Can Magento run on shared hosting?

So you want to set up a shop online? You have decided on the products you’ll sell, and you have created a full-blown business plan for your store and you need is to begin. You have asked around and found that Magento is perhaps your best bet to create your online store, so you’re going with it.

But there’s a little problem. You don’t know where you want to host your store because clearing owning a server and hosting your store there will cost you money. So the next logical assumption you make is that you’ll do better with shared hosting.

And you wonder if Magento runs on shared hosting. In a word, YES. Yes, it does run on shared hosting. But in order to do that, you need to choose the right provider and the right hosting plan to make it work for you. When you are just starting out, you may not get a lot of traffic. I know that sounds hurtful, but it’s true. It means you can manage with a shared hosting platform until you grow your customer base multiple times.

But the real question you should be asking is

Do you want shared hosting for your Magento store?

You see shared hosting may be a decent place to start because you are just starting out. I know that the low costs are tempting. But think about it. You might just be starting, but you do plan to grow, right?

If that’s a yes, you don’t want a shared hosting for your store. What you want is a bigger, clearer picture of your vision. The thing is successful businesses don’t become successful improvising with little, but they grow big by starting big. You must have foresight if you want to be successful.

It means you need to plan for scaling your business because shared hosting doesn’t allow that.

Disadvantages of using shared hosting services for Magento

  • Reduced Performance

When you use shared hosting for your Magento website development, there are more chances of reduced performance of the store. This is because Magento is more demanding of its hosting services because it wants your store to run effortlessly.

  • Low Stability

Shared hosting services which are less stable die due to the number of businesses in the cloud. If there is more usage by other users, your website shows a ‘404 error’ which increases the bounce rate and ultimately hurts your website traffic in more ways than one.

Better Alternatives to Shared Hosting

Magento website development will create a beautiful website store for you, but to make it powerful, you must have the right hosting with enough space to contain your growing business.

Shared hosting allows a maximum PHP space of 768M, but you need at least 2GB to make your store robust. This limits the possibility of growing your store. This is where VPS or virtual private servers come into play. With a VPS, you could have all the advantages of having a private server, without the high charges or the handling hassles of the hardware.