Running a Magento store on an underperforming server is like pushing an ocean liner with a small horsepower engine, and even if it’s barely viable, you don’t know when the site will suddenly crash.
Unfortunately, while Magento has excellent eCommerce capabilities, it requires significant hardware resources to back it up, and only the top hosting providers will allow you to take full advantage of the platform. Over the past few months, we have reviewed a large number of providers claiming to have the best Magento hosting platform, but the real story is that only a few brands match the advertised capabilities.
In the eCommerce world, many hosting companies can run WooCommerce or PrestaShop Software, however, is no match for Magento, which requires higher and more stringent server standards, and here is how we reviewed whether web hosting could meet the challenge.
- Custody Plan.Even small Magento stores can consume a lot of server resources, the first step is to check that the host provides adequate configuration and supports the necessary technologies to run a Magento store.
- Dedicated solutions.As a content management system, Magento is very personal and reputable brands often introduce custom solutions to make your e-commerce site faster and more secure.
- Ease of use.Magento is not the easiest software to build a website, by any means, but a quality hosting provider can ease your workload.
- Technical support.Magento users need more help than other webmasters. Support teams using only troubleshooting scripts are almost useless, and they need extensive Magento experience to help you detect and fix problems.
- Customer Comments.Magento sellers have invested heavily in their online presence and will certainly voice their concerns if they are not satisfied with the hosting service. We conducted interviews and research and sifted through a large number of user reviews to find out how they really felt.
- Terms of Service.More than 90% customers do not read the Terms of Service carefully, and hosting companies understand this, so they often hide some details. But please don’t worry, we check each TOS carefully.
- Features and prices.Magento hosting is not cheap, and with such a heavy back-end feature set, it can easily be more expensive than other CMS (e.g. WordPress) hosting.
All of this was done in order to compile the following list of rankings.
Scala Hosting is a US-based web hosting provider that is expanding into Europe and is quickly gaining international attention with a range of great in-house solutions.
This company uses LiteSpeed The server runs a reliable base setup that combines three-level caching, speed-optimized scaling, and a global CDN that can outperform standard LAMP Scala Hosting can automatically update Magento for you, but you probably shouldn’t do it. Based on the complexity of CMS, the update process can be abruptly interrupted, and it’s usually safer to save a snapshot of the server and update it manually, especially if the core patches are large.
Magento Hosting has a number of security features including anti-hacker protection, internal monitoring systems, custom rules, network firewalls, malware scanning and more. Search engine optimization tools are available for free, and while not as good as some of the top competitors, you can still get some help if you’re just starting out in the website building world. The system makes daily backups of the site, so you can always roll back to a previous version.
Another advantage is that you can subscribe to a shared hosting plan and then easily upgrade to a VPS when needed, which has a different internal control panel that can be used completely free of charge, making the VPS plan very affordable. If you already have a website, the hosting team can handle the migration for free, using either shared or VPS hosting.
Customer support is very good and responds quickly to questions 24/7, we contacted them with some Magento related questions and got the right answer within minutes every time. The knowledge base is limited and there are almost no Magento tutorials, but with the excellent support from Scala, this is not a big problem.
In recent years, Scala Hosting has received hundreds of positive reviews, a number that continues to grow, and customers love their consistently excellent service. There are almost no negative reviews, and most complaints are related to user misunderstandings (rather than actual problems).
Advantages
- Easily Scalable
- Affordable price
- In-house proprietary solutions
- Outstanding customer support
- Daily data backup
- Free Search Engine Optimization Tools
Disadvantages
- Limited knowledge base content
- There are few tutorials related to Magento
Moving into the high end of the spectrum, we have Nexcess, who from their inception have developed a number of solutions for Magento that many users regard as the best hosting provider. However, this only makes sense if the facts back it up, and we’ll see how Nexcess proves it.
Nexcess has an excellent hardware configuration, very tight security, and all set up to focus on providing fast Magento hosting. You can also choose from a range of useful services, for example, Nexcess helps you make your online store PCI-compliant, which takes some of the burden off. You even get some custom modules, such as Magento Sentry – enabling dual authentication for the admin panel.
Starting at $48/month for the shared and cloud hosting plans, the cloud servers come with many additional features that help increase the speed of running the store. For example, auto-scaling is enabled by default and the server will automatically scale to handle up to 25 additional users if the resource usage limit is exceeded. Of course, you have to pay for this, depending on the pricing plan, but there is 12 hours of free scaling time, which is very useful for bursts of traffic (as is often the case with online stores).
Technical support is critical, and customer service representatives are very knowledgeable about Magento, and all things related to hosting. Nexcess goes even further, offering domain-specific support teams. With other hosting providers, you have to contact first-line customer service and then be transferred to a Magento expert, but with Nexcess, you talk to a professional right from the start, which eliminates unnecessary wait times.
