Magento was End-Of-Life on June, 30th 2020, which means Adobe no longer provide security patches or updates for Magento 1. Since then many Magento users are moving to Magento 2. One of the biggest challenges for storeowners when changing platform to Magento 2 is finding a best Magento 2 hosting for their websites.
With 4+ years working on different Magento 2 projects, I was able to try different Magento 2 hosting providers. In this article, I will share my experience in choosing the best Magento 2 hosting.
The review has detailed performance for each hosting, along with all the tests I have done to measure the actual data.
Best Magento 2 managed hosting providers comparison table
| Ranking | Product | Magento 2 version support | Prominent Features | Overall rating | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Cloudways Cloudways review | All Magento 2 version | - Magento 2 installation in One Click - Flexible plans, wide range of choices - Strong inhouse CDN Optimized for Magento 2 With Advanced Caches - Free website Migration - Free stagging environment to test - Magento 2 themes/extensions before go live. - Easy server cloning | 9.5 | $14.00/month |
|
Nexcess Managed Magento 2 hosting | CE: 2.3.X 2.4.X EE: 2.3.X - 2.4.X | - Superior support on Magento 2 issues - Affordable and flexible hosting plans - Good caching system for Magento 2 - Many strong optimizations dedicated to Magento 2 - PCI Compliance for all plans - Free website migration | 9 | $19.95 |
|
Aspirationhosting | CE:2.2X 2.3.X , 2.4 EE:2.2X 2.3.X, 2.4 | - Experience support on Magento 2 issues - Free CDN for Desire plan - Robust cache solution - Affordable price compared to other providers - Free website transfer | 8.5 | $199 |
|
Magemojo | CE:2.2X 2.3.X 2.4.X EE:2.2X 2.3.X - 2.4.X | - Pro-level Magento 2 support, even with 3rd party extension and theme. - Super optimization for Magento 2 - Free magento 2 website transfer - 1 click to deploy stagging site - Amazon auto scaling - 4-layer DDOS protection - Free premium CDN | 8 | $31.9 |
|
Mgtcluster | CE: 2.3.X 2.4.X EE: 2.3.X - 2.4.X | - Fully support Magento 2.4 - Affordable price - Dedicated Magento 2 support - Docker environment integrated - Unlimited bandwidth for all plans | 7.5 | $18.9 |
Contents
5 Things to consider when choosing a Magento 2 hosting company
As per my experience, there are 5 factors to keep in mind at when choosing a hosting provider for Magento 2 website.
#1 Check if hosting meet Magento 2 system requirement
Magento 2 has many more features and optimizations compared to Magento 1, which means it also consumes more hardware resources. The latest version of Magento 2 is 2.4, has the following requirements:
Software:
- Linux OS (no longer support window OS)
- Apache 2.4 / Nginx 1.x
- Mysql 8.0, MariaDB 10.4
- PHP 7.4, PHP OPcache
- Elasticsearch (this search engine consumes a lot of hardware)
Hardware:
- Minium of 2G memory
- 2 core CPU at least
With such requirements, it’s clear that normal shared hosting cannot handle a single Magento 2 website.
You can learn how to check version of Magento 2 website here.
#2 Support on Magento 2 related issues.
Magento 2 is a robust eCommerce platform with many built-in functionalities, thus there may be many problems arising when working with Magento 2.
There are some simple issues you can solve yourself or look for solutions from websites such as magentip.com, StackOverflow, Magento 2 forum. However, some are more complicated, you can’t solve them yourself and you may need support from hosting staff.
=> This is why you need a provider with experience support on Magento 2 issues.
Normally, a hosting provider will only provide support on hosting related issues, you should look for a company that is specialized in Magento 2 and able to provide support on Magento 2 related issues.
All the hosting providers in my list are Magento experts. They even have certified developers to help customers deal with Magento 2 problems.
#3 Magento 2 optimization from server-side
To have a smooth running Magento 2 website, besides hardware requirements, we also need a lot of software optimization from the server-side.
You should carefully look at what optimization the hosting providers offer. Some important optimizations mentioned here are: Magento 2 installation tools, PCI Compliance, CDN, migration tool, Caching system, Eslaticsearch support, Firewall, PHP 7.4 support.
