5 Best Magento Hosting: All-in-One eCommerce Website Building

When it comes to eCommerce platforms, Magento is the first one that comes into mind for most people. Any online business can greatly benefit from using this platform as it provides the most popular tools that are related in any way to eCommerce.

Magento is an open-source platform which is one of the main reasons why it became so popular, leaving business owners the flexibility to precisely create the web shop they want. This means unique appearance, functionality and full control over your eCommerce website.

You don’t need to be experienced to start your Magento web shop. The platform was released back in 2008 especially for those individuals and businesses that have no prior experience in web development. They improved a lot since then and nowadays, there is an average of $100 billion worth of merchandise people can buy through Magento-powered websites each year.

Some of the biggest brands are proudly using it, no wonder that it’s the absolute leading platform for eCommerce on the Web. Both big and small businesses can benefit from Magento’s wide range of themes, add-ons and customizability. Next up we are going to talk about how Magento takes the online shopping experience to a new level.

Main Reasons to Use Magento

As plenty of other successful open-source platforms, Magento also has a huge community. Whenever you need help or want to learn something new, you can check out the Magento subreddit, the community forum or their Stack Exchange site which is basically a helpful question and answer website. These sites are full of solutions, guides and even ideas that might come in handy for your eCommerce site.

Another reason to start using Magento is that there is no shortage of high-quality themes and useful add-ons you can use on the platform. There are so many extensions available that you can find entire web shops where you can browse and buy them. With Magento, customizing your website and adding the desired functionalities has never been easier.

For example, you can always upgrade the searching experience for your customers. This can be done with extensions that help them find the products they want more easily, even suggesting other similar products to them.

Although you can easily find free themes, choosing a Premium one will save you plenty of time and ensure quick loading speeds with a 100% compatibility with mobile devices. If you want to set up a serious web shop without any prior experience in website building, you can’t go wrong with Magento.

The 5 Best Magento Hosting Providers Reviewed

As your Magento shop grows, it will be more and more reliable on performance. You can always start with a simple and cheap shared hosting plan but it will quickly lead to a slow website that no one wants to visit. It is definitely worth it to invest into stronger hosting plans that guarantee your Magento website to run smoothly even if you add more stuff or generate more traffic.

Another key factor is the quality of support provided by the hosting company. What you should look for is a hosting provider with a dedicated tech support team that can be reached 24/7 and quickly solves your issues. We are going to talk about the customer support of each of our five recommended web hosting providers as well.

When a Magento web shop starts to grow, it can reach the point when you have to switch to a stronger plan, be it a VPS, a dedicated server or a group of servers. You should look for a web hosting provider that has the necessary expertise and resources to migrate your website at any time. Now let’s see our short reviews where we reveal the most important details about each provider.

HostGator

HostGator is available since 2002 and it’s one of the oldest and most successful hosting companies out there. Even their cheapest shared plans are powerful enough to run a Magento shop, ensuring fast page loading speeds and stability. Choosing one of their shared plans is a great way to start your web shop because at HostGator, they are always ready if you need an upgrade or site migration.

Magento hosting plans at HostGator allow you to install Magento with a single click. With their Reseller, Cloud and Shared hosting options, the 2.0 version is the latest one you can get. However, you can install the 2.1 version as well by choosing one of their Dedicated or VPSs.

HostGator’s award-winning support can be reached every day, all day via email, phone or live chat. Server monitoring is also available and they do off-site data backups each week. Besides their professional team, you can also visit their knowledge base with hundreds of helpful articles and video tutorials.

Every hosting plan at HostGator gets you a free website builder, 4,500 free templates, 50+ free scripts that can be ready on your account in a few seconds. There are three Magento plans that are great for starters: the Hatchling plan for $2.75 per month, the Baby plan for $5.95 and the Business plan for $5.95 a month. The Business plan is definitely recommended for Magento users since it comes with a free dedicated IP and private SSL certificate.

InMotion Hosting

You have probably heard of InMotion Hosting, a company that started in 2001 and accumulated a huge customer base with 300,000 domains and counting. They provide an outstanding support, speed and uptime for your website which are the three main factors when it comes to choosing the perfect web hosting provider.

InMotion Hosting invested a lot into their servers, meaning that your website is guaranteed to load within 2 seconds even if the traffic reaches its peak. After purchasing one of their plans, all you need to do is to just log in and install Magento with a single click.

At InMotion Hosting, you can choose between VPS and Dedicated server plans that are specified for Magento. Every plan guarantees fast servers that are equipped with SSD drives. On top of that, their control panel lets you manage the information of your customers and deal with new orders, shipments, refunds and alike. It’s also the place where you can view reports about popular search terms, inventory and more.

InMotion is another provider with an award-winning customer support that guarantees quick response times and a team of technology experts with over ten years of expertise in everything that is related to web hosting. On top of that, you can find valuable information about setting up, maintaining and improving websites on their Support Center website.

