Magento hosting is currently available from hundreds of thousands of providers. The decision of what Magento hosting company to use can be the difference between the success and the demise of a Magento shopping cart website. While any Magento hosting, eCommerce hosting, or even generic web hosting company may look the same at first glance- placed in very simple terms, nothing could be further from the truth. There are three key elements we are going to be observing:

- Reliability
- Security
- Performance

While these again may appear like generic enough terms to select any web hosting company, they are not. Let's review each of these topics by how they apply specifically to Magento hosting, in hopes to reveal who the few realistic Magento hosting companies really are.

Reliability

It's a simple fact that it is too easy to start a web hosting company. Most hosting companies are "hobby hosts", or one-man shows. They have no systems administration staff, or customer service staff over off hours. They do not have administrative access to the servers that host your site virtually, and certainly not physically. They are resellers with no experience in how to correctly host a web site, and a very low chance of staying in business for very long. Magento has system requirements that are not enabled by default in a very large percentage of the web hosting companies out there, and will likely not function optimally, or possibly even at all, if your web host has not tuned a web hosting environment to play nicely with Magento. These web hosting companies will not have the ability to meet the unique web hosting support demands of your Magento shopping cart.

The first thing that you should look at when choosing a Magento hosting company is how long they have been in business. Companies on the official Magento Enterprise Hosting Partner list are ideal. Firstly, these companies know the ins and outs of the Magento application on day one, and will not be left experimenting on your hosting when problems happen. Some of the companies on the official list, such as Nexcess, have been working directly with Magento for over a decade. The number of Magento hosting companies that this can be said for can be counted on one hand, but are a great place to start your search.

Security

Security is a topic that's crucial for any eCommerce web site. If your site stores valuable financial info such as credit card numbers and personal contacts, as most Magento shops do, the severity of this topic is multiplied. No organization can afford to risk the devastating effects of having such data compromised. Many Magento hosting environments consist of private, virtual partitions of a server. This protects against a number of potential exploits that can be opened up by irresponsible webmasters that might otherwise share a server with your Magento shopping cart site.

Whatever company you choose for Magento hosting, it's a good idea to do daily PCI (payment card industry) scans, using a service such as ScanAlert or McAfee Secure. In addition to the extra assurance that these badges give your visitors (which have been proven to drastically improve conversions by bolstering trust), this also means your Magento hosting remains safe. New exploits come out every day, and countless web hosting companies never test for PCI compliance. Before ordering hosting, ask your host if they are PCI compliant, but don't stop there- test it yourself!

Performance

Performance tuning is a topic not to be taken lightly in a Magento hosting service, and overlooking the impact of this factor is perhaps the most common mistake that companies make when selecting their Magento host. Did you know that studies have repeatedly proven that users gravitate drastically towards faster web sites? Think about it. No venue is more competitive to sell your product that the Internet. If two Magento shopping carts have the same products, but one is consistently just 10% faster, which would you gravitate towards?

This trend has become so clear, that Google has taken to penalizing slower web sites in their search results. In fact, the search giant is so serious about penalizing your slow web server, that speeding up your web site is directly stated in their Webmaster Guidelines as a way to make your site rank better in their results. While Magento is pretty fast out-of-the-box, it won't perform up to spec unless you are in a Magento hosting environment tuned for Magento, and overall performance. Such performance gains can be found by looking at Magento's official Enterprise Hosting Partners, referenced on the Magento web site, as a number of these hosts have developed isolated Magento hosting environments tuned specifically towards speeding up the unique behavior of a Magento shopping cart.

In conclusion,

1. Don't make the same mistake that most amateur Magento webmasters make. Take the time to learn about your Magento hosting provider before your order service, and they will treat you well!

2. We have been in this business for years and you can trust your site with us. You just spend $5.00/month to get professional magento hosting.

Reasons why you must trust ASPHostPortal.com

Every provider will tell you how they treat their support, uptime, expertise, guarantees, etc., are. Take a close look. What they’re really offering you is nothing close to what ASPHostPortal does. You will be treated with respect and provided the courtesy and service you would expect from a world-class web hosting business.

You’ll have highly trained, skilled professional technical support people ready, willing, and wanting to help you 24 hours a day. Your web hosting account servers are monitored from three monitoring points, with two alert points, every minute, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The followings are the list of other added- benefits you can find when hosting with us:

- DELL Hardware
Dell hardware is engineered to keep critical enterprise applications running around the clock with clustered solutions fully tested and certified by Dell and other leading operating system and application providers.
- Recovery Systems
Recovery becomes easy and seamless with our fully managed backup services. We monitor your server to ensure your data is properly backed up and recoverable so when the time comes, you can easily repair or recover your data.
- Control Panel
We provide one of the most comprehensive customer control panels available. Providing maximum control and ease of use, our Control Panel serves as the central management point for your ASPHostPortal account. You’ll use a flexible, powerful hosting control panel that will give you direct control over your web hosting account. Our control panel and systems configuration is fully automated and this means your settings are configured automatically and instantly.
- Excellent Expertise in Technology
The reason we can provide you with a great amount of power, flexibility, and simplicity at such a discounted price is due to incredible efficiencies within our business. We have not just been providing hosting for many clients for years, we have also been researching, developing, and innovating every aspect of our operations, systems, procedures, strategy, management, and teams. Our operations are based on a continual improvement program where we review thousands of systems, operational and management metrics in real-time, to fine-tune every aspect of our operation and activities. We continually train and retrain all people in our teams. We provide all people in our teams with the time, space, and inspiration to research, understand, and explore the Internet in search of greater knowledge. We do this while providing you with the best hosting services for the lowest possible price.
- Data Center
ASPHostPortal modular Tier-3 data center was specifically designed to be a world-class web hosting facility totally dedicated to uncompromised performance and security
- Monitoring Services
From the moment your server is connected to our network it is monitored for connectivity, disk, memory and CPU utilization – as well as hardware failures. Our engineers are alerted to potential issues before they become critical.
- Network
ASPHostPortal has architected its network like no other hosting company. Every facet of our network infrastructure scales to gigabit speeds with no single point of failure.
- Security
Network security and the security of your server are ASPHostPortal’s top priorities. Our security team is constantly monitoring the entire network for unusual or suspicious behavior so that when it is detected we can address the issue before our network or your server is affected.
- Support Services
Engineers staff our data center 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year to manage the network infrastructure and oversee top-of-the-line servers that host our clients’ critical sites and services.