#4 Pricing
If your business is new with a limited budget, it’s better to consider an affordable hosting plan. Some hosting are overpriced, which means you don’t need to pay such high price for the return value.
It’s crucial to determine your business’s goal, such as how many visitors/month, how many concurrent users, how much $/month you can afford for hosting, and then pick the one that brings the best value according to your budget. This article will also guide you on how to choose suitable hosting based on your targets.
#5 Managed or unmanaged hosting
Managed Magento 2 hosting is a hosting solution that is tailored (and fully-optimized) for Magento 2 websites. Managed Magento 2 hosting provider will take care of all the technical issues related to Magento 2, creating the best conditions for you to focus on developing your business.
Unmanaged hosting means you will have to do all the jobs from the technical stuff, there will be no support from hosting providers with issues related to your website. There’s only limited support on server issues such as server hanging, DDoS, slow network…
Managed hosting certainly has a higher price, this type of hosting is suitable for storeowners who want to fully focus on their business, or for those who has no Magento 2 inhouse developer.
On the other side, running Magento 2 on unmanaged hosting means you will have to deal with Magento 2 issues yourself. This type of hosting is suitable for those who have technical knowledge and can solely resolve Magento 2 issues.
The choice is up to you!
How I test the performance of each hosting
I conducted several tests to find out what hosting brings the best performance results.
To make it fair, all tests are done with a default installation of Magento 2 hosted on similar hosting plans.
- Loadtime test: In this test, Pingdom is used, this test indicates the amount of time a user spent to load a default Magento 2 website.
- Stress test is performed to see how each hosting performs in a period of time with a number of increasing concurrent users. In this test, I use Loadimpact stress testing tool. I slowly raise the number of concurrent users from 1 to 50 and track the Magento 2 website’s performance. Good hosting providers tend to have a consistent performance with an increasing number of users.
- Ping test: In this test, I use Locaping to check every hosting’s ping time from different locations worldwide. The test locations are from 3 continents: Europe, Asia and America. A good hosting has a low ping speed for faster response time.
- Uptime test: In this test, I gather information about hosting uptime from Uptimerobot, an uptime monitor applications. In e-commerce, it’s crucial to keep our website online all the time. Hosting downtime may result in a loss in sales, so this factor is very important.
Note: All websites in this test are hosted in the USA server location of each hosting provider.
Cloudways
| Get Cloudways Hosting |
Hosting Type: Managed Magento 2 hosting
Load time with default Magento 2 theme: average 304ms Ping (min and max): Min: 1ms – Max: 198ms Best for: Store with less than 180 concurrent users Price: Start from $10.00/month |
Compared to other hosting providers, Cloudways has a completely different approach. Cloudways does not have their own datacenter. They only provide managed hosting services, they partner with well-known cloud infrastructure providers including: Digitalocean, AWS, Google Cloud, Vultr, Linode.
Cloudways is also one of the first hosting providers that support 1 click Magento 2 installation.
Due to this, customers will have a wide range of choices when choosing where to host their Magento 2 website. On the other side, Cloudways can fully focus on supporting customer issues related to their Magento 2 website.
Load time test
Cloudways also did very good job on optimizing hosting for Magento 2. The test returns 81 performance grade on a fresh Magento 2 website with 3.92s load time, nearly good as Nexcess.
Stress Test
In stress test, Clouways hosting shows its stability when the number of concurrent users and requests keep increasing overtime.
As can be seen from the chart, response time remains steadily at ~65ms even when active VUs reached 50. The average response time of the website was 67ms and it keep unchanged during the test. 0 HTTP failures is what I get after several tests on Cloudways hosting
Although response time is not as good as Nexcess (probably due to caching system), overall, Cloudways deserved to be a great option to grow your Magento 2 eCommerce business.
Ping test
I want to show you 2 ping tests from Cloudway, 1 without CDN and 1 with CDN
This is ping result without CDN
Ping is very low in US and Canada as the hosting I tested is located in the US
This is ping result with Cloudways CDN
You may be asking if the ping result below is wrong but no, it’s ping result from Cloudways server to different locations worldwide.
