There are many hosting companies available but only a few that specialise in Magento hosting as it requires a lot more resources than most applications.
Choosing the correct hosting package is not easy and I would suggest looking for a company that not only specialise in hosting Magento but one that also knows how to set up Magento properly for you.
You only need to have a look in the Magento forums to see the problems people encounter trying to install Magento, the bulk of these problems are server related and can be avoided by finding the right hosting company.
I believe that Magento is the best ecommerce solution available today and has some amazing features in the community edition that puts it head and shoulders above the competition. I would never hesitate to recommend Magento but would make sure people found the correct hosting company to prevent problems.
Magento was founded in 2001, providing an ecommerce solution in March 2001, since then they have concentrated on their open source edition and made some incredible improvements year after year.
Over the past few years they have developed their enterprise and proffesional editions, both of which are paid solutions and have the same heavey demands on a server.
The basic requirements to host Magento are as follows:-
Supported Operating Systems:
?Linux x86, x86-64
Supported Web Servers:
?Apache 1.3.x
?Apache 2.0.x
?Apache 2.2.x
PHP Compatibility:
?5.2.13+
?Required extensions:
?PDO_MySQL
?simplexml
?mcrypt
?hash
?GD
?DOM
?iconv
?curl
?SOAP (if Webservices API is to be used)
?Safe_mode off
?Memory_limit no less than 256Mb (preferably 512)
MySQL:
?4.1.20 or newer
?InnoDB storage engine
SSL:
?If HTTPS is used to work in the admin, SSL certificate should be valid. Self-signed SSL certificates are not supported
Server – hosting – setup:
?Ability to run scheduled jobs (crontab) with PHP 5
?Ability to override options in .htaccess files.
These are the minimum requirements to run Magento and many people successfully instal magento but then run into problems a little later as traffic starts to build up on their sites.
So like so many things in life, it is important to get it right from the start, your hosting company is the foundations of your ecommerce store and should be the best you can find. Cutting corners at the start to save a few pounds can cost you dearly in the long run.
I have worked with many companies over the years that have implemented magento only to find the hosting company they originally chose was not Magento freindly. Then the difficult task of swithcing hosts and reinstalling Magento comes in, plus you will then need to reinstall all your stock, order data, customer data and so on. This usually results in your site being off line for a while, which in itself can be quite costly.
So choose a Magento freindly host from the start, one that will install it for you as well is a great thing to look for as it means they are aware of the requirements and of course this will save you quite a bit of work.
magento hosting