Over the years, one truth has come to dominate the ecommerce industry i.e. all ecommerce stores are as good as the hosting solution that powers them.

In almost all cases, the success of ecommerce stores is directly dependent upon the performance and features of the hosting solution they use. Many ecommerce stores make profit during the first end-of-year holiday season sales. However, only the stores that have robust hosting are able to survive beyond the first two years of their existence.

A simple Google search will show that Magento store owners are spoilt for choice. It seems that almost every hosting provider has a specialized plan for Magento store owners. The cost of these packages range from very affordable to “breaking the bank” level.

Managed Hosting

The days of creating and managing servers by internal merchant team are fast coming to an end. The majority of the Magento store owners no longer possess the technical know-how or the money to setup and manage their hosting servers.

To keep up with the cut-throat competition, the store owners often now opt for managed Magento hosting solutions that take care of the server related hassles. These solutions ensure that the store owners only have to deal with store-level challenges only. In these cases, servers and hosting are an almost invisible layer that the store owners only deal with on occasional basis.

Now, choosing the right Magento hosting solution for your store requires extensive research. In particular, this research must focus on the following four key areas:

1. Security

Security is the number one concern of all Magento users simply because of the fact that ecommerce stores are favorite targets of cyber criminals. Security of the Magento stores is mainly the process of securing the servers that host the stores.

When discussing Magento hosting deals, the first question should be about the security measures in place. At the minimum, there should be server level firewalls, immediate patching and regular updates. In addition, the hosting provider must provide SSL certificates and HTTP/2 across the store.

2. Speed

The average attention span of an online shopper is just three minutes. If your store is not ready for a sale in this duration, the opportunity is lost (probably forever).

Magento stores, in particular, need to be fast enough to ensure that the majority of the visitors are retained and brought into the sales funnel.

The first thing to consider is the optimized server setup that presents a streamlined environment for Magento stores. The next speed related requirement is the customised cache that speeds up Magento stores during the daily operations. Popular cache choices include Varnish and Full Page Cache.

3. Scalability

During the holiday season, the demands on the Magento stores go up exponentially. In many cases, the lack of resources is the main reason why Magento stores are unable to stay afloat in the holiday season.

Scalability of resources during the crunch of the holiday season is an essential requirement of Magento stores. It’s always better to pay more for scaled-up resources than to lose the entire season’s profits.

However, not every Magento hosting provider is able to provide the ability to scale the resource up. Thus, you should ask about this capability before committing to a specific hosting provider.

4. Support

Magento hosting is a complex process that comprises of several interconnected and interdependent components. There is always a chance that things will go wrong (at the most inconvenient moments).

The quality of support determines the continued relationship of the stores and hosting provider. If the provider is unable to ensure the continued uptime for the store, the store owners will not hesitate to switch hosting immediately.

To Sum it all Up…

When buying hosting for Magento stores, always have a checklist ready that includes all the essential requirements for your store. Remember that every store has different requirements that are based on the specific niche, inventory and traffic. However, all decisions should keep the above four factors in view. However, managed cloud hosting solutions often provide the best mix of these factors.