grown over the years to become one of the best we have today. They are capable of hosting any size of a Magento store, from the smallest to the largest, and offer excellent support and high speed servers.
Bluehost is known for its high speed. As discussed above, speed is one of the factors that you need to look at when choosing a hosting for your Magento store. Even when your Magento store has high traffic, Bluehost will make sure that the store loads in at most two seconds.
Bluehost offers a variety of plans to cover the requirements of small to large Magento store owners. They have shared hosting that is good to small Magento store owners with low traffic. The cloud hosting allows you to switch servers as your Magento store grows, the Virtual Private Server (VPS) is good for hosting large Magento stores with your own private server while the dedicated server hosting is good for Magento stores that are growing.
On all the plans, Bluehost offers you a one-click Magento installation and an easy to use cPanel to easily manage your hosting account. You also get well-documented guides on their website, as well as phone and live chat support to help you sort any issues that you might face.
Bluehost Pros
- Their prices are affordable, especially to a beginner.
- Fast and reliable servers.
- Unmetered bandwidth and generous storage on all plans.
- Their servers have good and solid uptime.
Bluehost Cons
- Poor backup options.
- Servers are located only in the US.
- They do not have free website migrations.
- Some users have complained of poor customer support.
Bluehost Pricing
This is pricing for the shared hosting plans.
| Plan | Basic | Plus | Choice Plus | Pro |
| Price Per Month | $ 3.95 (Normally $ 7.99) | $ 5.95 (Normally $ 10.99) | $ 5.95 (Normally $ 14.99) | $ 13.95 (Normally $ 23.99) |
| Websites | 1 Website | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Storage | 50 GB | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| SSL | Free | Free | Free | Free |
| Bandwidth | Unmetered | Unmetered | Unmetered | Unmetered |
Hostgator
Hostgator is a popular hosting provider with over eight million websites hosted to date. They have optimized features that make sure that you get the best hosting for your Magento store. The Magento installation process is also easy and fast, with the automatic Magento installer.
HostGator hosting comes with an easy to use control panel that is packed with amazing features that you can use to show the statistics of your Magento store, a referrer, Webalizer, row log manager and error logs. You can use these features to optimize your Magento store. You can also use the control panel to optimize instant shopping carts, counters, forums and blog portals of your Magento store.
This hosting provider also comes with premium support round the clock. You also get an online support system with over five hundred videos and seven hundred guides to help you sort out any issue that you might face. They also offer an automatic backup of all your data on a weekly basis to make sure that you can easily restore your Magento store incase of an attack or loss of data.
Finally, you get some amazing features such as unmetered bandwidth, unlimited storage and subdomains, unlimited email accounts and a control panel with an easy to use interface.
HostGator Pros
- They offer unmetered bandwidth and unlimited disk space for Magento.
- HostGator is optimized for a shopping cart making it one of the best for Magento.
- You get free Magento transfer.
- Easy to use control panel.
- Automatic weekly backup for your data files.
HostGator Cons
- The plans are not quite affordable for a beginner.
- Server location is limited to the US only.
- Even though there is a weekly backup, restore from the backups will be charged.
HostGator Pricing
| Plans | Hatchling | Baby Plan | Business |
| Price Per Month (At 60% off) | $ 2.75 | $ 3.95 | $ 5.95 |
| No. of Domains | Single | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| SSL | Free | Free | Free |
| Bandwidth | Unmetered | Unmetered | Unmetered |
| Domain | Free | Free | Free |
InMotion Hosting
Founded in 2001, it has since grown to become one of the best hosting providers we have today. InMotion Hosting has the capability to host small to large Magento stores without any issues.
Inmotion Hosting support team is based in the US and offers a round the clock support to all their customers. You can choose either a live chat, phone or ticket system support. All their plans offer storage in SSD, which are considerably faster, with free SSL and have a one click installation of Magento.
The control panel is easy to use and understand and has an easy interface that makes it easy for you to manage your Magento addons.
Inmotion Hosting offers shared hosting, dedicated server hosting, virtual private server hosting and managed hosting. The shared hosting is ideal for small Magento stores, the VPS for the large ones while the managed hosting is ideal for those that do not want to personally deal with all the aspects of a server – the host takes care of all the technical tasks for you.
Inmotion Hosting Pros
- A very generous money-back guarantee of 90 days.
- They offer a free website transfer from other hosts.
- Free SSL certificate on their plans.
- Offers SSD storage which is considerably faster and reliable.
- They have different data center locations for you to choose from.
Inmotion Hosting Cons
- Their prices are a little bit on the high end for beginners.
- Phone verification when signing up is a bit difficult for users outside the US delaying the signup process.
Inmotion Hosting Pricing
| Plan | Launch | Power | Pro |
| Price Per Month | $ 7.99 | $ 9.99 | $ 15.99 |
| Domain | Free | Free | Free |
| Storage | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Websites | 2 Websites | 6 Websites | Unlimited |
| Bandwidth | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
GoDaddy
GoDaddy started as a registrar of domain names but has since started the hosting business and perfected it so well than most of its competitors. They offer amazing features such as a free domain, nightly backups, one-click Magento installation and migration, DDoS protection, malware scanning, caching, firewalls and automatic updates.
Godaddy offers shared hosting, dedicated hosting, VIP hosting and cloud hosting, making them ideal for small to large Magento stores. The shared hosting has four plans, namely Economy, Deluxe, Ultimate, and Maximum. If you want to get free SSL, then you have to sign up for the Ultimate and Maximum plans. On the Ultimate plan, you get the free SSL certificate only for the first year. You will part with $ 79.99 for the SSL certificate after the first year. The Ultimate plan gives you a lifetime SSL certificate.
GoDaddy servers run on Windows and Linux operating systems. You will also get a 24/7 support team through phone, live chat, and ticket-based system. There is also a support center with rich content in the form of videos and online tutorials. You can use these to sort out any issues that you could be facing.
If you are not satisfied with the GoDaddy services, you have a 30-day money-back guarantee if you are on the annual plans. On the monthly plans, you get a 48-hour money-back guarantee.
GoDaddy Pros
- The plans are affordable, especially for beginners.
- GoDaddy is optimized for eCommerce sites including Magento.
- Responsive customer support team.
- Rich online content to help one when they are stuck.
- Free domain name with all annual plans.
- One-click backups and restore.
GoDaddy Cons
- GoDaddy does not offer any password protection on pages.
- If you are not careful, you will come across hidden costs. For example, you have to sign up for a certain period for you to get prices displayed on their website.
- The cheap plans do not have a free SSL certificate making them expensive if you want to purchase it as an extra.
GoDaddy Pricing
| Plan | Economy | Deluxe | Ultimate | Maximum |
| Price Per Month | £ 2.99 (£ 5.99 when you renew) | £ 3.99 (£ 7.99 when you renew) | £ 6.99 (£ 12.99 when you renew) | £ 9.99 (£ 18.99 when you renew) |
| Websites | 1 Website | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Storage | 100 GB | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Bandwidth | Unmetered | Unmetered | Unmetered | Unmetered |
| Domain | Free with annual plan | Free with annual plan | Free with annual plan | Free with annual plan |
| SSL | Not Free | Not Free | Free | Free |
Conclusion
These are some of the best hosting companies for your Magento store. They all have the features that you need to make sure that your store runs smoothly without any issues. Make sure to choose the hosting plan that meets all your requirements and those of your Magento store.