Magento Hosting and Support

Magento asks more of a server than any other mainstream shopping cart, which is why a Magento store on a cheap general purpose plan is slow whatever you do to the front end. Our Magento plans run on semi-dedicated servers built for this one workload, with dedicated servers behind them for stores that outgrow them. This page covers both, and what Magento itself does well, so you can judge the platform before you pay to host it.

Does Magento need a dedicated server?

It is often said that it does. For larger and busier stores that is true, and we sell dedicated servers for exactly that. It is not true for everyone, and our semi-dedicated plans are the demonstration.

Magento does make heavy use of server resources, but a resource requirement is not the same thing as needing a machine of your own. What it needs is guaranteed headroom and a server configured for it, and that is what a semi-dedicated plan provides at a fraction of the cost of a dedicated server.

What semi-dedicated means here

We limit each of these servers to a handful of Magento sites, and where possible we spread the geographical distribution of those sites so that their busy periods do not coincide. The result is very quick response times, with our team looking after the tuning and the security rather than you.

The servers are built and tuned specifically for Magento: sensible PHP memory limits, opcode caching, a MySQL configuration suited to Magento’s query patterns, and the caching layers Magento expects to have available. Getting those wrong is the usual reason a Magento store feels slow, and none of them are things a store owner should have to think about.

What you still need to get right

Hosting solves the resource side. Two things remain your responsibility and both have a large effect on speed.

Extensions. Every module runs on every request, and a badly written one can bypass the caching that keeps the store fast. Keep the list to what you genuinely use, buy from developers who publish compatibility information, and test every upgrade on a staging copy first. Modules are the main cause of both slow stores and painful upgrades in every Magento project we have seen.

Indexers and cron. Magento relies on its indexers and its cron jobs being healthy. When a store mysteriously slows down or stops showing new products, this is very often why. We will tell you if we can see it happening.

Migration and trials

As with all our e-commerce hosting, we will help migrate your site from your current host at no additional charge.

The prices shown are for our annual plans, which represent the best value, and quarterly pricing is available on all of them. We also offer a three month free trial for testing or for developing a new store. A live site open to the public will need to move to a paid plan immediately.

Growing beyond a semi-dedicated plan

As your store grows you can move up through the semi-dedicated plans and then, if required, on to one of our dedicated servers. We handle the whole process, with little and in most cases no downtime at all.

What Magento is

Magento is an enterprise grade e-commerce platform, available as the free and open source Magento Open Source and as the commercial Adobe Commerce. It powers a large number of substantial stores and is designed for catalogues and requirements that would defeat a simpler cart.

Open Source is aimed at developers, at store owners with real technical knowledge, or at businesses willing to engage an agency. No direct vendor support is included, although community support is available through the public forums and the documentation is extensive. Support on the hosting side is ours: the server, the PHP and database configuration, the caching layers and the monitoring.

What Magento does that lighter carts do not

Complex catalogues. Configurable, bundled, grouped and virtual products, with attribute sets that let different product types carry entirely different fields.

Multiple stores, currencies and tax regimes from one installation, which is why it is common in businesses selling into several countries.

Customer groups and tiered pricing, so trade and retail customers can see different prices on the same catalogue.

Serious extensibility. The architecture is built to be extended properly rather than patched, which is why large bespoke builds tend to end up on Magento.

Themes and modules

Magento ships with a basic theme and a large number of free and commercial themes are available. Modules extend or replace core functionality and can change almost any behaviour in the system. The caution above applies: each one adds code that runs on every request, and a poorly written one can undo the caching that keeps the store fast.

What Magento asks of a server

Magento is much heavier than CubeCart, OpenCart or WooCommerce, and this is the single biggest thing to understand before choosing it. It expects a decent amount of memory, a properly configured PHP version, Composer for module management, and it benefits enormously from a full page cache and an indexer that is kept up to date.

The practical consequence is the one at the top of this page: the resources have to be there, and on a general purpose shared plan they are not.

Is Magento the right choice?

Magento is the right answer when you have a genuinely complex catalogue, multiple stores or currencies, or requirements that a simpler cart would need a dozen extensions to approximate. It is the wrong answer for a shop with two hundred products and no unusual requirements, where it will cost more to build, more to host and more to maintain than the alternatives.

If you are not sure which side of that line you fall on, ask us. We host CubeCart, WooCommerce, OpenCart and Magento, so the recommendation is not driven by what we happen to sell.

Magento customers

Examples of customer websites using our Magento hosting include Offshore Marine Parts and Tinsmiths.

Magento hosting plans