Looking for the right place to host Magento store
Based on a true story in attempt to find a good Magento hosting for my friend. All the characters are fictional, any coincidences are accidental. Jump right to the list to get results, if unpatient. But that is not the point.
Magento is a full-featured "eCommerce Platform for Growth", a trademark of Magento Inc.
Magento is a full-featured "eCommerce Platform for Growth", a trademark of Magento Inc.
Magento Performance
is it your concern too?
Why looking for performance then?
That is the right question. If you check "magento hosting" query you will find out that almost all search index top is bloated with affiliate "top-10-reviews" linked to every shared hosting provider that ever had "One click Magento installer" in its Fantastico or Installatron auto-install scripts. Most of these "100% Magento compatible" reviews are written by people who never saw the Magento in action and are interested just in getting their affiliate comissions. Why generic shared hosting provider is not suitable for Magento?
Because Magento is an enterprise level application and have more than 100 000 files of code to run.
The most of shared hosting providers have optimized their setups very well:
Obviously, these optimizations won't work for Magento - filesystem layer (and filedescriptors cache) is usually the most bottleneck thing there, every file open/stat operation is expensive. To serve a request it is required to compile everything from scratch every time - open about 100-200 files, make a request to database, generate a few image thumbnails if required (and stuck on write to filesystem if unlucky). And new request is on the way already..
Page loading time usually is much more than 5 seconds, customers making less requests and wonder how to get the thing they like in minimal number of clicks.
The most of the fun is when you (were lucky enough) start getting about 200-300 visitors daily to your store. Provider contacts you (if support is intelligent enough) and warns that your site is loading server and will be suspended and you need to move to VPS or dedicated server. In most cases they first suspend you and after that send a warning. Or even just suspend and you, waked up after a good sleep, contact them in the morning to get your warning. Eventually, you realize that generic shared hosting provider is not really interested in serving your store - it is much simpler to host "Me and My dog" sites for the same fees.
The most of shared hosting providers have optimized their setups very well:
- very fast serving of static content
- PHP running as CGI with no opcache support to reduce memory footprint and increase density
Obviously, these optimizations won't work for Magento - filesystem layer (and filedescriptors cache) is usually the most bottleneck thing there, every file open/stat operation is expensive. To serve a request it is required to compile everything from scratch every time - open about 100-200 files, make a request to database, generate a few image thumbnails if required (and stuck on write to filesystem if unlucky). And new request is on the way already..
Page loading time usually is much more than 5 seconds, customers making less requests and wonder how to get the thing they like in minimal number of clicks.
The most of the fun is when you (were lucky enough) start getting about 200-300 visitors daily to your store. Provider contacts you (if support is intelligent enough) and warns that your site is loading server and will be suspended and you need to move to VPS or dedicated server. In most cases they first suspend you and after that send a warning. Or even just suspend and you, waked up after a good sleep, contact them in the morning to get your warning. Eventually, you realize that generic shared hosting provider is not really interested in serving your store - it is much simpler to host "Me and My dog" sites for the same fees.
A little poll to give a better picture
To be honest, I myself voted for "I used generic shared provider and it sucks".
Loading poll. Please Wait...
VPS as way to go?
Ok, is that VPS will solve everything? Probably, yes. If you find a good VPS provider with at least 384M of RAM to host on a fast filesystem, and does not overcommit servers much. Then you will have a database and apache and php and ftp or ssh in the same environment. In most cases it will be even slower - now you have your own database server which should be hungry enough to eat almost all available RAM to serve InnoDB databases fast and you have to deal with configuring everything to get acceptable performance level. And finding a good VPS provider is another quest, do not get confused by cheap prices. Acceptable rates starts from $20 for unmanaged VPS and $30-60 for managed one. Magento performance optimizations
to consider if decided to go with own VPS
There are a lot of instructions/articles/howtos on Magento performance optimization. I like the approach introced in the slideshow as it is oriented on client's side view.
Magento Site performance optimization [SPO] by yireo
While many blaim Magento for being slow, it is possible to make the Magento e-commerce application lightning fast. This requires first of all funding, because you will need to add sufficient system resources (CPU, memory) to Magento to make it run properly. But it also requires time and knowledge. For the last part - knowledge - this list helps you further.
http://www.yireo.com/tutorials/magento/magento-spo
But why reinvent the wheel?
There must be providers out there who do all these optimiztions and do it well. Start looking for provider, specialized in Magento-only hosting. Actually, it is a recall to start of this article with improved query - "Magento-only Hosting".
Why Magento-only hosting?
That is obvious too - providers specialized in Magento-only hosting usually have a knowledge and resources on how to deal with the application. There are no any loads of little apps out there which needs generic optimizations, so all optimizations are directed toward the only application - Magento.
Starting point
Looking for Magento-only hosts
A good start point could be a Wiki article at MagentoCommerce with the list of hosting providers who will install Magento.
Going through the list we need to add to ignore list providers who:
And take a closer look on the rest of them taking into considerations page loading time of demo store, optimization report for demo store, and the price, of course.
Going through the list we need to add to ignore list providers who:
- Does not have pre-installed Magento demo installation
- Provides unlimited diskspace and bandwidth for Magento plans (most likely you are supposed to be suspended before even reaching something half-unlimited due to some ToS "violation")
And take a closer look on the rest of them taking into considerations page loading time of demo store, optimization report for demo store, and the price, of course.
Filtering results
I will filter current results for US. You can repeat the task as a "home exercise" if have some spare time or believe that nobody will do it better than yourself. The list seems to be huge, but most of them are excluded quickly, when know the rules.
No so much left. The next step is page loading time test from different locations.
- Aspiration Hosting - demo1 and demo2
- Crucial Web Hosting [Professional Partner] - an amazing showcase of existing customers
- Magenting - demo
- NEXCESS.NET [Enterprise Partner] - a showcase of existing customers
- PacificHost LLC - demo is without sample data
- ProperHost.net - demo
- SimpleHELIX - demo
- XenCube - demo
No so much left. The next step is page loading time test from different locations.
How well store is accessible around the globe
simple wolrd-wide speed check
Aspiration Hosting
Using simple test at internetsupervision.com checked how well the demos are loaded around the world.
Excluding sites loaded more than 2 seconds for further tests.
Excluding sites loaded more than 2 seconds for further tests.
Magento-only Hosting Providers
Solid Residual
Now we have 5 providers for closer look. Feel free to vote / suggest your Magento Provider adding it to the list (if you are satisfied customer of course).
Crucial Web Hosting
1 point
PacificHost LLC
0 points
ProperHost
0 points
Readers commentary
share your own story
The story is not finished yet. I am working on second module with further tests to narrow-down the results and will post it right here.
We all are interested in your own story of finding a good Magento-hosting provider, so feel free to share. Thanks for stopping by.
by cathleenrutledge
Hello world. This is my bio. I can edit it later!
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