To make it easier to see, I highlighted ping results that are lower than 100 in green.
| US (W) | US (E) | London | Singapore | Sao Paulo |
|
2 ms
|
2 ms
|
2 ms
|
5 ms
|
3 ms
|
| Bangalore | Sydney | Japan | Canada | Germany |
|
131 ms
|
2 ms
|
2 ms
|
9 ms
|
2 ms
|
As you can see, Cloudways Magento 2 hosting has super low ping time from all locations. This can be explained by their strong CDN (Content delivery networks). This inhouse CDN automatically reducing the physical distance between the server and the user by redirect user’s connection to the nearest server in the network, which helps significantly reduce ping time.
However, this powerful CDN is not free, they charge $1 for 25GB of data, so if your budget is limited you don’t need to use this feature.
Uptime
Cloudways also has a dedicated page to monitor server status. In this page you can keep updated with their latest notifications.
However, as Cloudways does not own datacenter, you could not see server uptime monitor like Nexcess. The information here is all about the cloud infrastructure providers they partner with.
To monitor uptime, you need to go to status page on their partner’s website.
For example, if you choose to host your website on AWS then you need to go here: https://status.aws.amazon.com/
With my experience working with clients who are hosting their site on Cloudways, website on Cloudways rarely fall into outage because all of their partners are giants in hosting industry like AWS and Google, Digital Ocean.
Hosting features
Cloudways has a team of experience Magento 2 developers and they have done many optimizations for their Magento 2 hosting:
ThunderStack formula: Cloudways use advance caching technologies such as Varnish and Memcached, which are recommended by Magento 2.
Special caching system for Magento: Cloudways also integrates Amasty’s Full Page Cache module directly to Magento 2 installation. Amasty is a well-known Magento 2 extensions provider.
1-Click to scale hosting: you can easily scale your hosting option in backend with just 1 click. That means you can increase Ram, CPU, HDD size directly from backend, you don’t need contact the support staff for this.
Support PHP 7.4: You can now run Magento 2.4 – the latest version of Magento 2 on Cloudways
Pricing
As Cloudways partner with different infrastructure providers, their pricing also varies accordingly.
With their 3 provider including: Linode, Vultr, DigitalOcean, price is nearly the same. Take a look at the table below:
DigitalOcean: start from $10/month
Linode: start from $12/month
Vultr: start from $11/month
AWS and Google have much higher pricing with the same server specification, if you are not a big fan of those giants, I recommend using Vultr, DigitalOcean, or Linode because they are also very good.
Support
Clouways provides 3 support methods
Livechat: you directly chat with support staff and they will solve your issue via chat
Ticket system: Ticket system is best to use if you have complicated issue, you and support staff can keep track of your issue precisely.
As a managed hosting provider, Cloudways provide professional support on server related tasks such as
- Free website migration (which means you can ask them to move your Magento 2 website from another provider to Cloudways for free, and Cloudways will make sure that your website operates flawlessly after the migration)
- Support on application-level issues: This means support staff are willing to help you with issues related to Magento 2
- Private slack channel: Cloudways customers can access their private slack channel where customer can directly interact with Cloudways support engineers to solve hosting issues or Magento 2 issues (this is available for premium support package)
The average response time from Cloudways is 10 minutes for high priority level ticket, which is very amazing.
Pros
- Flexible plans, wide range of choices
- Strong inhouse CDN, 1 click Magento 2 installation
- Optimized for Magento 2 With Advanced Caches
- Free website Migration
- Free stagging environment to test Magento 2 themes/extensions before go live.
- Easy server cloning
Cons
- Limited bandwitdh
- Phone support with Support Engineer only available in premium support package.
- As cloudways does not own servers, server issues sometimes need to wait for response from infrastructure providers
Nexcess
 Get Nexcess Hosting |
Hosting Type: Managed Magento 2 hosting
Load time with default Magento 2 theme: average 12ms Ping (min and max): Min: 30ms – Max: 227ms Best for: Store with less than 200 concurrent users Price: Start from $19.95/month |
Nexcess, an official Magento Platinum Partners, has provided Magento hosting since the first time of Magento. Unlike other hosting providers, Nexcess is dedicated to eCommerce hosting only, which means their developers devote most of their time to optimize hosting performance for eCommerce platform.
Below are Nexcess hosting performance test
Load time test
With several optimizations for Magento 2, Nexcess return an amazing result on Load time test on Pingdom. Loadtime is 3.78 and performance grade is 86.
