Up until recently, the advice around hosting for Magento sites was clearly focused on dedicated hosting solutions. With the level of optimisation needed to run a Magento site to its full potential, this was the best option almost every time.
However, in today’s world where website traffic levels aren’t always predictable, retailers are looking for flexibility as well as performance. Fortunately, cloud technology is advancing quickly and there are many more options available.
So we’ve written a blog explaining the types of solutions available and why you may want to choose or avoid each one.
Dedicated Hosting
What does this mean?
Your own server(s) optimised for your requirements and only hosting your website(s).
What are the benefits?
This is your own private environment and you can set up your hosting to meet your exact requirements, manage it yourself and use whichever operating systems, backup solution or other technology you prefer.
What are the drawbacks?
There’s little flexibility for big traffic spikes so you have to make a choice whether it’s worth building in excess capacity (and paying for it year round) when it’s not being used. Not only that but when hardware failures occur, your site could go down unless you have a comprehensive disaster recovery solution in place.
Fully Managed Platform
What does this mean?
When we talk about our Magento eCommerce Hosting Platform this is the type of solution we’re referring to. This means an optimised cloud platform designed specifically for Magento sites.
What are the benefits?
The technical side is fully managed for the client and the platform is set up for optimum performance with Magento. The customer manages their sites via a control panel so server administration is not required. Plus, this is a cloud solution so it’s more resilient to hardware failures.
What are the drawbacks?
If you’re a keen techie with plenty of experience in Magento hosting you may prefer to carry out the sysadmin work yourself and optimise it to your exact requirements.
Private Cloud
What does this mean?
This is simply a set of dedicated servers with a virtualisation layer running on top, allowing you to create and manage multiple virtual servers within a set of physical servers.
What are the benefits?
As with a dedicated server, this is your own private hardware so you have full control to customise your environment exactly as you like. You can put servers in multiple data centres, combine different operating systems and build in automatic failover for resiliency.
What are the drawbacks?
Again, you’ll need to look at how much additional capacity you require. You can add more hardware to your private cloud but often this is difficult to achieve at the click of a button when your traffic is on the rise. A private cloud solution can also be an expensive option for a single site.
Public Cloud
What does this mean?
AWS (Amazon) and Azure (Microsoft) are two of the most prominent public cloud providers. Anyone can spin up a server in minutes as services are based on shared physical hardware.
What are the benefits?
Due to the sheer size of the infrastructure, public cloud is highly scalable. If designed correctly, it can auto scale to deal with large traffic spikes resulting from high profile press coverage or a popular promotional campaign. It can be cost effective, if tightly controlled, and is particularly useful for developers who need to spin up servers for short periods.
What are the drawbacks?
At first glance, it can appear simple and very low cost but this type of environment can be difficult to manage and costs can quickly spiral out of control. Data sovereignty and security are also concerns for some businesses who have strict data security policies.
Hybrid Cloud
What does this mean?
A combination of public cloud, private cloud and/or dedicated servers. This is a highly bespoke solution that can combine elements of all of the above.
What are the benefits?
You can pick and choose the best of both worlds. If you want scalability but want to keep your customer data on your own private server, you can combine public cloud services for scalability with private cloud for security.
What are the drawbacks?
This is bespoke, and as such, it can be expensive to set up. It’s likely to be a complex solution that requires more resource to manage so you’ll need to select a hosting partner that can provide the right level of support.
We know hosting probably isn’t the most interesting thing you’ll read about today so we tried to keep this blog pretty short but our consultants are more than happy to discuss this at length if you’re interested!