Since we started in 2008 we've worked with more than 2000 businesses through our services, in-person training and workshops and one on one consulting.
Up until a few years ago, we almost always struggled when we took on a Magento client. Hosting performance and reliability was a constant struggle because we simply couldn't find good enough hosting to support the high performance requirements of Magento.
We've finally (!!) solved that problem. In this post we share the Magento hosts we use, trust and recommend to clients on an almost daily basis.
High quality, high performance Magento hosts we use ourselves, that we trust and recommend to clients.
I probably don’t need to tell you that Magento is a beast of a CMS. It’s hugely capable but that capability and functionality comes with a price in terms of performance.
As a web agency, we struggled for years trying to find a decent Magento web host that wouldn’t fall over once more than 2 visitors were on the site at once.
Again and again the number 1 issue our Magento clients wanted solve was their speed issues - it was a constant barrage of “how can we make the site faster”, both the frontend and the backend.
If you do some Googling around for Magento hosts you’ll find a bunch of articles recommended the usual suspects, Bluehost, Hostgator, Dreamhost, A2 and a bunch of other cheap, rubbish shared hosting provided that simply aren’t good enough in terms of performance or reliability to host Magento.
With hosting you get what you pay for, do you really expect a hosting product that costs less than a coffee at Starbucks to be any good?
Below you'll find our favorite Magento hosts. These are the hosts we use ourselves and recommend to our clients.
Of the hosts listed, Cloudways is our favorite. They're a hybrid of a managed hosting service and a dedicated VPS server. They resell servers from several different hosting providers including Amazon and Google building the server configuration with something they call their Thunderstack. What you end up with is the power of a dedicated server without all the technical management hassle that goes with it.
Unfortunately most people choose a hosting provider based on price which is not really the best way to do it.
Ultimately with hosting you get what you pay for. Cost is obviously one of the considerations to look at when choosing a provider but that's really only one element of many. Below I’ve summarized the key features or things we look for when choosing a hosting provider.
I really don’t have to tell you, speed and reliability are key when it comes to a hosting provider.
You know it yourself, if a website is too slow to load you quickly lose patience and click away. Your website visitors and customers are exactly the same.
Your hosting needs to be well matched to the number of visitors you’re expecting and the order volume you’re catering for. If your store revenue is in the millions then you’ll need a much larger server to suit.
Sidenote: we typically use sitespeedbot.com to WordPress website speed. In an ideal world your LCP should be under 2.5 seconds, CLS under 0.1, FCP under 1.8 seconds and TTFB under 0.5 seconds. We also use uptimerobot.com to monitor site uptime.
What is your support expectation?
At some point you’re going to need support. If you’re a larger store doing millions in revenue you’ll ideally need your own dedicated Magento dev resources on top of what the hosting provider offers.
Your website CMS is no different to your smartphone or laptop. It needs regular patches and updates to ensure bugs are taken care of and security holes are patched.
Some hosting providers offer patching as part of their service, others expect you to take care of it. Bottom line, patching needs to be done by someone!
What is your backup strategy? There’s so much digital capital tied up in your website that it’s critical that you at least have some backup system in place taking daily backups.
On bigger sites ideally you’ll need to look at realtime or near realtime backup solutions where the site is backed up upon every change or on an hourly basis.