What is Managed Magento Hosting, and why do you need it?
A successful Magento shop requires speed, agility, and capabilities to handle traffic spikes with the best possible security.
As Magento does not offer web hosting, you will need a robust infrastructure that meets specific Magento hosting requirements.
A suitable Magento hosting environment will require a server with specified and well-configured technologies.
These requirements can be met by many types of hosting, such as:
- Shared Hosting
- Dedicated Hosting
- VPS (Virtual Private Server) Hosting
- Cloud Hosting
While choosing the best hosting plan for Magento, you will have to decide between a Managed hosting or a Do-It-Yourself solution.
As your Magento store kicks into high gear, a Do-It-Yourself solution will quickly pile up, consuming more time, effort, and investments.
Companies often fail to set up and configure the necessary components.
Without the support of a managed hosting provider, updates, daily backups, server management, and security will be solely your responsibility.
Even if all these requirements are covered, you will need a team that is available 24/7 for technical assistance.
This article will look at Managed hosting services and why it is the best hosting option for your business.
What is Managed Magento Hosting?
Managed Magento hosting is a service where your Magento hosting provider is responsible for server and software management.
In addition to selling you a server, the managed hosting provider will look after your servers and take care of all tasks to keep your business running.
Managed hosting for Magento combines the top three backend aspects:
- Knowledge of the application
- Experience in server configurations (performance, security, backups)
- Cloud knowledge and expertise
Here, the technical experts work continuously behind the scenes to ensure your site runs optimally, even when you add more products, release new features, and increase traffic.
Managed hosting for Magento includes migration, scalability, performance, and security.
Exceptional features of Managed Magento hosting:
- Migration of existing shopping cart
- Hourly full backups
- Server-side security updates and patches
- Cache management
- Continuous monitoring
- Database management
- Customer support on application level
- Development environment
- Compliance and security certifications
- Firewall and data encryption
Delegating these tasks eliminates the technical and maintenance burdens so that you can grow your Magento store efficiently.
In addition to these services, there are several benefits to managed hosting, which improve Magento management.
Let’s take a look at some of the top benefits of managed hosting for Magento:
Advantages of Fully Managed Magento Hosting
1. Specialist Support on Application Level
Several things could go wrong while hosting your Magento store.
Server misconfigurations, disabled caching, excessive third-party apps, integration errors, etc., all of which can be stressful and overwhelming.
Managed hosting allows you to gain professional support in handling the Magento infrastructure.
An experienced Magento team will assist in customizing the online store to your specific needs.
They will build your Magento web stack, configure Varnish and Redis cache systems, set up web servers, firewalls, SSL certificates, and more.
If there are any unexpected issues, your managed hosting provider will identify the exact problem and provide professional solutions effectively.
2. Operational support
Managed hosting entrusts all the operational and maintenance workloads to experts for a secure and high-performing Magento platform.
It provides complete operational reliability with server administrators resolving maintenance issues in a shorter time frame.
Without managed hosting, you will also be in charge of all the technical aspects of Magento. It may become an add-on to your workloads.
Managed hosting eliminates backend tasks from your checklist, giving you more time and peace of mind to focus on your business.
For better operations, you also gain additional tools such as:
3. Monitoring
Continuous monitoring ensures a healthy status of your servers for exceptional performance. It also helps identify and troubleshoot issues proactively.
You can access granular visibility of various metrics such as CPU usage, memory, disk space, and bandwidth using a single dashboard on a powerful control panel.
Managed hosting offers excellent log management solutions to analyze and explore large data logs for real-time monitoring and troubleshooting.
4. Security
E-commerce stores are highly susceptible to cyberattacks and can result in massive financial loss, sensitive data breaches, and brand damage.
In late 2020, around 2806 Magento 1 stores witnessed a "Cardbleed" cyberattack that heavily compromised the consumer's payment data.
There are several Magento security threats to look out for:
- Malware and ransomware
- Phishing
- SQL injection
- E-skimming
- Cross-site scripting (XSS)
- Spamming and bad traffic
Managed hosting prioritizes Magento security and strengthens defenses with regular updates, vulnerability scans, and server-side security patches.
According to VMWare's Carbon Black 2020 Cybersecurity Outlook report, 79% of respondents noted that finding the right security talent was "extremely challenging."
Around 80% revealed that they had increased their security budget to prevent breaches.
Managed Magento hosting plans ensures advanced security needs with highly effective and reliable protection solutions.
Opting for managed hosting for Magento means that highly trained Magento security specialists are at the forefront of protecting your store against all malicious attacks.
Check out this article for an in-depth Magento security checklist.
5. Optimization and Performance
Page load time affects bounce rates, conversion rates, and consumer loyalty.
A Radware case study showed how a 2-second delay in page load time during a transaction resulted in 87% abandonment rates.
Even though Magento ecommerce platform is highly customizable, adding unnecessary extensions with poor cache management will negatively affect your site speed.
Managed service providers handle optimization workloads of both server and software for Magento.
MGT-Commerce offers page load time under 0.3 seconds for blazing speed and a seamless consumer experience.
Gain deeper insights: Top 12 tips for Magento 2 speed optimization in 2020
6. Scalability
Scalability is critical for a successful Magento shop, but it also requires flexible architecture and strategy. You don't want your Magento site to be unavailable during traffic spikes.
Managed hosting solutions help you scale globally with continuous uptime and required compliance.
Auto Scaling enables you to prepare effectively for traffic peaks and grow your business strategically.
It is an excellent process to upscale or downscale resources automatically within a threshold, using predefined configurations.
