Magento hosting providers

When it comes to Magento performance, having a solid hoster that knows it stuff is highly recommended. The following guide is a listing of hosting providers that should be able to give you a good service when it comes to Magento.

Disclaimer

Yireo is not a hosting provider. We don't actively implement Magento shops either - we focus on extensions and training instead. The following list is subjective (our own vision on things), inspired by some customers and friends, and incomplete. Use it as a quick start for a proper investigation.

Requirements for hosting Magento

Besides the official system requirements of Magento, there are couple of recommendations we can make regarding Magento. Here's what makes a good hosting environment for us:

A VPS or physical server: Magento might require quite some resources, and sharing resources via shared hosting is simply a bad idea. Make sure to also get root access, so you can modify whatever you want to modify. If root access is not available, don't panic: You can ask the hoster to change settings if tuning needs to be done. If they are unwilling to help you tune the server, switch hoster.
Managed or unmanaged: If you can become root, this will allow you to manage all things yourself. However, if Linux is not your thing, this also means that you need to hire a developer or Linux administrator for setting up things. With managed servers, this administration is done by the hoster. Our experience is that a server needs a lot of management in the beginning, but then requires only a couple of hours of maintenance per couple of months.
About control panels: Often people that start with hosting think having a control panel like CPanel, DirectAdmin or Plesk is a good idea: You can easily configure mail and so on. Our recommendation to have a Magento server that only hosts Magento. You can put your files, backups, mail and music elsewhere. Dedicate the server to Magento.
SSH tools: Make sure to have SSH access available, preferably also with root access. This will allow you to add tools like git, modman, composer, n98-magerun and other command-line tools to your server. Don't worry if you are incapable of using the shell - your developers will require this (if they are good).
Backup policy: Make sure to check upon the backup policy, or even more important the way to restore your backup. If a restore from backup means resetting the entire VPS to a previous state, this is not something you want to undo the deletion of a simple image. The hoster might provide a solution for both disaster recovery and incremental backups, or you might need to set things up yourself.
Specialized in Magento: A really good hosting environment for Magento includes technologies like PHP-FPM, Redis and memcached. With a VPS you can install these things yourself. With a managed server (as in: managed by the hoster) you will need to make sure are available for a reasonable price.

Listing

Some well known hosting providers have various VPS packages to help you with. With the specifications above you can find a suitable package easily. Some of these hosting providers are listed below: