Choosing the best webhost for Magento : eComm Journey part 2
Things are progressing nicely on my quest to open up my own eCommerce store. My best friend Michael works for a large hosting company and he has his own server. He has let me have access to it for free so I can test out sites for Adsense etc. Unfortunately since its his personal server, he doesn’t do a lot of maintenance on it, so the 1 click installs are not up to date. The management console is Plesk, which I really don’t care for. I am a cPanel guy. The other issue is that because he gives me access for free, the support is lacking. Hey, you get what you pay for.
I would love to say that I installed Magento but I have many other things that I need to be doing to prep for this venture so I decided to contact my friend Nathan – who is actually the one that turned me on to Magento – and I offered him $200 to install and configure Magento and the various modules that I have to customize the site. 4 hours into it, he sent me a message of frustration. Something about having to disable CGI scripting, I don’t remember exactly, but I realized that if I was going to put up a real eCommerce site that was going to pay my bills, I would have to pay for a host. So the hunt began.
I started with Google search of “Best webhost Magento” and I got pretty much what I expected: review sites with affiliate codes to web hosting companies. I continued to dig around, checked in with some forums I frequent, and made some calls and instant messages. Web hosting is pretty cheap. When I first started online marketing , bandwidth was outrageously expensive. There was no such thing as unlimited plans, that was unheard of. The adult sites I worked on were paying thousands of dollars per month for hosting. You can now get decent hosting for $9 – $49 a month, depending on what you need.
What I was looking for was a fast host with a strong bias towards Magento. Magento is tricky, and if the host isn’t up on it, you can be in for some trouble. If Magento is mis-configured, it is a real pig on resources. I am not a Magento lover by any means, but for what I need right now – it’s the best option for me. It’s also free and the goal of this project is to spend as little money as possible. I was also looking for easy install of other applications that I need (wordpress, forums, etc). Webhosts with one click installs are often a good choice because they have the configuration optimized for their system. I also wanted a host that I could upgrade the plan easily. I wanted multiple domains, email addresses, the standard stuff. I compared 8 hosts side by side, with price being in the top 5 criteria, but not the clincher. I have no problems paying for quality. My computer is really slow right now because I am running a bunch of scraping apps so I am going to skip the list of features and benefits that I compared, but I will tell you that I decided on a host.
I decided to go with SiteGround Hosting. The plans that SiteGround offers are very reasonable, and I found a lot of positive reviews – especially about their Magento hosting. I picked out the mid range business plan for 12 months with 3 months free. I pulled out the credit card, set up the account, got my confirmation immediately. I logged into godaddy and changed the DNS to SiteGround. I went back to my cPanel account, went to site apps, clicked on Magento and in under 1 minutes, Magento was installed. Fantastic. The admin holds all kinds of other goodies as well, its very fast. I am very impressed. So, if you are thinking about picking a new web host for an ecommerce site, especially Magento, my vote goes to SiteGround. I am a web marketer so I wouldn’t be doing my job if I neglected to put up a banner for them. Please check them out.
So far, this project has cost
Failed Magento installation: $200
New Hosting account with Magento Installation: $49
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