Magento Running Costs

[j600com]

Hi,

I'm interested in finding out how much the average running costs are on a magento site. I know it may depend on traffic volume etc but roughly if you are on magento what is it costing you on average per month to host/support?

I've spoke to a few people recently who had been getting minimal traffic but paying £100-£200 per month for hosting (not enhancements or upgrades, just hosting/supporting what is there). I wanted to see if this was typical, or if people are paying more/less than this.

I'm also keen to find out how many are using the free version, and how many are using the licensed version. Or if you are a magento developer, and don't mind sharing the info - what the split is of your clients who are using the free version vs the pro/enterprise versions.

Any help from people using magento would be great.

Ps. only interested in opinions from people who have actually used it please

Thanks

 

[iboxsecurity]

Unless its very high traffic I do not see why they would be being charged £100-200 a month for hosting - we have a ton of magento sites (all the free versions) that we host for clients at around £20-£40 a month.

We build magento sites day in day out and I would suggest not going for the paid version unless you cannot get everything you need in the free version either through modules or bespoke programming using a developer.

 

[j600com]

Unless its very high traffic I do not see why they would be being charged £100-200 a month for hosting - we have a ton of magento sites (all the free versions) that we host for clients at around £20-£40 a month.

We build magento sites day in day out and I would suggest not going for the paid version unless you cannot get everything you need in the free version either through modules or bespoke programming using a developer.

Thats great help thanks, on average how much traffic are these £20-£40 clients getting? And how many products?

Sorry for all the questions

 

[iboxsecurity]

Without too much detail average products sit between 200-800 and traffic can be anywhere from couple thousand hits per month up to 60-70 thousand hits per month.

 

[awebapart.com]

Online shop owners should also factor in ongoing software development, integration and maintenance as a running cost too, even if it is just semi-bespoke, when considering total cost of ownership.

I noticed a contract on jobserve today where an agency was looking for a magento developer and offering £400-£500 per day! (which makes you wonder what rate that agency would be charging that person out to their clients for)

 

[j600com]

Thats great thanks, when you say hits - do you mean hits (or unique visitors?)

 

[j600com]

Online shop owners should also factor in ongoing software development, integration and maintenance as a running cost too, even if it is just semi-bespoke, when considering total cost of ownership.

I noticed a contract on jobserve today where an agency was looking for a magento developer and offering £400-£500 per day! (which makes you wonder what rate that agency would be charging that person out to their clients for)

I've also heard good magento developers are expensive (and rare - hence being expensive).

What frustrates me (and I imagine others) is there are so many people claiming to be able to do magento well, but when you look at their portfolio its either empty or the sites that are on it are terrible, running really slow, don't work in my browser (chrome) and ranking nowhere on search engines - but these are the guys claiming to be the experts.

I really do want to find out who the "good guys" are when it comes to magento, and start to learn how to spot those "playing at it" who clearly cant build decent/successful sites on it - but will have a bash at it and claim to be magento experts.

This has all come about on the back of reading this article tbh

 

[webhostuk]

Hi,

I'm interested in finding out how much the average running costs are on a magento site. I know it may depend on traffic volume etc but roughly if you are on magento what is it costing you on average per month to host/support?

I've spoke to a few people recently who had been getting minimal traffic but paying £100-£200 per month for hosting (not enhancements or upgrades, just hosting/supporting what is there). I wanted to see if this was typical, or if people are paying more/less than this.

I'm also keen to find out how many are using the free version, and how many are using the licensed version. Or if you are a magento developer, and don't mind sharing the info - what the split is of your clients who are using the free version vs the pro/enterprise versions.

Any help from people using magento would be great.

Ps. only interested in opinions from people who have actually used it please

Thanks

Our Special e-commerce Hosting package that supports Magento and has ngnix webserver to boost website performance with free SSL + dedicated IP costs just 69GBP per year.We also offer one click auto installer for Magento hosting. You can take a look at: Ecommerce Hosting

 

[j600com]

You can provide good magento hosting for £69 a year? Are there any extra charges for bandwidth/support etc?

Also, can you give me an example of a good magento site that is currently on this package so I can take a look.

 

[awebapart.com]

I've also heard good magento developers are expensive (and rare - hence being expensive).

