Magento 2 is a free, open-source eCommerce platform trusted by thousands of business owners and developers that lets you start selling online quickly. If you own a Magento 2 platform you may have already spent some time looking for the best possible Magento hosting for your business.
While Magento requirements are not something extraordinary, not every web hosting provider can run a Magento 2 installation equally well. Thus, you must keep in mind some special considerations when choosing Magento hosting for your website.
Performance requirements
First, you need to understand what are your store performance requirements. What is the website traffic? What load of visitors do you expect? What is the likely volume of orders to be processed at the same time? How many products will be in the store? After answering these questions, you can determine the quality characteristics of the future hosting provider and “margin of safety”.
Technology stack
Secondly, you should take into account the requirements for the Magento 2 technology stack. This is important when choosing the characteristics of the hosting provider's servers. Up-to-date requirements are regularly published in the official Magento 2 specification.
Operating system Linux x86-64
Memory Requirements at least 2 GB of RAM
Composer latest stable version
Web server Apache 2.2 or 2.4, Nginx 1.x
Database MySQL 5.6, 5.7
PHP 7.1.3, 7.2.0 (Magento 2.3.1 certified and tested on PHP 7.2.11)
The following is not obligatory but is highly recommended:
support for Elasticsearch version 6.x
Varnish version 4.x or 5.2
Redis 3.2, 4.0, 5.0 (compatible with 2.4+)
Additional services included in the hosting plan
Before ordering hosting check if the following services are included in the hosting plan or you need to pay for each feature separately.
- free migration;
- round-the-clock availability of the resource;
- 24/7/365 monitoring;
- SSL encryption, firewalls;
- commitment to Service Level Agreement (if any);
- high level of access control and security;
- maximum opportunities for updating;
- high fault tolerance and performance;
- daily backups;
- full scalability.
Type of hosting and location of data centers
When choosing a hosting plan consider the location of the vast majority of your audience. If you sell in one country, you should choose the server located in that country. This will reduce response time and increase local search results.
VPS hosting
Fort stores with consistently high traffic and an average of 50 orders per month VPS hosting is an ideal option.
VPS hosting is the virtual dedicated server service. This is a virtual machine that is located and works, among others, on one physical server. The common resources of such a server are distributed among all the websites that work on it, but they do not “interfere” with each other, as is the case with shared hosting. This is the optimal solution for stores with up to 50 orders per month. In addition, choosing this type of hosting helps to avoid the cost of building and developing your server infrastructure.
Cloud hosting
For large online stores, highly visited retail with more than 1000 products and 1000 orders the best solution would be a cloud solution.
The cloud server is one of the most stable types of hosting. In this case, the place for deploying and running the application is not provided on a separate local machine, but in the cloud network. That is, cloud hosting is a network of connected virtual and physical servers, the disk space of which is summed up. These systems are often supported by load balancers. Therefore, if the server on which the online store is located turns out to be unavailable due to a sudden increase in load (for example, during the season of sales and promotions), buyers will still be able to use the site. In addition, this type of hosting is characterized by the absence of restrictions in “expansibility”: you can use the capabilities of the cloud if you need additional resources.
