Compare Magento Hosting
What You’ll Learn
Some of the questions you’ll be able to answer after reading this page are:
- What is Magento?
- What are its pros and cons?
- What should I look for in a web host for Magento?
- What are Magento’s top features and how can they benefit you?
- What do Magento’s various editions offer?
Plus I’ll offer my recommendations for hosts. Let’s get started!
What is Magento?
Magento is a popular e-commerce site system that offers site owners a uniquely powerful combination of flexibility and ease-of-use.
Do you want to sell downloadable products? T-shirts from a drop-shipper? Your own handmade creations?
Magento will work for you, regardless of your business model or the type of inventory you offer for sale.
The Magento platform is one of the most popular standalone e-commerce platforms available. It isn’t hard to see why. The company was once owned by eBay, Inc., which is one of the internet’s largest retailers.
In 2018, Magento was officially acquired by Adobe Systems Inc.
The software is available in an Open Source Community Edition, as well as in a premium Enterprise version.
What are Magento’s Key Features?
The open-source version of Magento is a complete e-commerce platform, not a freeware preview edition.
If you are willing and able to take the time to set up and configure the software, there is very little you can’t do with the Community Edition.
The following list highlights the most important features shared in both versions.
Magento’s Marketing and Promotion Features for E-Commerce
The right marketing and promotional tools can make all the difference between a failed e-commerce business and a highly successful one.
Magento offers a number of key features to help busy online store owners grow and promote their storefront sites.
- Display related items on product pages
- Upsell offers and cross-promotions
- Create highly customizable coupons and special pricing rules
- Configure tiered pricing and volume discounts
- Create category landing pages
- Packaged products and bundling
- Display recently viewed items to customers
- New item promotions
- Multiple shipping options, including support for free shipping
- Display polls and surveys
- Manage email newsletters
- Enable customer wishlists and send-to-friend functions
Magento Commerce created “Magento U” to offer on-demand training. They also hold in-person training events as well. Check out their YouTube channel to find tutorials.
Magento’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to Boost Business
Search engine optimization (SEO) is particularly important for e-commerce sites.
In a crowded digital marketplace, a well-optimized site and product pages help you attract more shoppers and make more sales.
Magento offers the following SEO tools to help searchers find you online:
- XML Site Map
- Pretty URLs, with full control over URL settings
- HTML metadata for products, categories and content pages
- Popular search terms page
- Google Content API
Simplified Site Management To Save Time
Managing your e-commerce site’s administrative functions can be a complex and time-consuming matter. Magento makes the job somewhat easier with these site management tools:
- Manage multiple sites from one administration login
- User types with customizable permissions
- Full customizable theming and templating engine
- Internationalization and localization built-in, including currency support.
- Web Services API for third-party integrations
- Batch import and export of all data (product, orders, customers, etc.)
- Built-in CMS (Content Management System) for pages, blog posts, announcements, landing pages, and other content
- Tax calculation, based on multiple areas and customer types
- Anti-spam measures such as CAPTCHA
Magento Catalog Management – How Does It Work?
Managing the display and organizational aspects of the product catalog is another vital aspect of online shopping site management.
Magento provides some fairly extensive catalog management options, including the following:
- Easy to configure product groups and variations
- Variable pricing for different customer groups (retail vs. wholesale; members vs. visitors, etc.)
- Digital/downloadable products and sample excerpts
- Unlimited product attributes
- Group custom attribute fields into attribute sets for quickly creating similar products within a class of items
- Complete inventory management tools, with RSS alerts
- Batch updates to product groups
- Automated product image resizing and watermarking
- Specialized pricing rules with multiple options and conditionals
- Search term rewrites and result-page redirects
- Crowd-sourced tags and reviews, with full moderation capability
- Support for personalized products (embroidering, monogramming, photo printing, etc)
- Multiple configurable options for customer input
Magento’s Product Browsing Features
Customers appreciate an easy, intuitive approach to catalog browsing on e-commerce sites.