Users consistently appreciate the hosting platform, and they like the useful and fast technical support, the easy website migration, and the overall smoothness of the server. However, some users complain that upgrading from shared hosting to a dedicated server can be a hassle. There are 6 pricing plans ranging from $49 to $849 / month, and more enterprise-class servers are available as your e-commerce site grows in size.
Pricing and feature transitions between plans are relatively smooth, especially when using auto-scaling. Nexcess is a bit more expensive than most competitors, but they are highly optimized for Magento and worth the higher cost to you.
Advantages
- Robust pricing plans
- Many customization features
- Experienced technical support
- Solid State Drive Storage
- Automatic retractable
Cloudways specializes in content management system hosting and has a wide reputation in WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Magento and other hosting areas.
Many users realize that using AWS Hosting a Magento site is a recipe for success, but to take full advantage of the cloud you need to understand the details of configuring your servers, combine this with the complexity of Magento and you’re in for a logistical nightmare. cloudways has a beautiful solution that provides an infrastructure like AWS while taking over all the operations and maintenance work. You’ll also get a custom control panel to avoid the tricky dilemma of cloud hosting.
They have optimized their servers and offer a number of other tools, including site migration, Elasticsearch, Linode, DigitalOcean, and Google Cloud) to choose from, each brand has a separate billing strategy.
As with other cloud services, you are free to scale your resources and pay the bill at the end of the month for about twice the price of using the original host. For the most part, this is very fair, and unless you own a large store, it’s much more expensive to hire an expert. All in all, the price matches the service, the infrastructure and site building tools are hard to beat by other competitors, and Cloudways is probably the best Magento hosting platform, especially if the traffic is unpredictable.
Technical support is reliable, but, unlike Cloudways, which outsources some of its customer service to Pakistan and GoDaddy), Cloudways clearly prefers to provide quality service rather than save some extra cost.
Overall, most customers have positive things to say about Cloudways, they like the almost unlimited scalability of Magento cloud hosting and the clean and easy to use dedicated control panel. Interestingly, some users have had trouble signing up for an account; the registration process seems to work fine now, but has been a recurring problem for years, and you can ask support to create an account manually for you if the system rejects your email address.
Advantages
- 7-day free trial
- Virtually unlimited scalability
- Strong infrastructure
- Pay-as-you-go pricing model
- Perfect for peak traffic
- Nice technical support
Liquid Web has been in this business for a long time and makes some seemingly arrogant claims, such as claiming to have the best customer loyalty and the fastest VPS hosting service.
This company prides itself on being a high-end hosting provider, offering only VPS, cloud servers and dedicated servers, with no shared hosting plans, but that shouldn’t be a problem since most Magento users choose at least VPS hosting. If VPS doesn’t suit your needs, Liquid Web also offers affordable dedicated servers in order to allow you to easily expand your Magento store.
With expert server configuration, robust security features, and best-in-class speed optimization, you can easily get superior Magento performance. liquid Web also offers a range of additional services, but some of them are paid for, for example, the support team can check if your store is compliant with PCI Standardsand fix security vulnerabilities, which is very useful for e-commerce sites where protecting customer data is a major concern.
Customer service response is fast, with Liquid Web claiming that support staff can answer the phone and respond to chat requests in 59 seconds, and work orders take slightly longer to respond to, but no more than 59 minutes. The vast majority of users praise the speed of support, and in most cases, your questions are responded to almost instantly. As for the quality of support, they seem to target experienced users, and you may need to handle simple issues yourself.
The user reviews are mostly positive, mainly praising the strong customer support and solutions. The negative reviews mostly relate to late billing resulting in data deletion, which is very odd since their policy is actually very lenient and will only delete after 45 days if you forget to pay. Overall, Liquid Web has crafted a robust hosting platform for Magento that is more advanced than most of their competitors, and if you are willing to accept their pricing plans, this would be the best choice.
Advantages
- Secure and reliable hosting features
- Fast and effective customer support
- Simple and practical additional services
- PCI Compliance Scan
- Free Data Backup
If you’ve researched web hosting services, chances are you’ve heard of SiteGround, one of the most beloved hosting providers, with a strong reputation and satisfactory scores in various tough tests.
For Magento hosting, they offer a one-click installer, but of course it doesn’t stop there. Although the shared Magento plans have the same price and similar features compared to regular web hosting, the underlying advanced features are much more. For starters, custom MySQL query caching does wonders for you in terms of performance and security, and with features like speed optimization, active server monitoring, custom security policies, and more, you get a reliable solution.
SiteGround estimates that the highest level of shared web hosting can handle 100,000 unique visits per month, which is fine for an average WordPress site, but Magento is more demanding and should only handle a few hundred active visitors per day when targeted optimization efforts are included. It’s best to go with the highest shared plan to take full advantage of advanced caching and bypass the low resource usage limits of the starter plan.
