The right hosting plan and provider can end up being a long-term solution and definitely improve your business. The differences between various hosting solutions are many, though, and to make the right choice there is a need to understand a few basic principles. So, if you are looking for the best way to get your Magento hosting, we hope to provide a few advices below.
What is Magento?
First, let’s discuss what exactly Magento is. Magento is a platform that focuses on e-commerce and gives online merchants control over the look, content, and functionality of their online store. It provides a flexible shopping cart system and offers marketing, search engine optimization, and catalogue management tools. Magento is easy to install and add additional layout and plugins and is created to be used by someone who isn’t a developer and does not have a lot of technical knowledge.
Different Types of Hosting
To choose the best option that works for your Magento hosting, you first need to know about the three different types of hosting that are available: shared, VPS and dedicated hosting.
• With shared hosting you, as the name implies, share the same server space with other users and have only a certain amount of resources available. Your website will be on the same server as hundreds or even thousands of other websites, and such resources as CPU, disk space or memory will be divided among each of you.
• VPS hosting is like a middle ground between shared and dedicated hosting. VPS can be similar to shared hosting in a way that you will also have to share server space with other users. There is much less of them though, and the server space is divided into different virtualized environments. The main benefit that you get while using VPS for you Magento hosting, is that besides getting the basic allocated resources you also have an option of getting more, in the event of a sudden spike in user activity and website traffic.
• Dedicated hosting basically means that you get all the server to yourself. You do not share the resources with anyone and can configure your hosting environment to fit your specific needs. You are also responsible for your own maintenance though, and that may require a little more technical expertise on your part.
How to Choose?
So, which one of the three possible options is best suited to host your Magento website? To answer that question, you first need to consider how big is your website going to be and whether you expect constant growth. If your online shop is going to be small and niche, shared Magento hosting is probably going to be enough. It will not offer you any real resource space to grow you site much further, though. As we mentioned before, the best option for resource flexibility and the ability to scale up, when needed, is VPS hosting. So, if you have expectations for your online shop to get more and more popular, consider choosing VPS hosting. Also, keep in mind that dedicated hosting is mostly chosen by mega-companies with constant international expansion and extremely large user traffic.