A well-Featured e-commerce hosting solution should make it as simple as possible for your visitors to find the products they’re most interested in purchasing.
Magento provides the following catalog browsing options:
- Multi-layered navigation with search results and product categories
- Filter and sort by price or price range
- Compare Products
- Catalog search, with auto-suggest
- Breadcrumb navigation
- Category and product specific page designs and templates.
Product Display Options
E-commerce optimization includes maximizing the visual appeal of your products through a variety of display options.
Magento provides the following features to assist you in creating a product display system that shows off your inventory to its best advantage:
- Multiple images for a product
- Image zoom
- Availability (inventory)
- Tiered pricing upsell
- Product options
- Grouped products
- Wishlist
- Send to a friend
- Share to social media.
Checkout, Payment, and Shipping Options in Magento
An e-commerce site will not last long if its checkout and payment systems are not strong, secure, and reliable. Customers must be able to trust the security of their sensitive personal and financial information, including addresses and credit card data.
Likewise, shipping options should ideally be available to customers so that they can make the best purchasing decisions; often, shipping costs can add substantially to the overall price.
Magento offers the following options for configuring checkout, payment, and shipping:
- Single page checkout
- Checkout as a guest or with an account
- Ship to multiple addresses in a single order
- SSL / HTTPS support for orders
- Saved shopping carts
- Gift messages (per order, per product)
- Shipping and tax estimates
- Invoice billing
- Integration with multiple payment gateways, including PayPal and Authorize.net
- Accept checks, money orders, and purchase orders
- “Bill Me Later” option
- Flat rate and free shipping
- Shipping rates calculated by weight, volume, and number of items
- Order tracking
How Does Magento Handle Order Management?
Order management options offered by Magento include a number of tools to help ensure the accuracy and reliability of the purchase process:
- View, edit, create and fill orders from backend
- Multiple invoices per order
- Shipping integration and label printing, with real-time rates from UPS, USPS, FedEx, and DHL
- Call-center order-taking interface and assisted shopping
- Custom Order Statuses
- Order duplication and re-ordering
- New order notifications via email or RSS
Magento supports B2B as well as B2C e-commerce.
Customer Accounts in Magento
Customers appreciate being treated like valued individuals. Customer account systems empower e-commerce brands with value-added tools that help engender greater levels of trust and goodwill.
Magento offers the following tools to set up, administer and manage customer accounts:
- Unlimited ship-to and bill-to addresses, with a default selection
- Wishlist with commenting
- Tracking
- Order status and history
- Reordering
- Email subscription management
- Product reviews and tagging history
- Access to downloadable products
How Does Magento Support Customer Service?
Customer service is a crucial component of a successful e-commerce business. Problems and complaints are inevitable.
As long as the business provides the essential tools for the site owner and the customer to address those issues as they arise, the business’s good reputation can be maintained. Magento’s features include the following customer service tools:
- Contact form
- Create and edit orders as admin
- Order tracking from an account
- Password reset from admin or front-end
- Automated emails for account and order activity.
Analytics and Reporting
Finally, e-commerce site owners require access to continuing, reliable data to monitor the core metrics that measure the health of the business as a whole.
Magento provides analytics access through the following integrations and tools:
- Easy integration with Google Analytics
- Admin reports dashboard
- Detailed reporting on virtually every facet of the store, including sales, tax, cart abandonment, most viewed, top-performing products, search terms, review activity, inventory, coupon use, refunds, revenue, and invoicing
Looking for the right Magento host?
SiteGround – rated #1 by our readers – provides Magento-optimized hosting, free installations of Magento, and free site transfers. We’ve arranged for our readers to save up to 67% on SiteGround plans. Use this special discount link to get the deal.
What Features Does Magento Enterprise Edition Offer?