Magento is a complex system, utilitising quite advanced system architectures. You need to be quite an experienced and advanced developer to understand an advanced system (under the hood), and that probably explains why the good developers charge the rates they do.

 

[edmondscommerce]

Realistic Magento hosting starts from around £20 per month. There are hosts that have taken the time to optimise their server software to make the best of the hardware.

As for the versions, the community (free) edition is fine for pretty much everyone. We have a handful of clients running enterprise and professional but the vast majority are on CE.

As someone trying to hire developers pretty much continuously to meet demand, I can say they are extremely rare.

Instead of trying to find "Magento Developers" we simply hire highly skilled PHP developers and then train them up on Magento. Of course as a client you won't really have that option unfortunately.

Bear in mind when looking at portfolios etc that developers are rarely going to be responsible for the entire site. For example we don't have any in house designers so sites in our portfolio have all been designed by third parties. We take the PSDs etc and build the Magento theme from these.

Same for SEO - Magento has awesome potential for SEO out of the box, however we still see live sites running "Home Page" as their meta title on their home page - not good, or using the default Magento favicon.

Apart from the higher spec hosting Magento requires as compared to lighter weight platforms such as osCommerce, I can't see that the running costs are going to be massively different.

We charge the same no matter which platform we are working on. Also some tasks are so much easier (cheaper) on Magento than other platforms simply because of the wealth of functionality built into Magento as standard. EAV helps as well.

 

[edmondscommerce]

Further to that - on the article mentioned by the OP, a lot of those issues are actually geting better.

For example upgrades are getting a lot smoother. Early Magento versions had issues (think 1.3 or less). At 1.4 some major improvements were brought in but they did break old sites. Since then jumping from 1.4 to 1.5 or 1.6 is vastly easier.

 

[dx3webs]

Hi there,

We host mainly Magento stores... hundreds of them from small start ups with a few products (14.50 pcm) to monster stores with 50000+ products (both community and enterprise). We also also support stores we don't host.

From the start we made it our business to ensure that Joe Blogs who knew enough to read instructions could get magento up and running for almost nothing (naturally we offer a complete setup and install service as well.

The article you link to is mostly rubbish..

The truth is that Magento was never designed to be a true tool for those without start up capital or programming knowledge.

Nonsense.. we have plenty of clients who do just that. Start with the basics, let the site grow and update as you can afford..

90% of our clients use community version.. and some of them run up traffic that is easily comparable to the enterprise edition sites.

Community Edition: Free – lacks needed functionality
Professional Edition (starting at $2,995 yearly – you get coupons
Enterprise Edition (starting at $12,995 yearly – you get a gift registry

so on the one hand he scoffs at the lack of functionality and on the other complains that the only addition is coupons? (I think he means Rewards as CE can do coupon codes.) Most of the functionality that is missing from CE can be purchased as an extension if you really need it for a lot less than the cost of the Professional / Enterprise edition. The key advantage is support... and hosts like us can give you that for a lot less.

@j600com drop me a PM and I can send you a range of magneto sites at all levels.

also, there are a few useful Magneto speed : price comparison sites you may find useful..

http://www.magespeedtest.com/
http://magebenchmark.sonassi.com/

 

[webhostuk]

You can provide good magento hosting for £69 a year? Are there any extra charges for bandwidth/support etc?

Also, can you give me an example of a good magento site that is currently on this package so I can take a look.

Its special shared package we takecare notoverload any of our shared ecommerce hosting ,and have limited accounts on shared hosting server. If the requirement is much higher we request the customer to upgrade to VPS hosting. So that we can maintain the quality we offer.

Regarding examples you can contact us on our livechat.

 

[j600com]

Its special shared package we takecare notoverload any of our shared ecommerce hosting ,and have limited accounts on shared hosting server. If the requirement is much higher we request the customer to upgrade to VPS hosting. So that we can maintain the quality we offer.

Regarding examples you can contact us on our livechat.

What sort of traffic levels would be possible on the £69 version? E.g at what point would you outgrow that and need the VPS one.

If you could PM me some examples so I can take a look that would be great.

 

[More4mums]

I have recently moved my e-commerce site from os commerce on to Magento and it was definitely a learning curve. It has about 100 products and about 8000 unique visitors a month.

