From the course: Magento Community Edition 2 Essential Training

Choosing a Magento host

From the course: Magento Community Edition 2 Essential Training

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Choosing a Magento host

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- [Instructor] Selecting the right host for your Magento site is very important, even if you plan on using shared hosting, which is popular and often more economically feasible for small websites. As you probably know, there are many options out there for shared hosting. With Magento, I highly recommend you find a host that has packages specifically designed for the platform. This is even more important than it is for content-based platforms like WordPress and Drupal, where it often doesn't matter if you have, say, Drupal-focused hosting, if your site isn't particularly large. With Magento, it is important to find a host with a deep understanding of Magento specifically, even if you're running a small site. There are a few reasons I make this recommendation to use a host specifically focused on Magento. First, it's always important to have top-notch security on e-commerce platforms. So, since that's what Magento is, you'll want a host whose servers are configured specifically for this type of site, with all relevant security measures in place, server-side. And if there's ever a critical security vulnerability discovered, in some cases the hosts themselves can configure their servers to mitigate the damage a hacker might cause. So you're often safe, even if you're unable to make your own changes, or run your own updates right away. Second, similar to the security concerns, you'll want a host that keeps adequate backups of the sites on its servers, in case some catastrophe happens or there's an actual security breach, although I should note that you should always, always, always keep backups of your own, as well. Many generic hosts do keep backups for their clients, but these are not always entirely reliable. Again, when you're running an e-commerce site, it's extremely important that no data is lost, ever. So, with a Magento-focused host, you'll be better protected in the case of data loss. Nexcess, for instance, keeps backups on external servers and in your control panel, if you go to the file manager, here at iworx-backup, you have direct access to daily, local backups. Finally, Magento is a particularly complex platform. Aside from troubleshooting issues on your site, even when installing, you may come across some problems that are difficult to figure out and that are often related to server configuration, rather than an actual mistake made during installation. Cron configuration is extremely important on Magento sites and it can be difficult to set up on your own, especially if you're not well-versed in manually configuring cron, or maybe you don't even know what cron is. Once again, whatever host you do end up using, I just want to stress that if you're running a Magento site, no matter how large or small, and regardless of whether you're using the open-source Magento Community Edition or the paid Magento Enterprise Edition, it's really recommended to use a host that knows Magento well and that offers hosting packages designed for Magento users.

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