When it comes to Magento performance, having a solid hoster that knows it stuff is highly recommended. The following guide is a listing of hosting providers that should be able to give you a good service when it comes to Magento.
Disclaimer
Yireo is not a hosting provider. We don't actively implement Magento shops either - we focus on extensions and training instead. The following list is subjective (our own vision on things), inspired by some customers and friends, and incomplete. Use it as a quick start for a proper investigation.
Requirements for hosting Magento
Besides the official system requirements of Magento, there are couple of recommendations we can make regarding Magento. Here's what makes a good hosting environment for us:
- A VPS or physical server: Magento might require quite some resources, and sharing resources via shared hosting is simply a bad idea. Make sure to also get
root
access, so you can modify whatever you want to modify. Ifroot
access is not available, don't panic: You can ask the hoster to change settings if tuning needs to be done. If they are unwilling to help you tune the server, switch hoster. - Managed or unmanaged: If you can become
root
, this will allow you to manage all things yourself. However, if Linux is not your thing, this also means that you need to hire a developer or Linux administrator for setting up things. With managed servers, this administration is done by the hoster. Our experience is that a server needs a lot of management in the beginning, but then requires only a couple of hours of maintenance per couple of months. - About control panels: Often people that start with hosting think having a control panel like CPanel, DirectAdmin or Plesk is a good idea: You can easily configure mail and so on. Our recommendation to have a Magento server that only hosts Magento. You can put your files, backups, mail and music elsewhere. Dedicate the server to Magento.
- SSH tools: Make sure to have SSH access available, preferably also with
root
access. This will allow you to add tools likegit
,modman
,composer
,n98-magerun
and other command-line tools to your server. Don't worry if you are incapable of using the shell - your developers will require this (if they are good). - Backup policy: Make sure to check upon the backup policy, or even more important the way to restore your backup. If a restore from backup means resetting the entire VPS to a previous state, this is not something you want to undo the deletion of a simple image. The hoster might provide a solution for both disaster recovery and incremental backups, or you might need to set things up yourself.
- Specialized in Magento: A really good hosting environment for Magento includes technologies like PHP-FPM, Redis and memcached. With a VPS you can install these things yourself. With a managed server (as in: managed by the hoster) you will need to make sure are available for a reasonable price.
Listing
Some well known hosting providers have various VPS packages to help you with. With the specifications above you can find a suitable package easily. Some of these hosting providers are listed below:
- HostGator (VPS)
- Simple HELIX (dedicated, VPS)
- Magenting (shared)
- DigitalOcean (VPS)
- SiteCloud (VPS)
- Elief (VPS)
- Aspiration Hosting (dedicated)
- Arvixe (VPS, shared)
- RackSpace
- Crucial Web Hosting (VPS)
- MageMojo (dedicated)
- Nexcess (VPS)
- SiteGround (shared, VPS)
- Byte Internet (shared, Dutch)
- CloudHosting (formerly XLSHosting VPS)
- Flexwebhosting (dedicated, Dutch)
- mgt-commerce (Magento cloud)
- Tilaa (VPS, Dutch)
- iKoula (VPS)
- VPSCHEAP
- Hosting XS (Dutch)
- BudgetVM (VPS)
- KnownHost (VPS)
- EuroVPS (VPS)
- WiredTree
A list of Magento hosters on the Magento Wiki can be found here.
About the author
Jisse Reitsma is the founder of Yireo, extension developer, developer trainer and 3x Magento Master. His passion is for technology and open source. And he loves talking as well.