Managed hosting is one of the key factors for the success of your Magento ecommerce store, as the performance of your resources would depend on the performance of your hosting provider.
Generally, ecommerce stores are more resource-heavy than basic websites, since they have multiple operations and functionalities integrated within them. As for websites and stores built on Magento, they especially need a server with good resources, and which fulfills Magento hosting requirements.
In this piece, we’ll look into what Magento stores need from their hosting provider, and learn from 9 Magento store owners how Cloudways fulfills those requirements.
What Do Magento Store Owners Need From Their Hosting Provider?
Nobody wants to change their hosting provider again and again. Here are a few requirements that Magento hosting should always fulfill.
Security
Previously Magento has been badly affected by online threats which include threats like Cardbleed, the attack affected 2000 Magento stores, and was described as the “largest documented campaign to date.” Then there was the Magento Killer script that affected config files and stole data like credit card information.
Magento stores therefore need a hosting provider with its own secure environment, and that keeps the systems updated with the latest Magento releases.
Speed
Magento is a dedicated ecommerce platform that offers great ecommerce functionalities, which means it needs a hosting server with good resources. Too many Magento stores are unable to live up to their optimal Magento speed because of lack of server resources, which poorly impacts the customer experience.
Compatibility
A Magento hosting provider must fulfills Magento’s hosting requirements. It should have the required packages installed, and enough resources to host Magento and handle the traffic. In other words, it needs to be compatible with Magento and handle its requirements.
Technical Support
Magento is a platform best handled by technical experts, whereas store owners would rather pay attention to the business side of the ecommerce store. While they can have Magento developers or agencies handle the technical side of operations, with hosting they need technical support from the hosting provider.
Dedicated Hosting
Magento store owners are well aware that shared hosting solutions are not reliable for Magento. Dedicated hosting solutions like cloud hosting and managed Magento are recommended for Magento stores, with dedicated server resources allocated, and which offer more server control.
Considering these decision-making factors for Magento hosting, what do Magento store owners have to say about Cloudways?
Why Do Magento Stores Keep Turning to Cloudways for Hosting?
Well, let’s hear it from them.
Excellent Security
Max Ta, CEO at SimiCart
“When it comes to security, Cloudways delivers beyond expectations. Their 1-click Let’s Encrypt SSL makes it effortless for SimiCart to meet PWA security requirements (HTTPS). On top of that, there are dedicated, OS-level firewalls to provide an additional level of security for the new website. With all these layers of security in place, Al-Bahar can now confidently venture into the future without a care.”
All Cloudways servers come with a dedicated firewall that provides an additional layer of security.Magento store owners also get a free SSL certificate for their sites. Then there are features like two-factor authentication, IP whitelisting and server auto-healing that further improve Magento store security.
Performance and Speed from a Server with Magento-optimized Stack
David Pratt, Director at DTF Digital
“The caching & server components on offer with Cloudways are great. They give us the ability to deploy a variety of apps safely in the knowledge that the right components are there to squeeze every last bit of performance out of them!”
Ed Bull, Director at Limesharp
“Magento on a whole is pretty slow out of the box, it needs to be hosted on a stack configured and optimised specifically for that application. With Cloudways, we get a highly optimized stack which changes depending on the application you are launching which I think is a brilliant feature. Moreover, Cloudways engineers are fully trained on Magento & WordPress so will happily jump-in to help fix issues. That level of support for us has been incredible so far.
Magento 2 in particular is a powerful platform that needs server components that make the average hosting platform feel inadequate. In fact, recent versions of Magento 2 go as far to make it impossible to host a store without server technologies such as Elasticsearch. Having these components already set up and optimised when we create our app is a huge boon.”
Cloudways servers utilize a powerful stack that’s optimized according to Magento hosting requirements. The Platform is also always updated with the latest Magento version, patches and technologies. The LAMP (Linux Apache MariaDB PHP) environment is pre-installed, along with Elasticsearch, and Varnish and Redis caching technologies. There’s also an excellent CDN add-on..The result? Optimum performance for Magento store owners.
Freedom to Choose Between 5 Top Providers in 60+ Locations
“El Buzo” Stan, Owner at Lidia Crochet Tricot
“We can now sell our products on all continents with ease. This is an achievement for us, as we have been able to build a company from scratch”
Cloudways offers services from Managed AWS Hosting, Google Cloud Web Hosting, and DigitalOcean, with data centers in over 60+ locations globally. So no matter where your customers are, you can reach them easily without any sort of lag. Cloudways works on a pay-as-you-go model so you only pay for the resources that have been used.
Active Technical Support
Ed Bull, Director at Limesharp
“With Rackspace we always received a good level of support. Their engineers are skilled and on the whole get back to you quickly so we expected to be getting that level of support from Cloudways at the very minimum. We have often found service levels dip after a period of time, but that has not happened with Cloudways. We still receive instant responses to our queries and issues even after five years of using Cloudways.
We can’t speak higher of the service, platform and team at Cloudways. They are constantly improving and evolving their offering to make things even smoother. We love the instant responses to our issues, Slack channel communication and an easy to use web interface.”
Ease of Server Management
Paul Ryazanov, CEO at MageCloud
“As an agency that supports many eCommerce customers, we always need a trouble-free hosting provider. For more than 5 years MageCloud utilizes Cloudways as a managed cloud solution for all major cloud platforms. With a fully automated dashboard, we are able to manage the entire infrastructure for 60+ customers without any extra hassle. We are 1000% happy with the professional level of technical support that helps maintain servers with 99.99 uptime SLA.”
Server and application does not require much technical expertise at Cloudways. The dashboard is automated, and the 1-click functionality makes everything easier.
The Platform Helps Form Long-Term Strategic Partnerships
Alex Nguyen, Founder at LitExtension
“Cloudways is an important strategic partner of LitExtension that provides a managed Cloud Hosting platform for both individuals, teams, and businesses. Your Platform-as-a-service cloud servers impress me with a set of fantastic features that allow users to scale up hosting resources.
Similar to LitExtension, Cloudways defines its mission as ensuring customer satisfaction. This is why the partnership between Cloudways and LitExtension is beneficial for store owners, developers, freelancers, and web agencies as well.
We feel extremely confident in hosting our clients’ stores. Not only this, but we also feel our partnership with Cloudways is from one specialist to another who both have a deep understanding of Magento and Ecommerce.”
Final Words
Cloudways has clearly made an impact as a managed Magento cloud hosting solution. With Cloudways, Magento store owners don’t have to worry about hosting requirements and pre-installed packages because all those things have already been taken care of. Not only does it offer ease of server and application management, but the Platform’s features have turned it into a one-stop solution for Magento hosting needs.
Abdur Rahman
Abdur Rahman is the Magento whizz at Cloudways. He is growth ambitious, and aims to learn & share information about Ecommerce & Magento Development through practice and experimentation. He loves to travel and explore new ideas whenever he finds time. Get in touch with him at [email protected]
