Why we use Nexcess for ALL of our Magento websites

Did you know that Magento was built on Nexcess servers?

When it comes to hosting there is an endless number of options available. If you're simply hosting a small blog or brochure website then the chances are that you'll be fine with a budget hosting option which can be found for as little as a couple of pounds a month, or perhaps even free.

E-commerce is a different ball game however. With many businesses relying on their e-commerce site to generate a large proportion or even all of their revenue, then it's critical the hosting plan you choose is up to the job. Let's face it, all reputable hosting providers these days offer an impressive SLA with at least a 99% uptime guarantee, so what really sets Nexcess, our chosen hosting partner apart from the rest? Here are the three most important things we think you should be looking for:

Performance

This one might seem obvious, but we've had customers come to us with underperforming Magento websites, claiming that they have worked tirelessly with their previous agency to try and improve performance but they are still not happy. Of course, there are lots of optimisations that we can do to improve your Magento website, but unless your website is underpinned bu a solid and well performing hosting environment, any efforts will be waste. Our first step is always to get our clients on board with Nexcess and they're often shocked at the performance gains. Despite previously paying huge fees to well-known hosting companies who claim to be top of their game.

This is a huge plus for us. During the first step of our onboarding process we've already had positive results and a happy customer, which sets us off on a good foot for a long and happy working relationship!

The screenshot below was taken after we migrated a project from another hosting company claiming to offer a premium hosting service to Nexcess. As you can see after the migration on the 28th March, the baseline latency across the board was noticably reduced, and perhaps even more impressively, the huge spikes in latency during peak times were almost completely eliminated!

Dedicated vs Cloud

Whilst dedicated server options are available, cloud hosting has come on a long way in recent years and we find it superior in almost every way.

The days of renting rackspace in data centres are now a distance memory. Physical backups and having to ask an engineer to shutdown your server and physically add a stick of RAM to get you through the next promotional traffic spike was once the norm, but now nothing short of unnacceptable.

Furthermore, having a well managed cloud environment means that the responsibility of keeping on top of server maintenance and dealing with root access tasks is all handed off to the hosting experts allow you and your agency to focus on the things you want to - improving the website.

This kind of setup means that we can create simple environments that are consistent for all of our customers, removing unknowns, and making onboarding and ongoing deployments efficient and stress-free.

Scalability

Hand-in-hand with performance, is making sure that your Magento hosting plan can scale with your business. Having your site on a reliable, well designed cloud hosting infrastructure means that your site is able to be instantly scaled to your demands. Autoscaling is possible to automatically scale up at times of high traffic and upgrading (or downgrading) can happen without any interuption or downtime.

Knowledge & Support

Every hosting provider these days seems to claim to offer Magento Hosting, but what does that really mean? Magento's hosting requirements aren't anything particularly abnormal and Magento will "work" on most regular hosting environments, which is why any hosting company can claim to offer support. The difference with Nexcess is that they were one of the very first hosting companies to truly specialise in Magento as a platform.

What does this mean? Not only do Nexcess know how to manage servers, they genuinely know Magento and all of its quirks. It's this extensive knowledge that means they can extract every ounce of performance out of it and offer the level of support that they do. For us, they are an extension of our team and regularly assist with debugging problems that often extend beyond a simple hosting configuration issue - including those issues that cross between the realm of server vs development. Not only this, but Nexcess' 24/7 support gives us and our clients comfort knowing that somebody is always available to help them in an emergency out-of-hours situation.

Value

Remember we are not discussing budget hosting options here, so for an e-commerce site with reasonable turnover you should be expecting to pay around £150 upwards, but what really matters is value. Many of our customers have been paying extortionate hosting fees with additional setup and account management fees to big hosting companies. Nexcess has none of this and just offers great performance and exceptional service for a reasonable price.

Interested in migrating to Nexcess?

If you would like to experience this great hosting platform for yourself, visit their website for more information, and be sure to let them know that we sent you their way!

• Visit nexcess.net