Stress Test
The blue line stands for Response time
The purple line stands for number of Requests/second
Nexcess brings an outstanding results in Stress test, the average response time of Nexcess was 12ms. With an increasing number of VUs (virtual users) overtime, Nexcess response time remains steadily. There’s only some spikes where response time jumped to 101ms, this often happens when the system build caches for static content.
Number of HTTP failures is 0 in 21367 requests, which means the server is up all the time during the test.
The test outcome proves that Nexcess should be in the top list of Magento 2 hosting providers with stable and fast performance.
Ping test
Below is Nexcess ping time from different locations.
| US (W) | US (E) | London | Singapore | Sao Paulo |
|
58 ms
|
30 ms
|
90 ms
|
218 ms
|
152 ms
|
| Bangalore | Sydney | Japan | Canada | Germany |
|
227 ms
|
199 ms
|
158 ms
|
25 ms
|
103 ms
|
The hosting location in this test is US, so US returns the best ping. Ping can be improved much better if you use CDN (content delivery network) for your website.
Uptime
Nexcess has a very detailed server status page where you can monitor server status.
As you can see, Nexcess has 100% uptime in the last 2 months. Green blocks indicate that the server is on and there is no problem.
On this page, you can also monitor server maintenance status.
The page keeps updating hour by hour, so you can keep track of server status easily.
Hosting features
Nexcess hosting provides many robust features to improve Magento 2 performance.
- Auto-scaling: Auto-scaling feature is one of the most prominent features from Nexcess. This feature works this: when your store’s traffic surges (likely happen when you run promotion campaigns) and traffic exist concurrent users limit for your hosting plan => The system automatically triggers an event to extend hosting’s PHP process limit (PHP workers) to temporarily burst concurrent users limit on your website. This means you don’t need to pay extra bucks for a bigger hosting plan just to make sure your website does not overload in seasonal promotion campaigns.
- Nexcess Cloud Accelerator: Cloud Accelerator acts as a layer to boost load speed of your website. This feature is powered by Nginx and tailored by Nexcess, a core function of this feature is MicroCache. Microcache keeps your static content in Memory for faster load. This is an advanced caching solution used by many eCommerce giants to boost store performance.
- Nexcess Application Stack: Nexcess application stack includes all latest technologies: OpenStack. Apache 2.4, PHP 7.4 (required for Magento 2.4), Redis 3, MariaDB 10.2, Varnish Cache.
-
Elasticsearch: I need to take special note of this feature because from Magento 2.4, Elasticsearch is a core component required to make search function on Magento 2.4 work properly. This search engine a Magento 2 store’s entire catalog to provide fast and accurate search experiences.
-
Pricing
Nexcess offers affordable Managed Magento 2 hosting plan
The XS plan is the starter plan, $49/month support up to 20 concurrent users, 50 SSD diskspace and 10 extra domains, 1T bandwidth. Although it’s stated that the plan can handle up to 20 concurrent users, a live site of my clients surpassed 40 concurrent users on XS plan and everything still fine. It’s just some kind of suggestion from hosting provider.
For most store, I suggest using S plan. This plan will be fine ulti you reach 80 concurrent users. If you reach that numbers => your store is growing so good. There’s no problem to spend some extra buck for bigger plan.
You can upgrade to Dedicated server option anytime you want, Nexcess support staff will help you transfer data safely in no time.
Support
One thing that makes Necess stand out from the crowd is their excellent support on Magento 2 issues.
Once you become their customer, there’re 3 ways to get support from Nexcess:
- Email support @ support@nexcess.net
- Ticket support: Ticket support for complicated issues related to Magento 2, with ticket system, it’s easier to track issue fixing process.
- Phone support from 3 countries: US, Australia, UK => In case you need urgent and emergent support like server down, just make a phone call and Nexcess will solve the issue immediately
Their support staff knows how to handle Magento 2 issues because there are several certified Magento 2 developer in their support team, which makes them your right choice for Magento 2 hosting provider.
Pros
- Superior support on Magento 2 issues
- Affordable and flexible hosting plans
- Good caching system for Magento 2
- Many strong optimizations dedicated to Magento 2
- PCI Compliance for all plans
- Free website migration
Cons
- Bandwidth is quite limited, costly to buy more.
- Nexcess DNS is not free to use.