If Magento Community edition is insufficient to meet your e-commerce needs, the Enterprise edition offers additional functionality and greatly enhanced support.
Magento Enterprise Edition vs. Community Edition
There are two reasons not to use the Community Edition and pay for the premium version instead. The first reason is the high level of support and general ease of use as compared with the DIY nature of the Open Source version. The second reason is that you need access to one or more features only available in the Enterprise Edition.
The following list highlights some of the most important of the features only available to Enterprise customers.
- Customer Segmentation, Targeted Promotions & Merchandising: This suite of features allows you to group customers based on shopping behavior, demographics, or other factors, and target promotional offers and other communication by segment.
- Dynamic Rule-Based Product Relations: The Community Edition provides product-based upsell features. The Enterprise Edition expands this to allow customers and shopping cart attributes to be included in product relationship rules.
- Persistent Shopping: A long-term cookie maintains shopping experience across multiple sessions without the customer needing to log in each time.
- Abandoned Cart Recovery: You can send automated emails to customers who did not complete checkout.
- Private Sales: This feature enables you to offer limited-access products or deals, restricted to certain customers or customer groups.
- Page Caching: Pages that don’t need to be dynamically responsive to customer activity can be cached, which speeds up loading time and improves overall site performance.
- PA-DSS Certified Payment Processing: Your Magento store comes with its own payment gateway, which is fully integrated with the store software.
- Gifting Options: Enable physical and virtual gift cards, gift registry, and gift-wrapping options at the checkout.
In this Magento video, David Gilboa, co-founder of Warby Parker, shares his experience with Magento Enterprise Edition.
More Enterprise Features Worth Exploring
Additionally, the Enterprise edition provides the following features:
- Rewards Points and customer loyalty programs
- Store credit
- Multiple wishlists
- Return management
- Enhanced CMS features
- Scheduled data import and export
- Backup and rollback tools to protect your site in the event of hacking or other performance issues
- Staging and development environments with sync and roll-back features
- Administrator activity logging
- Improved search
What are Magento’s Hosting Requirements?
Many Magento hosting providers have one-click installation wizards for the Community Edition of Magento. If your host offers Magento with its one-click installs, you can assume the tech requirements are met.
If you are going to install Magento yourself (either the Community or Enterprise Edition), make sure your host supports the correct server requirements.
| Requirement | Version |
|---|---|
| Linux | x86-64 |
| Apache | 2.x |
| Nginx | 1.7x |
| MySQL | 5.6+ |
| PHP | 5.4+ |
SSL
Depending on your payment gateway choice, you will probably need to support HTTPS. As a result, you will need a hosting plan that supports an SSL certificate.
At the minimum, this will require a dedicated IP address.
VPS Versus Shared Hosting
Given the complexities and performance needs of a large e-commerce site, you are probably better off using a VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting plan, rather than a shared hosting account.
WordPress vs. Magento for E-Commerce
How does Magento compare to the global powerhouse CMS for bloggers, small-medium sized businesses and many e-commerce stores: WordPress?
When it comes to e-commerce, Magento and WordPress put up a good fight. Magento is an exclusively e-commerce focused platform, while WordPress aims to please all webmasters with its flawless user-experience. That said, Magento offers more than just a simple storefront.
Like WordPress, Magento offers thousands of plugins and templates from both in-house and third-party developers.
If you’re in it for the long run, Magento is a sound choice for your e-commerce store with a slightly higher learning curve than WordPress. On the other hand, WordPress is equally as functional and will get the job done.
Which Magento Web Host Plan Should You Choose?
You can run Magento shared hosting, a VPS, or a dedicated server.
The right hosting plan for your needs will largely depend on the size of your site.
How Large is Your Magento Store?
The larger your store, the more resources are needed for your Magento shop to load quickly for visitors. If your site has any significant revenue, shared hosting is likely going to be too slow, and cost you sales.
It will usually make sense to upgrade at least to a VPS.
