Best Magento Hosting Services (Top 10)

Why Magento CMS as an eCommerce Platform?

When it comes to choosing an eCommerce CMS or eCommerce platform there are a lot of options to choose from to take your shop online. The popular ones are WordPress WooCommerce, Shopify, Volusion,  and a number of other ones. 

But the reason why many businesses prefer Magento is that it is a very robust platform with a high level of functionality and customizability, scalability of the platform means there would be no need to change to a different platform later on as you scale up.

What is Magento CMS?

Magento is a popular open-source CMS that was developed specifically for e-commerce websites.

The feature-rich platform comes with a highly intuitive administrative interface that gives online merchants a way to control the look, contents, and functionalities of an eCommerce website.  Magento uses MySQL and Zend PHP databases and using collections and models in it, is the best way to get data from the database. 

Now Magento 2 is available. It is the latest upgrade over Magento which has a lot of improvements over Magento 1. Some of the improvements are:

• Full Page Caching is built into both the Magento 2.0 Community and Magento 2.0 Enterprise. 
• Guest Checkout is enabled by default
• Better performance and reduced table locking
• Made possible to separate your databases in Magento 2.0 Enterprise
• Reduced JS code calls
• Reduced JS code calls
• Added support for PHP7 and MySQL Percona
• Better administrative interface
• Better UX for B2B resources
• Two-step checkout
• Static CMS homepage

How is Magento Best Marketing or Search engine Friendly Platform? 

Independent Navigation Links

Navigation links are the text links that are used for product pages, categories, blogs, etc, in menus. 

Unlike other eCommerce platforms, Magento gives you complete control over navigation links, which is one of the important SEO factors to be considered. You will be able 

to control the anchor text for any link generated on your site.

Independent Page Titles

Page titles are the main meta titles that appear in the search results or at the top of your browser for your website. You can create a unique title for every page of your Magento eCommerce website. 

Customizable H1 Tags

Heading h1 tags holds great weight as a rank factor in Search engines.  As H1 tags another important SEO factor, you can Many other eCommerce platforms, H1 tags are generated automatically for product pages and are not easily changed. However, Thankfully, with Magento’s platform customization of the H1 tag made easier and different from the product name (for targeting specific keyword variations) if you so desire.

Canonical URLs 

For a dynamic eCommerce website, it's obvious that the same product within an eCommerce store is listed under two different URLs. The two URLs may look unique, but the content of the page is the same that is the same products listed on 2 pages. This acts as a duplication. 

As per SEO strategy, canonical URLs explain to search engines which content is a duplicate of the original page and where to redirect traffic. This feature Magento platform comes with this awesome feature so you can set a canonical tag to appear on category and product pages in the configuration section inside the Magento admin panel. Magento 2.0 automatically uses the canonical tag in hierarchical product URLs.

Speed Up Magento

Magento and WooCommerce are both known for having issues with speed because of built-in themes which consist of thousands of s/ws', plugging, etc and their speed performance degrades over time. 

Making sure your eCommerce website is loading fast is one of the most important factors to your sales, SEO rankings, and the shoppers' overall user experience.

We are in an era where eCommerce is moving towards mobile and customers on the go don’t want to wait for content to load. The faster the website loads, the more will be conversion rates. 

That’s why Google made Speed one of the best important factors of search rank.

How to speed up Magento and keep it running fast?

Magento comes with a number of options and configuration adjustments that can give you a huge performance boost and make your site load faster.

• Latest Version

Make sure you are always running the latest version of Magento as updates generally contain bug fixes and performance improvements. 

• Content Delivery Network

Implementing a Content Delivery Network (CDN) with Magento is one of the easiest ways to instantly decrease the load times and ensure great speed. With CDN you are serving your assets (product images, javascript, CSS) from multiple locations around the globe so they are delivered faster to your shoppers.

• Utilize Caching

There are many forms of caching to perform that can result in great speed for a website like Browser Caching, Gzip Compression, Expire Headers, and Page Caching.  Magento comes with a built-in caching module, but for better results use 3rd party solutions. Make sure all Cache Types are enabled by navigating to “System” → “Cache Management”.

There are many forms of caching that can be implemented with Magento. Many people have great success combining NGINX + APC + Memcache + Varnish caching.

What to look for in a web hosting provider for hosting Magento Websites?

Many reliable Magento hosting providers have one-click installation software like Softacolous and through which you can install Magento with a single click. 

Make sure to check these hosting requirements:

• Linux hosting server version x86-64
• Apache version 2.x
• Nginx (alternative to Apache - 1.7x)
• MySQL 5.6+ version
• PHP 5.4+ version

SSL Certificate & Dedicated IP

For an online store or other e-commerce-related site and if payment handling is not done via third-party services, then you need an SSL certificate and dedicated IP to make customers’ transactions safe. Payment gateways require high security for secured transactions and data protection. Using SSL is also the best way to show your customers you care about their privacy and security, hence you will probably need hosting that supports HTTPS. Find a hosting plan that provides an SSL certificate. Many reputed companies free SSL certificates along with hosting such as Bluehost, Hostsoch, Hostinger, Inmotion hosting . 

At the minimum, Your eCommerce solution will also require a dedicated IP. A dedicated IP will grant you more credibility and will make customers feel more at ease when making transactions on your site.

Moreover, when it comes to hosting a website on a shared server where the same IP is shared with among other thousands of users, with are sending out spam e-mails or are engaging in black hat practices and are being blacklisted or banned as a result, your website can be affected by the behavior of these sites. This is the main reason why you would want to get a dedicated IP in order to protect your website from spam in terms of reputation.