- Auto-scaling function is free for only first 24 hours
Aspiration
| Get Aspiration Hosting |
Hosting Type: Managed Magento 2 hosting
Load time with default Magento 2 theme: average 447ms Ping (min and max): Min: 19ms – Max: 233ms Best for: Store with less 200 concurrent users Price: Start from $7.99 |
Aspiration, an US based company founded in 2008, is also a Managed hosting provider specializing in Magento hosting. Aspiration offer affordable hosting plans but fully optimized for Magento 2.
What makes Aspiration hosting amazing is that they have Magento developers who work directly with customers to figure out solution for Magento 2 issues.
Load time Test
In load time test, Aspirationhosting performance grade was 78, which is not far from Nexcess and Cloudways.
Stress test
In stress test, I increase the number of virtual users from 0-50 in 12 minutes, and the result can be seen from the chart below
The average response time stays around 100ms during the test. There were some spikes at the beginning, but response time remains stable afterward. Although response time was not as good as Nexcess, it’s still very good for a Magento 2 website.
Ping test
In Ping test, Aspriationhosting has good result. With server location in US, Ping in US(West) = 55ms, US(East) = 26ms, which is good enough for an eCommerce website.
Aspirationhosting offers different server location including: New York(US), California(US), Singapore, London(UK), and Sydney(Australia).
If your website mainly serves Asian customers, remember to select Singapore server location when signing up for hosting plan on Aspiration. This is essential in SEO because Google tends to rank a website with faster load speed in a specific location.
Uptime
Aspirationhosting status page is where customers can track their server status.
In this status page, you can check status of all server location with their running services like HTTP, MYSQL, FTP, POP3. Green check indicates that server is up, when there’s downtime it will be a red X.
Aspirationhosting guarantees a minimum server uptime of 99.9%, customers will receive credit to their account if server uptime is not 99.9%
Hosting features
Asprirationhosting offers many features that are tailored for Magento 2 websites:
- Lite mage cache for Magento 2: a built-in page cache to accelerate your Magento 2 store’s performance. This caching solution is better than Varnish because it communicates directly with Magento 2 system. You can refer the following chart to understand how Litemage cache works to boost Magento 2 speed.
- Free Aspiration CDN: Aspirationhosting improving load speed for their customers with a free inhouse Content delivery network. This CDN speards over 50+ cities across six continents. One amazing thing about this feature is that it is totally free and integrated directly in your hosting plan.
- 1-Click Magento 2 installation: You can install Magento 2 without any hassle with Aspiration hosting Magento 2 installation tool
Support
Aspirationhosting offers 4 ways of support: Phone Support, Ticket support, Email support, chat support. I personally prefer Ticket support because I can easily track issues with Aspiration staff.
The hosting provider also offers Free Web Development Support to all clients, but it’s limited to simple issues only.
Support response time takes around 20 minutes for simple issues, 1-2 hours for application issues.
Pricing
There are 3 hosting plans
- Aspire: $7.99/month: good for new stores with not too many products, this plan has no phone support, web dev support, and free built-in CDN
- Desire: $19.99/month: Good for high traffic store with regular promotion campaigns. The only limit of this plan is that it has no phone support.
- Inspire: 49.99/month: Consider this plan if your store has more than 1000 SKU and lots of daily traffic as well as concurrent users.
Pros
- Experience support on Magento 2 issues
- Free CDN for Desire plan
- Robust cache solution
- Affordable price compared to other providers
- Free website transfer
Cons
- Limited support on basic plan
- Livechat support not very help full with application related issue
- No free CDN on basic plan
Magemojo
| Get Magemojo Hosting |
Hosting Type: Managed Magento 2 hosting
Load time with default Magento 2 theme: average 3.4s Ping (min and max): Min: 1ms – Max: 233ms Best for: Store with less than 200 concurrent users Price: Start from $19.95 |
Magemojo, a hosting company specialized in Magento hosting was founded in 2009. Unlike other hosting companies, Magemojo provides Magento hosting only.
Their founder’s background was a developer who working on Magento platform. He noticed that many store owners were frustrated with poor performance of Magento websites on various hosting providers. With his deep knowledge on Magento, he knew Magento couldn’t perform well on a standard hosting. Magento requires a lot of optimizations to run smoothly and flawlessly.
That’s why we have Magemojo, a company with a single product – Magento hosting.
