We work closely with merchants from various industries around the world. When it comes to choosing a hosting platform, it turns out they have much in common. Namely, the need to carefully think through business requirements and customer experiences as they select the right hosting solution.
Finding the right eCommerce hosting platform has become a mission critical business decision. Why? Think about your favorite restaurant. Beyond expectations that the restaurant will offer easy access, efficient service, and pleasant experience – you expect really good food served quickly and exactly to order. You would not go to the restaurant if the food did not match the storefront experience, would you? Therefore, any website should be stable and high-performing. After all, a website represents the merchant’s brand. Thus, ensuring the stability of your hosting platform is a crucial aspect of website maintenance and support. This emphasizes the importance of careful selection when choosing a hosting platform. Selection often proved difficult and something of a business gamble, as it was hard to choose a solution that met a respective merchant’s needs.
Fortunately, Magento introduced their own powerful solution – Magento Commerce Cloud. It covers all Magento Commerce functionality, hosting infrastructure, and additional services to improve and maintain a website. This in itself is unique. Additionally though, there are two different plans to address different sizes of business: Starter and Pro plan. Each plan includes architecture as a set of configurations and services that provides a possibility to develop, extend, test, and maintain websites of different complexities.
So what are the benefits of Magento Commerce Cloud? In this article we are reviewing the most important:
1. AWS managed hosting and autoscaling
The possibility of an entire infrastructure on AWS environment is definitely the next level of hosting solutions. Providing extensive ability to scale resources depending on expected website load – there is no need to migrate a website to more powerful servers if business is expanding. With Magento Cloud, it’s possible to just contact the support manager and schedule autoscaling for the time period required (e.g, peak holiday sales, launch of a new product – when huge loads are anticipated) and they can perform necessary preparations.
2. Magento Commerce features out of the box
Basically, it’s a hosting solution with all additional features of Magento Commerce – all in a single package. Magento Commerce Cloud includes all features from Magento Commerce (former Enterprise Edition) as well as hosting provider and customer support of the entire infrastructure. And that leads us to the next outstanding feature;
3. Simplified support and maintenance by Magento team
Magento experts are supporting not only the website but also 24/7 the hosting environment which simplifies system maintenance significantly. Magento Cloud infrastructure is always kept compatible with the latest Magento releases.
4. Additional services out of the box
Magento Commerce Cloud includes the following additional services for website speed and performance monitoring;
Fastly – improved content delivery network (CDN) which provides many additional features such as full page cache, web application firewall, and others. For Magento 2 Fastly is a must-have service for improving storefront performance.
New Relic – performance monitoring service that allows administrators to view detailed stats of all system processes on the website.
5. Multiple environment support
With Magento Commerce Cloud it is not necessary to pay for additional staging or development environments. There is a staging environment almost identical to production, but out of the box. Moreover, additional development (integration) environments can be created “on the go” for different testing purposes with no additional costs. So you can easily improve, test, and then deploy changes to any environment without affecting real users’ experience. What’s more, Magento is working on improving the Magento 2 PWA support for their Commerce Cloud.
To sum up, there are many benefits of creating a website on Magento Commerce Cloud. A balanced solution for website owners preferring to retain a degree of admin control without expending effort to manage the infrastructure.
We hope that this information helps you to learn more about Magento Commerce Cloud. Feel free to reach out to us if any additional questions arise or to get Magento maintenance services.