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

Starting an eCommerce Website with Magento : My Journey

I have been working in online marketing since Al Gore created the internet. I have marketed everything. I am an SEO expert, PPC, Social Media, etc. I know the ins-and-outs of marketing eCommerce sites. It has been in the back of my mind that I am really foolish for being so complacent that I continue to make money for other people. I should be doing this myself.

I currently work for a company that specializes in B2B ecomm sites. I work with them from inception up until they are rocking the sales. The pieces that I am missing are unfortunately very important parts of the puzzle. So, I have decided it’s time to take the plunge and do it myself. I am have decided to use Magento as the shopping cart, and I will use WordPress for the blog. I am loaded up with Magento modules, WordPress themes, all that stuff is covered.

The hard part about starting an eCommerce site is deciding what you are going to sell. It helps if you have your own products – but if you don’t – you need to create relationships with manufacturers that will give you a good price that you can mark up enough to make money with, but still stay competitive. Deciding on what you are going to sell is also difficult. Hopefully its something you enjoy. The problem is that even if you enjoy something, that doesn’t mean you are an expert. You also need to know if there is a market out there, and how competitive it is. I love music, but I am not an equipment expert, and I also do not have the relationships or capitol to start re-selling high end equipment. The advertising costs are also expensive, and the competition is stiff. I have been giving this a lot of thought.

I am not prepared to announce what the site is, and I will be vague in the theme of the site. Domain age is crucial in getting respect from the search engines, so part of the task was looking through my domains and pulling one that had some age on it. I have decided on a domain that works for the products I am going to sell. It doesn’t have the keyword in it which is unfortunate, but its a pretty good domain and its 8 years old. The domain has 27,000 page in Googles index, but those aren’t going to do much for me so I will probably lose those. The site isnt a high PR site so I am not too stressed about losing them. The amount of pages and the age of the domain at least tells me that Google will visit it frequently so I wont have too much of an indexing problem.

So, I am going to embark on the first part of the project and install Magento on the server. I might document the process that I go through to help out others who are thinking about taking on the same project. I plan on doing this all on my own with no outsourcing so that will be a challenge, but I have a huge advantage when it comes to the marketing of the site. The challenge is going to be opening up the relationships with the manufacturers of the products I plan to sell, the dropshipping, credit card processing etc.

I have been very lazy about keeping this blog up to date, but I will give it a shot and at least try to write short entries with any lessons learned.

If you would like to help contribute to the project, feel free to check out some of the advertisers on this blog. Any bit of revenue will help.