Let’s see how Magemojo performs throughout my tests.
Load time Test
On a default Magento 2 installation on Magemojo, performance grade was 83 with average loadtime = 3.4S, a totally outstanding result as it’s faster than most hosting providers.
Stress Test
With many tweaks for Magento 2, it’s not surprising that Magemojo return a good result in my Stress test.
The average response time was 97.77ms. The host remains stable during the test with 0 HTTP failure.
Ping test
Magemojo US server return very good ping results with A+ Grade in Bitcatcha ping test
- US(E): 1ms
- US(W): 63ms
- Japan: 170ms
- Singapore: 233ms
With such ping values, you can be rest assured that your store can serve global customers from all continents. We can also improve this using CDN (content delivery network), a smart system that will detect customers’ physical address and connect customer to the nearest server location.
Uptime
Magemojo uses AWS (amazon web service) for their Magento 2 hosting plan, which means the system’s uptime is nearly 100%.
Customers have a page to check server status: https://status.magemojo.com/
Hosting features
Magemojo has a bunch of optimizations for Magento 2, here are what you benefit when using Mamojo Managed Magento 2 hosting
- Stratus™ control panel: Magemojo has built a dedicated hosting control panel for Magento 2 named Stratus. Stratus has a lot of features, which you can refer here
- Cloudfront CDN: Magemojo use Cloudfront CDN for the fast delivery of static components on your website. And it’s totally free within stratus!
- Horizontal auto-scaling platform for Magento: When your store has a surge in traffic, the system will automatically adds additional resources to protect website from being down.
- Free daily backup: its’ important to backup website regularly to protect merchant from data loss. Magemojo offers free daily backup in their Stratus system.
- Unlimited bandwidth: Magemojo offers unlimited bandwidth for their customers, this is available on all hosting plans.
- Run Magento® 2 CLI commands directly from Stratus control panel: Developers should love this feature, now they can run Magento command without SSH tool.
Support
Magemojo has 15-minutes guarantee support, which means customers will receive answers via ticket system in under 15 minutes
Magemojo only offers ticket support for technical problems, so if you are familiar with livechat, phone support methods you will find it disturbing.
Their phone support is only for sales inquires.
Pricing
Magemojo has 3 pricing options for 3 regions. US datacenter has the cheapest price, Frankurt and Sydney datacenter is 30% more expensive.
Below are their US datacenter pricing.
Starter plan costs $98/month, its recommended for 2.500 visitors/month. 25GB SSD storage, 1 Dev site. Pro plan costs $298, serving 25.000 visitors/month while Proplus plan with x4 visitor/month for $498. Depends on the size of your business, pick the plan that best fits your store.
I recommend starter plan for a new store, you can upgrade it to higher plan later.
Pros
- Pro-level Magento 2 support, even with 3rd party extension and theme, just drop a ticket for immediate support.
- Super optimization for Magento 2
- Free magento 2 website transfer
- 1 click to deploy stagging site
- Amazon auto scaling
- 4-layer DDOS protection
- Free premium CDN
Cons
- High pricing compared to other providers
- Limited API calls
- Limit on support channels, only ticket system.
Mgtcluster
| Get Mgtcluster Hosting |
Hosting Type: Managed Magento 2 hosting
Load time with default Magento 2 theme: average 3.4s Ping (min and max): Min: 7ms – Max: 231ms Best for: Store with less 200 concurrent users Price: Start from $8.99/month |
Mgtcluster, also known as Cloud Cluster Inc is a Magento 2 hosting provider who provides fully managed Magento 2 hosting services on Kubernetes cloud.
Although being a young Magento 2 hosting provider (joined the industry in 2017), Mgtclusters offer many cutting-edge technologies on their hosting that can significantly boost performance of Magento 2 websites.
Mgtcluster provides only Magento 2 hosting service, and they have put a lot of effort to optimize hosting environment for Magento 2.
Let’s see the performance of Mgtcluster with a default Magento 2 website.
Load test
Mgtcluster returns 83 performance grade in loadtest.
The test result is nearly the same as Cloudways and Magemojo, showing that Mgtcluster has good optimization for Magento 2
Stress Test
Mgtcluster mainly focus on hostig stability, that’s why we have the following chart in Stress test.
