This is quite a touchy subject in the Magento Ecosystem. Arguably this issue fuelled Adobe’s progressive move towards the SaaS model and providing their own Cloud hosting platform. Lets face it, no-one wants a merchant stuck in the middle of a blame-game between developer (supporting software) and hosting company (supporting infrastructure). It’s very possible that merely the marriage between these 2 suppliers is not at the required level to provide an overall trouble-free service. 

We explore our viewpoint on Managed Hosting having worked and partnered with all the key Magento hosting companies in the last 15 years.

Large-scale Enterprise methodology/scalability to the rescue

The necessity for larger merchants to have scalable infrastructure has introduced IaC (infrastructure as code) into the common-place discussion points. Whilst scalable infrastructure is unnecessary for most SME’s, the IaC methodology can introduce major cost benefits.

Example:

  1. Merchant A is on Magento Open Source - hosted with a traditional dedicated server hosting company. They need to raise tickets with their hosting company to upgrade PHP, MySQL, Elasticsearch or any other application on the stack. This takes time, introduces room for error, risk due to disparity between development and live. Ultimately the hosting company cannot facilitate infrastructure as code, therefore there is no testing procedure and usually an early morning even where an engineer will upgrade said application and fingers crossed, hope for the best.
  2. Merchant B is on Magento Open Source hosted and uses Managed Magento Hosting on MDOQ. Platform application stack versions can be changed at any time, synced up to allow development/test work, then switched in production, all from the self-service control Ie the infrastructure is all managed through automation, nobody executes manual SSH/CLI steps, therefore infrastructure amendments can be played, replayed, reverted countless times reducing risk to potentially 0%. 

Merchant B wins every time, his developers can enjoy developing instead of worrying about operational processes. A unified platform which provides managed hosting, deployment and DevOps tooling sets the bar and slashes the overall platform costs.