Starting with one of the VPS hosting plans at InMotion Hosting is what we mostly recommend. There are three different plans with prices ranging from $27.99 to $64.99 per month. The specs are 4GB of RAM, 4TB of premium transfer per month, 75GB disk space and 3 dedicated IP addresses. This can be scaled up to 8GB of RAM, 6TB monthly transfer, 260GB disk space and 5 dedicated IPs.

BlueHost

BlueHost started in 2003 and evolved into one of the best hosting providers on the Web. More than 20,000 people choose them on a monthly average and there are plenty of Magento users among them. They don’t offer plans specifically for the platform, but they offer features that can come in handy for setting up and managing Magento web shops.

There is no need for manual install because they included a 1-click Magento installer in their control panel. The installer is a part of their “Simple Scripts” package and it will set up your website database as well, making your store available within a few minutes.

BlueHost is a great choice for small and medium businesses. Their prices are affordable and you also get the required performance to run a Magento store seamlessly. Although their support team rather consists of WordPress experts, they can fix common Magento issues as well.

On BlueHost, people usually host their Drupal, Joomla, or WordPress websites but a Magento web shop can also run normally with around 1.5 second load time. This wasn’t always the case, but the company recently started to focus on providing a better performance for everyone including Magento users, proving themselves as a reliable web hosting provider for the platform.

The prices for their shared plans are $2.95 for the Basic, $5.95 for the Plus and also $5.95 per month for their Prime plan which is the mostly recommended one. If you would rather choose a VPS plan, there is the Standard for $19.99, the Enhanced for $29.99 and the Ultimate plan for $59.99 per month.

GoDaddy

GoDaddy is the absolute top web hosting provider in America with hundreds of thousands of customers. It is the biggest one in the industry while still being affordable and user-friendly, making it an ideal choice for big and small businesses that want to establish a solid online presence.

To pick one of the cheapest shared hosting options at GoDaddy is not even a bad idea. You can start your Magento store with great performance and then either get your money back in 30 days or upgrade to a stronger plan. Their Economy plan is the cheapest one and it gets you the basic resources to run a Magento site. It costs $2.99 per month and you get 100GB of storage, unmetered bandwidth and a free domain.

The Deluxe plan grants you unlimited sites and storage for only $4.99. For more complex sites and bigger traffic, their Ultimate plan is the best choice. It costs $7.99 per month and doubles both the memory and processing power, also adding a 1-year SSL certificate that can increase your search rankings.

Besides Magento, there is a 1-click install option for over 125 applications with every plan. Plans can be scaled up and down with a single click with GoDaddy. They have a Backup and Restore system that costs $1.99 per month and it guarantees that you won’t lose your files and folders ever again. GoDaddy also provides an award-winning security that can prevent your websites from any harm.

InterServer.net

InterServer.net was founded back in 1999 and they offer high-quality, fast and reliable web hosting plans for everyone. The Interserver.net VPS plans constantly receive positive reviews from their customers, which is the main reason why so many Magento users choose them. Although a shared plan might quickly become weak for a Magento site, a VPS plan is always an outstanding idea to begin with.

With their plans, you get a user-friendly control panel where you can install advanced software and plenty of applications. As many of the top providers, they have also made it easy to install Magento with a simple script. There are even more scripts available on the InterServer.net cloud that might come in handy for setting up and customizing your Magento shop.

InterServer.net offers a whopping 16 different plans for VPS, starting with 1 CPU core, 1GB of RAM, 25GB storage and 1TB transfer. This plan costs $6.00 per month for Linux and $10.00 for Windows users. If you scale it up to plan number 16, you get 4 CPU cores, 16GB of RAM, 400GB of storage and 16TB transfer which costs $96 for Linux and $160 for Microsoft users.

A 99.9% uptime is guaranteed, otherwise they will pay your money back. You can also manage backups and there is a free migration service in case you have a previously saved cPanel backup that needs to be migrated to an InterServer.net server.

Conclusion

One of the most important thing to decide when choosing a Magento hosting provider is whether you can afford to pick a VPS or Dedicated server plan according to your budget. If so, you should definitely start with these type of plans because as you add more products to your web shop and generate more traffic, your Magento-based site will need more resources. Choosing a shared hosting plan can be a good idea, but only for new and small Magento stores.

You don’t want to lose money just because your pages load slowly, leaving your customers unsatisfied. Shared hosting plans are usually limited, but VPS and Dedicated server plans can be scaled up easily. It mainly depends on your goals which hosting provider will be optimal for your Magento web shop.

Hopefully these five reviews gave you an insight that will help you decide which hosting site suits your business the most. If you are not sure, you can simply try out each of them and take advantage of their money-back guarantee if you didn’t quite like it. Web hosting companies usually help you migrate your site from other providers and it’s completely free.