How to choose a hosting for your Magento 2 store?

The store performance strongly depends on hosting and server capacity. Thus, сhoosing the right hosting for Magento 2 is one of the most important steps in creating an online shop. Let’s see what you need to pay attention to. 

#1. Business needs

First off, you need to understand what your business requirements are. You need to analyze not only the current situation but also think about what you may need in the future.

It is especially important to pay attention to the following points:

• Website traffic. How much traffic do you have on average? How much traffic will you have at peak time, for example, at Christmas sales?
• The number of products. How many products do you have? Do you have 100 items or 100 000 items in the catalog? Do you have hundreds of images and videos on your website?
• Audience location. Where are your customers from? You need to choose a server that will be as close to them as possible. If you sell goods to the USA, but your servers are in Europe, it may impact store performance.

Also, don’t forget the Magento 2 also has hosting requirements that you need to carry out. 

#2. Hosting management model

Hosting can be managed and unmanaged. Managed hosting is the model where you get not only a server but also a bunch of services. The provider will take care of the management, security, performance, memory, and other IT support.

Unmanaged hosting is a server without any other services included. That means that you need to install and update all the needed software by yourself or hire a DevOps specialist that will manage your Magento 2 hosting.

#3. Server type

There are 3 main server types:

1. Shared. When a single server is split among several websites.
2. Dedicated. It is one server that belongs only to your website. But it has a fixed capacity that is hard and expensive to extend.
3. Cloud. It is one of the most popular options today. Its key feature is that you can start with a 2GB server and extend it as your business grows. This type also has better performance indicators, which means it works faster than other Magento hostings.

#4. Security

There is no need to remind once again how important security is for an online store. When choosing hosting pay attention to things like:

• SSL encryption;
• Server monitoring;
• Firewalls to filter traffic;
• Security patches;
• Website backups.

→ Protect your store from fraud with Security Suite

We hope that now you have an idea of which hosting suits best for your Magento 2 and business needs.