The Dedicated Hosting Option
Monitor page load times from there, and if they’re still too slow, you can always upgrade to the more expensive dedicated server options.
My Top 3 Recommendations for Magento Hosts
Speed is a major concern with Magento.
If not handled correctly, it can load slowly, especially for developers making changes to the e-commerce store, and more importantly, it can slow down response time for visitors.
| Host | Bandwidth | Storage | Starting Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| SiteGround | Unmetered | 10 GB | $3.95/mo |
| InMotion | Unlimited | Unlimited | $6.39/mo |
| Bluehost | Unmetered | 50 GB | $2.95/mo |
SiteGround for Fast Magento Hosting
SiteGround is a great Magento host if you’re trying to reduce or eliminate speed issues.
Hosting plans come with SSD storage, as well as SiteGround’s proprietary SuperCacher speed technology.
Magento will run fine on shared plans, a VPS, or a dedicated server; just pick the right one for your shop size.
Finally, you can pick the server location you’d like, as Siteground has multiple datacenters around the world.
InMotion Hosting: Strong Support and Magento Alternatives
InMotion Hosting is an excellent choice is you’re creating an online store for a business in the United States. It has server locations on both the east and west coasts, with exceptional 24/7/365 U.S. based support.
The server technology easily surpasses the minimum requirements for running Magento 2, with PHP 7 fully supported.
Finally, if you’re not quite sold on Magento for your business, or have problems down the line, you can always switch to PrestaShop, a free e-commerce platform included for free on all InMotion plans.
Bluehost: a Magento Budget Option
Not everyone needs premium performance or support. If that sounds like you, and you’re looking to find a budget host plan, you might like BlueHost.
It’s not blazing fast, and the support isn’t amazing. In fact, there’s very little documentation on Magento specifically in their knowledge base.
However, all plans are cheap, fairly reliable, and have decent performance.
A2 Hosting scored #1 in our recent speed and performance tests. You can get up and running in minutes with their Magento plans. Save up to 50% on A2 plans by using this special discount link.
Includes a free site transfer, free SSL, and an “Anytime” money-back guarantee.
Other features in E-commerce
Magento Frequently Asked Questions
- What alternatives are there to Magento?
Some of the more popular self-hosted e-commerce alternatives to Magento are osCommerce and Zen Cart. You can also build e-commerce functionality on top of a larger content management system like WordPress or Joomla, using plugins or extensions.
The most popular options here are two WordPress plugins: WP E-commerce and WooCommerce. You could also use an online marketplace like eBay, Shopify, Walmart, or Amazon instead of setting up your own online store.
- Will Magento work on shared hosting?
In most cases, you can get Magento installed and running on shared hosting, but shared hosting is usually not an adequate hosting framework for an online store.
E-commerce sites require exceptional security and user privacy measures, as well as higher resources like storage, and bandwidth. A shared hosting plan may not be ideal for such a resource-intensive mission-critical website.
- What is the best type of Magento hosting?
If you are serious about building a successful e-commerce system on Magento, it is probably best to use a scalable VPS hosting solution. This will allow you to expand over time and only pay more as you generate more traffic.
If you need to upgrade, you can always migrate over to a dedicated server, preferably with your current host.
- What is Magento Commerce Cloud?
Magento Commerce Cloud (MCC) is a pre-configured cloud framework that allows efficient development practices within an automated workflow. Magento Commerce Cloud supports MySQL, PHP, RabbitMQ, and Redis, and allows developers to create a highly integratable deployment environment. MCC comes with a generous set of developer tools.
- How do you install Magento with cPanel?
You can install Magento via your cPanel with most hosts that offer one-click installations. Just use your host’s installer (e.g., Softaculous) to find Magento under the Ecommerce apps. In most cases, just one click gets the job done.
- Is Magento a SaaS or PaaS?
Magento is a PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service).
- What operating systems does Magento run on?
Magento only runs on Linux.
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