In terms of customer support, SiteGround has invested heavily. The online knowledge base contains tutorials on setting up Magento, performing basic tasks, and solving common problems, which is useful for beginners. Human support is online 24/7, knowledgeable and friendly, and has a dedicated Magento team that can migrate your site or solve complex Magento issues for you.
Users like this efficient support service and praise them for helping to reduce resource usage, which is a common problem with Magento. However, a few users dislike the resource restrictions on sharing plans, which is somewhat to be expected – after all, no one likes to see a restriction warning. Nevertheless, Magento is probably the most demanding content management system available, and imposing limits on shared plans is inevitable and requires an upgrade to cloud hosting if you attract thousands of visitors per month.
This company offers good value for money, but if you are planning to start a Magento site, then you should consider starting with the GrowBig plan, which in addition to offering more resources, also has more powerful caching features, and on-demand backup tools.
Advantages
- Affordable start-up plans
- Expert Server Configuration
- First-class customer support
- Cloudflare CDN
- Daily data backup
Disadvantages
- Limited resources for introductory programs
- 768MB PHP memory limit in shared plans
As you can see from the name, FastComet specializes in speed and has been doing well since they opened their doors to retail customers a few years ago. In addition, they claim to be the best Magento hosting provider, and now let’s see if the facts live up to the hype.
Unlike most hosting companies that display inaccurate content on their websites, FastComet provides all the information they can, and the competitive spirit is one thing, but this is associated with misleading marketing. Most retail sellers use the officially recommended FastCloud Extra plan and enjoy substantial server resources — 6-core CPU, 6GB of RAM, and reasonable speed optimization, which helps make Magento sites run more smoothly.
With 10 data centers worldwide, this gives you a strong support to expand your business internationally and Magento webmasters can enjoy strict security, theme/plugin installation services, real-time server monitoring, and a large number of affordable products. Please note that as website traffic ramps up, do not move from FastCloud Extra shared hosting to the Starter VPS plan, as this is effectively a downgrade of resources and the initial VPS plan is not optimized for eCommerce.
You get top-notch customer support, with VPS and dedicated hosting plans that come with a 10-minute response time guarantee, though shared hosting users tend to get a response just as fast. FastComet has some real experts with expertise that goes well beyond server management, and can even help you integrate Magento extensions and fix any errors you might encounter if your site is wasting resources, they’ll even notify you and suggest a solution.
Most users praise the fast and efficient technical support, and much of the work of the customer service representatives goes beyond fixing the store. Another area of dissatisfaction for some users is that the unlimited sharing plan is actually limited, but this should not be an issue as it is industry standard practice to have a fair use policy to prevent resource abuse and FastComet is more transparent about actual limits than other competitors.
Reasonably priced, with a wealth of hardware resources, plus a Magento Getting Started Guide, all available in a shared plan. Follow FastComet’s official recommendations to properly optimize your Magento store and you’ll be able to stay in the same hosting solution for a long time.
Advantages
- Affordable price
- Very good value for money
- Extensive hosting plans
- Very useful customer support and additional services
Disadvantages
- Some plans are more restrictive on resources
- Do not provide dedicated IP addresses to shared host users
Consistently the largest independent hosting provider in the UK, Krystal Hosting prides itself on being honest, transparent and environmentally friendly, in addition to offering a range of useful additional features that other competitors often have to pay for.
With powerful hardware configurations, tools optimized for speed, and tight security, Krystal has a best-in-class infrastructure. Backup your Magento site 6 times a day, which is very useful for e-commerce sites. In addition, they go to great lengths to ensure PCI compliance, which is a useful help since, unlike the commercial version of Magento, the open source version is not PCI-compatible by default.
You can get a free domain name if you buy a hosting service. However, some of the promotional slogans are misleading, for example, they refer to cPanel and Let’s Encrypt SSL Packaged as great proprietary features, but in reality, they are standard for any quality web host. As a web hosting provider, Krystal’s only data center is located inLondonIf your main customers are far away, it is better to choose another hosting brand.
Phone support is available 24/7, but live chat is only available during business hours. krystal has a strong in-house support team and does not intend to outsource it. Statements about the quality of support are factually correct, customer service is prompt and professional, and even the CEO sometimes communicates with users via email.
Fast loading speed, great technical support, and easy to use utilities, all of which were widely praised by users, with a suspiciously high praise rate, as even the best Magento hosting providers had many negative reviews. Despite this, the PR department did their best to appease users with reasonable complaints, and they even presented flowers to a refunded webmaster as a sign of apology.
Advantages
- Excellent security
- Ideal for UK users
- Experienced technical support
- Back up your website 6 times a day
- Free domain name for life
Sonassi specializes in e-commerce web hosting, a company that initially ran a Magento store and then moved into web hosting, meaning they have real Magento experience.
