What is cloud hosting for Magento?
Cloud hosting on Magento refers to hosting your e-commerce store on a cloud hosting platform. Rather than relying on unscalable dedicated servers, cloud hosting allows you to access your store’s resources on a scalable cloud platform. With cloud hosting, your store’s data including files and database are stored on a network of virtual servers, which are maintained and managed by a cloud hosting provider.
This provider manages the underlying infrastructure and virtualization technology, ensuring that your store has access to the resources it needs, such as storage, RAM or memory, CPU or processing power, and bandwidth, on-demand. This offers an incredible number of benefits including improved site reliability, redundancy, scalability which in turn can result in reduced costs.
Furthermore, Magento hosting on the cloud makes it easier to manage your store, as it doesn’t require maintaining physical equipment or managing complex IT infrastructure. Cloud hosting adds that flexibility you desire and is a cost-effective way to host a Magento store, providing the reliability, scalability, and security needed to run a successful e-commerce business.
How does cloud hosting for Magento work?
It works by storing your store’s data and applications on a network of virtual servers, using virtualization technology, which are maintained and managed by your provider. Common virtualization technologies include KVM, VMware, Hyper-V, and XenServer. Mainstream cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) , Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform often run KVM and tweak it to make it their own optimized virtualization technology.
Processes and steps to consider include:
- Setup: You sign up for a cloud hosting service and configure your Magento store to run on the cloud infrastructure. Ubuntu and CentOS are the popular flavors of Linux used for hosting Magento
- Storage: Your store’s data and applications are stored on physical disks which are managed by the cloud hosting provider. Since Magento can be resource intensive, storing your data on solid state disks (SSDs) is highly recommended. SSDs can provide much faster access to your data than SATA or SAS storage.
- Scalability: You can easily scale your resources to accommodate increased traffic and demand, without any downtime. At most providers, you can easily add or remove resources as needed, such as CPUs, RAM, storage, or bandwidth.
- Maintenance: There’s little to worry about in hardware maintenance since the cloud hosting provider manages the underlying infrastructure. This ensures that your store has access to all the resources it needs and that it remains secure, reliable and online
- Backup and Recovery: Your hosting provider typically will provide backup and disaster recovery services, which can help you quickly restore your store in the event of a disaster or catastrophic data loss. Ask your provider to ensure you have configured the desired backup schedule for your store. Depending on the backup solution in use by your provider, a backup process can slow down your Magento store. Check with your provider to ensure the backups are taken during off-peak hours.
To ensure that your provider doesn’t negatively impact the optimization of your store, it’s critical to choose a reputable cloud provider with a long-track record of providing support for Magento stores. They should already know how to properly configure your store for the cloud environment. Additionally, you or your provider should regularly monitor your store’s performance and make necessary optimizations to ensure that your site remains fast and performs well for your store users.
To summarize, cloud hosting works by providing you with a reliable, scalable, and flexible way to host your Magento store, while also providing redundancy, decreased maintenance, and cost savings. Cloud hosting is by far the most recommended choice for hosting a Magento store. Shared hosting can bring on unnecessary security risk, while dedicated servers can result in scalability issues
