If you are in the process of planning and launching a Magento powered store, you are in for an experience of a lifetime. You will experience a powerful store management experience and your visitors will have a great time shopping on your Magento store.
During the process, you would need to make a crucial decision that could potentially make or break your store. I am referring to the choice of the hosting solution for your store.
In almost all cases, an ecommerce store goes down when the hosting server is unable to cope with the requests of the visitors. When this happens, visitors start seeing errors (such as 404). At this point, the store’s revenue and brand reputation start to go down. If this continues, eventually goes under.
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The Two Dimensions of the Decision
Many store owners (particularly the first-timers) often fall into the trap of cheap hosting solutions that look attractive on the surface. However, once the store goes online and receives traffic, the inadequacies of the solutions become apparent. At this point, changing the hosting servers become a costly and technical challenge.
Another important aspect is the technical requirements for server management. Magento is a resource-intensive platform and server management and maintenance is a never-ending chore. Not every store owner has the right technical skill set to ensure consistent server performance. Thus, they have to pay for sysadmins that form an additional item on the expense sheet.
In my opinion, whether you are a Magento veteran or a first-timer, managed Magento hosting solutions offer the best mix of price, features and the ability to focus on running your business rather than wasting time on server management.
Why Managed Magento Hosting is a Better Option
To save you the hassle of trying out the various managed Magento hosting solutions, I decided to evaluate Cloudways, a popular option in the managed cloud hosting industry.
During my initial research, the fact that Cloudways offers the choice of five cloud providers (Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Linode, Digital Ocean, and Vultr) caught my attention and I decided to dig a bit deeper.
I have opted for a FREE trial to test out the platform. I discovered that they have a Pay-as-You-Go (PAYG) billing model, where you only have to pay for resources you consume during the billing cycle.
Now, sit back as I will show you how to host your Magento store on this managed hosting platform within minutes.
Step 1) First log in to the platform. If you are new to Cloudways, create an account and use the coupon code ‘BOOSTMAG’ to avail a special discount.
Step 2) In the top right corner, click the Add Server button to launch a new server.
Step 3) Now select the application you want to install. They offer the latest version of both Magento 1 (1.9.4 with FPC) and Magento 2 (2.3.1 with Varnish).
Now, name your application and server, and assign it to any of your projects. Where New Project is created by default which you can select from the drop-down menu.
Step 4) Select the hosting provider on which you want to launch the application.
Once you are done, select the size and data center location. For AWS and Google Cloud Platform, you also have to define bandwidth, application and database storage.
You can configure your server by selecting the bandwidth, storage capacity, and database depending on your store’s requirements. If you find the need to scale your resources at any point, Cloudways allows you to scale your server any time.
Step 5) Finally, click the ‘Launch Now’ button at the bottom right corner to launch the Magento application on the selected server.
It might take a few minutes depending on the speed of your internet connection.
Congratulations! You have launched your server with pre-installed Magento application, ready to go!
Managed Magento Hosting Features and Configuration
That was easy!
You can easily launch your Magento store on a managed server in minutes without requiring any technical expertise. If you are using unmanaged hosting, then, launching a Magento store is not easy and requires you to be an expert in both server management and Magento configuration.
Server Management
Now let’s check out the features that come with the managed Magento hosting for easy management of both the server and application.
Control over Server: To have full control over your server Cloudways offers SSH terminal through which you can access your server resources and manage them via CLI commands.
Server Monitoring: The Server Monitoring tab offers an overview of server performance and resource allocation so that you have a clear idea of server resource consumption as per your business needs.
Managed Services: To optimize your Magento store, you need a cache solution such as Memcached, Varnish, etc. Cloudways simplifies service management and allows you to change the service status in a click.
Setting And Packages: This tab helps you to change your server configuration in a few clicks. You can also define the values in predefined fields such as execution limit, upload size, max input time, and OPCache memory.
Server Scaling: This feature allows you to manage your server size to meet the challenges of traffic spikes and increased demands on the server.
Backups: Easily take a manual (also known as an on-demand) backup or schedule server backup on a frequency of your choice.
Application Management
Cloudways also allows you to comfortably manage your web applications. It provides all the essential features that you need to configure your Magento application.
Access Details: While creating the server, all the application requirements are already generated and shared with the user.
Domain Management: Easily manage your domain and redirect the application to your domain in a few clicks.
Cron Job: Automatically perform your scheduled task(s) easily by defining them into the Cron job.
Free SSL Certificate: SSL has become an integral part of every ecommerce store. It is essential for doing online business because of the additional layer of security on your store. Cloudways offers FREE SSL certificates that you can easily install on your main and subdomains without any hassle.
Application Settings: You can easily define the settings for your application in a few clicks.
Deployment via Git: Developers can set up a smooth workflow by taking advantage of the integrated Git deployment. This simplifies project development and acts as version control for your codebase.
Cloudways CDN: This feature speeds up the delivery of static resources for your application, which overall improves the load time of the website.
Wrapping Up
Selection of the right hosting is as important as selection of the right platform for developing an ecommerce store. So for an ideal ecommerce platform, there should be an ideal optimized hosting, for which managed hosting is the best choice where you can select from multiple Magento hosting providers to host your online store. Such hosting services are essential for providing a great experience to store visitors. Cloudways is the recommended managed host for your Magento stores because of their hosting features and easy to use configuration delivered by their very excellent platform.
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