Colocation providers now by iomart Owned, with a cloud infrastructure that provides over 20 data centers around the world, enabling customers to access your site from a variety of locations and enjoy a virtually latency-free browsing experience.
This company has developed a program called MageStack The operating system (based on Debian Designed specifically for Magento, it makes horizontal scaling easier and can significantly improve the overall performance of the site. Software engineers noted that, overall, making Magento run fast yielded better results than active caching, which, while useful, could not fully address certain key issues, such as slow checkout pages.
In addition to the unique operating system, you have access to a variety of handy utilities, such as PCI-compliant operating environments, real-time server monitoring, off-site data backup, and more, all of which are useful additions. Technical support is available at three levels, two of which are paid, and of course, you can also pay in advance for emergency interventions by the developers. The customer service team is great, they are all experts in Magento and make sure everything runs smoothly for you.
The company has received positive user feedback, but one reason for the low number of online reviews may be that the solution is quite high-end. sonassi’s target audience is large retailers, i.e. users who need a strong infrastructure and are willing to pay for it. If you are launching your first Magento store, you may want to work with other, cheaper web hosts, but if you already have a large store, Sonassi can make sure your business runs smoothly.
You have access to a large number of resources and can easily add multiple servers, so you can achieve almost unlimited scaling.
Advantages
- Operating system optimized for Magento
- Top solutions
- A large technical team
- Provide development services
- Offsite Data Backup
Hostinger is one of the fastest growing hosting brands, known for their incredibly low prices. Cloud plans are optimized specifically for Magento, and fully managed hosting means they maintain the servers and all essential software, saving you a lot of O&M work while retaining an easy-to-use website building platform.
These programs are available in CloudLinux The system runs in a cache, which helps improve reliability and security and reduces resource usage. Compared to regular Magento hosts, the LiteSpeed Hostinger has gone a step further and even added a dedicated caching mechanism, in fact, their server speeds are among the highest in the hosting industry.
The control panel is similar to cPanel while retaining most of its features, the difference being that it is free, thus reducing the cost of ownership. You can perform basic tasks such as clearing cache through the internal control panel, plus there are some speed optimization and security tools, and the server is backed up daily to ensure that rollbacks are always available in case of problems. If subscribing to Magento Hosting PlanYou can also get a free domain name, which is a bit unusual for a private server.
The support system is clunky, we had some trouble with chat and there is no dedicated phone service, presumably to keep costs down, and a large company like Hostinger should take care of these issues. However, once you get familiar with the technical team, you’ll see that they’re actually pretty good and can help you with most hosting-related issues, despite not being full Magento professionals.
This company has probably received more positive reviews than any other competitor, which should be expected given the size of Hostinger’s business. However, they have a less-than-stable reputation for manipulating user reviews, such as having their own employees pose as customers, which is undeniably a shady tactic. Of course, Hostinger can do a great job when it comes to web hosting, you just need to be aware of some transparency issues.
Advantages
- Very affordable price
- Adequate resource allocation
- Robust speed optimization
- Free Control Panel
- Solid State Drive Storage
Disadvantages
- Clumsy support center design
- A 4-year hosting subscription is required to get the best price
As an independent hosting brand, A2 Hosting is not the largest hosting provider, however, they are heavily optimized for PHP-based content management systems such as Magento and are attracting a wide range of potential customers.
Although you can subscribe to a smaller plan to install Magento, we recommend using at least Turbo Max to get more server resources and the extra cost is worth it. The infrastructure is specifically tailored to the content management system, resulting in faster load times and excellent performance in heavy traffic situations. All servers come with LiteSpeed, which offers a speed advantage over regular Nginx and Apache, plus you get a host of performance optimization tools.
LiteMage Cache is a powerful caching plugin that works with server-side caching and LiteSpeed containers to make Magento run much faster, and that’s just the beginning of things like Magento compression,Cloudflare CDNA2 claims unlimited resources, which is a bit misleading because unlimited storage should be impossible, but they don’t mention actual usage limits, so it’s hard to assess the size of the site you can host.
Technical support is excellent through knowledgeable agents and an instantly responsive service where you can ask for help via chat, phone, email, etc. The knowledge base is also relatively good, with many tutorials dedicated to various aspects of Magento, such as configuring the caching mechanism, managing CMS extensions, etc. There is just so much content and so little navigation that you may need to use the search tool often to find what you need.
Most users have positive things to say about A2 Hosting, they like the hosting platform and the various tools, and of course, the support team gets positive reviews. Some users complain that the unlimited resources are misleading, Magento servers do offer plenty of resources, enough to get your store open, however, uncountable resources do not mean you have unlimited access, and A2 will ask you to upgrade if the site is too big for the hosting plan.
Advantages
- Fast servers
- Numerous speed optimization features
- First-class customer support
- Daily data backup
- Solid State Drive Storage
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