Managed hosting services assist in creating a robust Magento infrastructure to expand your store securely.
7. Reduce time and save costs
Hosting a Magento website on your own might not be as cost-effective in the long run.
You may end up paying for full-time technical support by hiring in-house staff or opting for expensive hourly services.
A subscription-based managed hosting for Magento is thus more cost-efficient, as it offers a suite of managed Magento services and a team of experts readily available to help you any time of day.
Whenever you need any technical assistance, you can contact your managed hosting provider and resolve all issues efficiently without breaking the bank.
Whereas opting for unmanaged hosting will later cause more financial losses due to downtime.
The saved costs by not choosing managed hosting would later result in significant losses of investments and opportunities.
8. Global infrastructure by a Cloud Data Center
Magento open-source is a feature-rich platform where you can set up hundreds of inventory and customize purchase funnels to boost conversion rates.
However, with added functionalities and plugins, you will also need a flexible and resilient infrastructure to avoid a laggy e-commerce platform.
Managed hosting offers the latest hosting technologies that are cost-effective and help you scale globally.
Having a global infrastructure means you are always ready to provide the best services to your customers worldwide.
In events like Black Friday/Cyber Monday, which greatly influence e-commerce revenue, you don’t want your site to be unresponsive, slow, or unavailable.
The cloud infrastructure offers a reliable and global cloud platform so that you reach consumers globally and offer them a high-performing e-commerce site.
9. Newest Hosting Technologies
If you are using AWS Cloud for Magento hosting, you’ll gain access to technologies such as:
- Amazon Relational Database Service (AWS RDS)
- AWS Web Application Firewall
- Content Delivery Network (CDN)
MGT-Commerce offers next-generation AWS Graviton 2 processors for remarkable Magento site performance at a lower cost.
Upgrading to news technologies keeps your Magento site secure and highly efficient, giving you an edge over your competitors.
Managed Hosting vs. Unmanaged Hosting for Magento Store:
What is Unmanaged hosting?
Unmanaged hosting allows you to own your servers with complete control and access.
You are responsible for the maintenance workloads, security, installation, and operations.
Hosting a Magento site on your own will require:
- In-depth knowledge and expertise in Magento
- Building a Magento specific architecture
- Installing regular server-side updates and security patches
- Constant monitoring of resources
- Compliance and PCI certifications
- Backups and rollback
- Resolving all issues on your own
- Creating a disaster escalation strategy
You may get tempted by the cheaper cost of an Unmanaged hosting plan, but soon you may notice how every downtime results in high financial loss.
Let’s dive deeper and take a look at some key differences of Managed vs. Unmanaged Hosting for Magento.
| Categories | Managed Hosting | Unmanaged Hosting |
|---|---|---|
| Access and Control. | Magento specialists control the servers. | You gain full root access and control. |
| Installations and Setup. | A specialist will conduct every setup and configuration. Managed migration guarantees moving your Magento shop without any hassle. |
You will install the Magento framework from scratch. Migrating without prior Magento experience might result in data loss. |
| Security. | The hosting provider will completely handle all your Magento security needs. Hosting providers conduct vulnerability scans, patches, and threat detection regularly. |
You will have to take care of security by yourself. You may need Magento security expertise to safeguard your Magento store. |
| Performance and Uptime. | Magento optimization is one of the focal points of managed hosting services. They will aim at providing faster page load times and continuous site availability. |
Slow speed and downtime may occur if you don’t optimize your Magento store effectively. |
| Control Panel. | The managed hosting services will add a server control panel. | No server control panel is given. |
| Updates, Backups, and Restorations. | Specialized system admins execute regular updates, automated backups, and data restoration. | You will manage the operational tasks such as backups, updates, and data recovery in case of any losses. |
| Technical Support. | Managed hosting services provide 24/7/365 technical support for your Magento hosting. | Unmanaged hosting requires technical expertise or pricey hourly support. |
| Efficiency and Productivity. | It saves you time, and helps increase efficiency in hosting your Magento store. | Requires a lot of time and effort to keep the lights on for your Magento store. |
| Scaling. | A Magento hosting company provides flexible infrastructure and defined specifications for easy and secure global scalability. | Scaling in different regions would require the ability to configure and manage the Magento architecture. |
| Monitoring and Server Maintenance. | Get continuous monitoring and maintenance. All issues are resolved quickly by the support team available to you 24/7. |
You will need full-time monitoring support for healthy servers and a smooth hosting experience. |
| Costs. | Recurring fees. No additional costs. The costs are 50 times lower than hiring a fixed system admin. It is more cost-effective in the long run. |
There is no recurring fee. Add-ons for management will require additional costs. Expensive in the long run if you don’t have technical expertise. |
Unmanaged hosting demands technical expertise and is time-intensive in terms of continuous maintenance.
For a growing Magento shop, **managed hosting will ease all operational and management workloads while also reducing your infrastructure costs.
Conclusion
Successful e-commerce businesses are continuously developing and adding new technologies.
The backend workloads of Magento hosting are complex and significantly affect site performance and security.
Delegating these tasks to a fully managed Magento hosting provider is a practical and safe bet to eliminate the worries of maintaining your Magento store.
With managed hosting for Magento, you can focus on growing your e-commerce business.
Discover MGT-Commerce for high-performance Magento hosting and fully managed services.
We help you gain that competitive edge in e-commerce by delivering the fastest Magento hosting and a wide array of benefits for an outstanding consumer experience.
Our excellent support team is here to consult you and drive your business forward.
Want to try it yourself? Get started with a free demo!