Response time stayed at ~90ms all the time during my test (like a straight line).
Ping test
Mgtclusters only has datacenters across the US, there is no datacenter outside the US. So if your website serves customers outside of the US, please consider another hosting provider for faster web load
The response times from Mgtcluster server to different locations worldwide is very good as can be seen in the table below
Uptime
Mgtcluster does not have a server status checking page, so I decided to monitor Mgtcluster uptime using a 3rd application Uptime Robot
As can be seen from uptime monitor page, there were no downtime during 30 days in my test. It proves that Mgtcluster is a high availability hosting.
Hosting features
Mgtcluster is one of the earliest Magento 2 hosting providers that support Magento 2.4 version. Their hosting also comes with a lot of features specially designed for Magento 2.
Latest version PHP: Mgtcluster support latest version of PHP: PHP 7.4. As you may know, Magento recommends php7.4 for their latest version: Magento 2.4
Instance for Magento Kubernetes: Dedicated
Container Runtime: Mgtcluster uses Docker as container runtime
Free SSL Connection for Magento on Kubernetes
Support
Mgtclusters offers 4 ways of support: Email, Ticket system, Livechat, direct support.
If you need urgent assistance, just use livechat and an support argent will help you right away. Mgtclusters does not offer phone support, so take advantage of their Ticket and livechat support for your Magento 2 and hosting issues.
Besise hosting-related issues support, Mgtclusters offer support on Application-level issues, if you have any trouble when using Magento 2, just submit a ticket and their support engine will help you solve the issues.
Pricing
Mgtcluster is one of the most affordable Magento 2 hosting providers at the moment.
Look at the pricing table below, the starter plan is only $8.99/month with strong host features. You will have a server with 3 core CPU, 4GB ram and 100GB SSD hardisk to run your Magento 2 website.
The biggest plan is Advanced Magento 2, which has 6 core CPU, 16GB ram and 240 SSD. Enough to handle a medium-sized Magento 2 website.
Practically, I tried to run a store with 80 concurrent visitors and 2000+ products on Mgtcluster Professional Magento plan and everything was fine, no bottleneck or downtime till now.
Pros
- Magento 2.4 ready
- Affordable price
- Dedicated Magento 2 support
- Docker environment integrated
- Unlimited bandwidth for all plans
Cons
- Lack of caching solution for Magento 2, the hosting still use Memcache as caching solution.
- No datacenter outside the US
- No dedicated server option
The short version of the review
If you don’t have time to go through all my long and detailed Magento 2 hosting review, here are my quick points taken from the article:
- If you have low budget for hosting => Go for Nexcess, Mgtcluster, Cloudways, Aspirationhosting
- If you need serious support on Magento 2 issues => Go for Nexcess, Magemojo, Mgtcluster
- If you need super fast hosting with many Magento 2 optimization => Go for Nexcess, Mage mojo, Cloudways
- If you look for flexible plan options => Go for Cloudways and Nexcess.
With the bloom of eCommerce, everyone is looking for a good hosting to run their online business. If you decided to choose Magento 2, then this Magento 2 hosting review should be a good reference for your hosting decision.
Quick FAQs on Magento 2 hosting
Below you can find some most frequently asked questions related to Magento 2 hosting
+ How to check Magento 2 hosting version: You can follow this guide to check Magento 2 version
+ What is the latest version of Magento 2: The latest version of Magento 2 is Magento 2.4, all hosting I reviewed in this article support Magento 2.4
+ What is minium system requirement for Magento 2: I recommend at least 2GB ram and 2 core CPU for a live site and 3GB ram, 2 core CPU for a development site
+ Is it necessary to choose a datacenter location where my customers frequently accessed from? Yes, it’s highly recommended to choose a datacenter location near your end-users, there are many benefits from this such as: faster load time, SEO…
+ How can I run Magento 2.4 on localhost? I want to test Magento 2.4 features before purchasing cloud hosting: Please refer to this article to learn how to install Magento 2.4 on Localhost environment
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Thanks you for the Magento 2 hosting review, I finally decided to move my magento 2 website from AWS to Nexcess to cut some expense and I fell satisfied with my decision.
Nexcess support is excellent and their staff even helps me solve the 503 error after migration.
Highly recommended
Hi Jack, I’m glad to see you are happy with Nexcess 🙂
Please share your experience on Nexcess next time.
