Magento Hosting

Magento is an open-source e-commerce web application that was released on March 31, 2008. It was created by Varien, created using the Zend Framework application. Magento Enterprise Edition, a paid adaption of Magento intended for larger businesses, was released on April 15, 2009. Varien, the corporation who created Magento Commerce, previously worked on behalf of os-Commerce(another extremely common e-commerce platform). They initially intended to overhaul osCommerce, but soon after they decided to redraft it as their unique solution. Soon after the launch, many specialty magento hosting companies began to pop up.

Magento formally began development near the start of 2007, seven months afterward August 31st the initial public beta version was released and met with critical praise. Among the coolest features of Magento, is ‘Magento Connect’. With this powerful built-in plug-in it is possible to download and install several different modules, features as well as perform upgrades. You'll be able to also access all the open-source material developed by members belonging to the community. Downloading and installing themes is made even easier, and you can easily purchase premium themes. The three different sections on Magento Connect are for Core Modules, Community Modules and Commercial Modules.

Some of the other key features of Magento are the built-in marketing and promotion tools, email marketing, analytic’s and reporting, a detailed and graphical breakdown of sales, easy site management using the Magento API and advanced site management like URL rewrites, Google site map creation, etc.

There are several downfalls of Magento, it is by no means a perfect solution. A few of those downfalls include heavy resource usage, heavy mysql usage and the MySQL tables are poorly structured, so it slows your store down a bit more than your typical eCommerce application would. The php_memory_;limit setting originally was recommended for 64mb when the beta came out. Most shared web hosts typically limit someone to 32-64mb, though some permit you to increase this through your htaccess file. However, now Magento is recommending you have a minimum of a 512mb php_memory_limit. Half a gigabyte of RAM for just one website! An everyday shared hosting provider will not allow this, so you will have to turn to a specialized magento hosting provider. This naturally comes with increased costs, among the main factors many small businesses have to think about when beginning, especially when forming an online business.

Choosing a fantastic Magento host  who specializes in Magento or at the very least offers some type of Magento Hosting will definitely increase the websites loading time and overall performance, so be sure that you think about this before purchasing a hosting plan!

Overall I'd give Magento an 8/10 – if the developers of it actually put some time into increasing the performance and loading times, resource requirements to cut back the costs of Magento hosting, and other prevalent issues, then it might gain a point from me instantly and go to as much as 9/10.