Magento E-Commerce Open Source Software

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.

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.

A word of caution that applies to every Magento project we have seen: modules are the main cause of both slow stores and painful upgrades. Each one adds code that runs on every request, and a poorly written one can undo the caching that keeps the store fast. Install what you genuinely need, buy from developers who publish compatibility information, and test every upgrade on a staging copy first.

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 that a Magento store on a cheap general purpose hosting plan will be slow no matter what you do to the front end, because the resources simply are not there.

Magento hosting

It is often said that Magento needs a dedicated server. For larger and busier stores that is true, but it is not true for everyone. Our Magento hosting plans run on what we call shared dedicated servers, which host only a handful of Magento sites each, tuned specifically for this workload.

That gives you the performance headroom Magento needs without the cost and administrative burden of your own machine, and if the store grows past it you can move on to a dedicated server with our help and without downtime.

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.