I had terrible experience with Bluehost, it takes a lot of time to fully load my Magento 2 store. Many sales were lost during that Chrismas sales time due to hosting problems.
I asked for support from Bluehost but all they said were: Please consider upgrade your hosting plan.
Finally, I decided to move my website to Cloudways using Vultr VPS and their free Migration for Magento 2 was really helpful.
I regret not using Magento 2 managed hosting from the start.
My advice is: dont’ use bluehost for Magento 2, it can’t handle Magento 2 website.
Bluehost is a shared hosting provider who is specialized in WordPress only, I also recommend not use Bluehost to run Magento 2.
You still can use Bluehost to host your Magento 2 website blog if the blog was built using WordPress.
That’s the tactic many Magento 2 users are using to save budget.
Can I run a Magento 2 store on a VPS with 3gb ram and 2 core CPU?
My store has 800 products and 300 daily visitors. I also plan to install a WordPress blog on my website, so can the VPS handle both cms?
Thanks in advance for your advice!
Hi Mikey,
A VPS with 3G ram and 2 core CPU totally can handle Magento 2 as well as a WordPress blog. You just need to use a caching solution like Memcached or vanish cache and both WordPress and Magento will operate normally on your VPS.
I’m planning to build a Magento 2 website that serves global customers, can you suggest what server location should I choose?
Also, is there an affordable way to build multiple vendor market place website in Magento 2? I want to allow other vendors to sell their products on my website.
Thanks!
Hello Elijah Smith,
In case your store serves global customers, I recommend choosing US server location as average ping from US to other locations is pretty good compared to other server location.
About building a multi vendor marketplace website in Magento 2, you can take a look at this article to choose an affordable solution for your business: https://magentip.com/best-magento-2-multi-vendor-marketplace-extension/
Best regards,
Hung Tran
I highly recommend Cloudways, they simplize the installation process for Magento 2.4. Magento 2.4 becomes terrible because it requires Elasticsearch to be installed.
I was my right decision to move my website from SiteGround to Cloudways, I can install Magento 2.4 with just 1 click.
Their support on Magento 2 is also very helpful and quick!
Hi Marco Marius, thanks for your suggestion!
I also asked Siteground staff and they said that they no longers support Magento 2.4 on their shared hosting platform. To run Magento 2.4 on SiteGround, users are recommended to register for Cloud VPS Plan.
Can I run Magento 2.4 on a normal shared hosting? I would like to save some budget as my store is totally new and there’re only some products and small amount of daily traffic
Hello Mashall, I would not recommend using Magento 2.4 on normal shared hosting as it requires Elasticsearch, which eats a lot of RAM. Normal shared hosting will run out of memory very quickly make your website stop functioning, and you will not be able to run commands like Composer command on normal shared hosting like SiteGround, Bluehost, Hostgator…
In addition, Magento 2.4 no longer supports web wizard installer. You need CLI to install Magento 2.4
Please consider Nexcess or Cloudways as their plans support CLI and nicely optimized for Magento 2.4
Hi Hung Tran,
Thank for this insightful Managed Magento 2 hosting review, I finally choose Cloudways to host my new store and I’m happy with their service.
Could you please write a tutorial on how to install Varnish cache on Cloudways hosting? My site loads not very fast and support staff asked me to install Varnish cache but I’m new and I don’t know how to do it.
Thanks!
I have published a tutorial on how to install Varnish cached for Magento 2, you can refer the tutorial here https://magentip.com/install-and-configure-varnish-cache-magento-2/
Which is the best cheap rate magento 2 hosting?
Hi,
Thanks for the review. I’m looking to set up a store and expected traffic will be very low.
I can’t find any Coudways plan with $10/mo? were they discontinued or is that not for Magento 1click install?
Cheers
Hi Kanna, they have updated their price, I will update it in my article
I have read your blog on the key factors to consider when choosing Magento hosting providers. It was very interesting and helpful but I can add some extra points in your article. Here some extra points:
1.Nexcess. Nexcess is one of the best hosting providers for the Magento platform.
2.Cloudways. Cloudways is one of the leading cloud-hosting providers for Magneto users on DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr, AWS, and Google Cloud servers.
3.WebScale (Magemojo) .
4.Hostinger.
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