The basics look more compliacated than they really are - with help from the wikis and forums I have managed to get most things working along with some limited help from a local developer. Still tweaking the site and adding to it.

It runs on a shared served from vidahost and they are great ! Currently only £29 a month but the option to upgrade when it is required.

 

[Dominic Taylor]

We have lots of clients running Magento sites on our shared hosting from £17/year, and the main issue as you build a more complex site is the sheer amount of code Magento contains, so shared hosting becomes inefficient due to needing to run suPHP which is much less efficient than mod_php.

We also have a few clients on VDSs/dedis who see poor performance due to endless plugins (as with Wordpress sites with many plugins), and conversely many which run lightning-fast.

I'd say a good mid-point for most sites (ie exclude the very large and very small) is a good VDS with a well-configured Magento store, total cost around £60 - £90/month.

Mage_Log is also the most inane default option ever so unless you disable it and have a decent InnoDB config you'll have some fun as the log tables grow to millions of rows...

 

[aicomms]

Hello,

There is no reason why you cannot run a magento store for the same about as running a non commerce store, so it depends on a few things but for a startup i would say no more than £25 a month.

1. How many products will the store have?, this matters because of the images the more images the more space you need.

2. Your preferred host, the smaller hosting companies charge more but normally will be quicker because you will not be sharing the server with that many people.

Thanks
Ai Communications Limited

 

[VikG]

Its special shared package we takecare notoverload any of our shared ecommerce hosting ,and have limited accounts on shared hosting server. If the requirement is much higher we request the customer to upgrade to VPS hosting. So that we can maintain the quality we offer.

Regarding examples you can contact us on our livechat.

webhosting.uk.net are you sure this is correct? On my accounts you have suspended services but never confirmed why? Also otherways to maintain quality are to reply to support requests. Im still waiting.

 

[ManWithBagOverHisHead]

Magento is built on PHP, which was never designed to run complex applications. Whilst its faster than classic ASP, its much slower than technologies like ASP.net which are optimized for running complex web applications very very fast.

These guys have a good comparison here - ASP.net is almost as fast as C++ which is about as fast as you can get... you'll see it blows PHP and classic ASP out of the water.

http://www.wrensoft.com/zoom/benchmarks.html

This is reflected in hosting costs. You can host a very complex and busy ASP.NET site on relatively cheap hosting and it'll go like a rocket. Most of the development tools associated with ASP.NET are free (the visual studio Express versions), MS SQL server express is free, and there are excellent free and low cost ASP.NET ecommerce software. My background was in classic ASP and later PHP - but I was staggered when we switched to ASP.NET and I saw the speed at which it ran.

Magento is great for small simple sites, but you'll pay a relative premium to host them. Its just a shame they didn't write in it .net, it would have been unbeatable.

 

[Dominic Taylor]

The benchmarks are probably right for that specific scenario but that doesn't mean it should be taken as gospel for any implementation of the various languages it tests. ASP.NET is a compiled language so in theory should be 'faster' than PHP, but PHP runs well on Linux which has far less demanding server / licensing requirements - and of course PHP also has opcode caching mechanisms available. Additionally each has to pass through a HTTP server so that plays a part too.

That said the reason Magento can be slow isn't to do with the language they chose - some of the most absurdly inefficient, slow, server-killing websites we host use ASP/ASP.NET (as many as use PHP or perl) - it's what they chose to code. Magento is a complex app and, when running PHP without opcode caching, means a whole lot of processing has to be done. Let's not even go into their love of XML, EAV, TLA, ABC schemes...

With a good setup it doesn't hugely matter what the language behind the system is as long as the system is thought out properly.

Additionally, throw Varnish in front of a site, configure it well, and you can handle large traffic loads with ease.

I don't think it's completely true that one needs to pay a premium to host a Magento site as most businesses will have their own virtual/dedicated server. It does however require more in-depth knowledge and tuning than perhaps any other similar app (how many people here will strace a request to see what can be sped up - I do )

 

[WHUK]

Magento is a very efficient content management system for eCommerce websites. It offers with extremely powerful features for the people who want to setup their online stores. Moreover the best thing about Magento is that it is highly customizable therefore it can be optimized to suite your requirements.

 

[ManWithBagOverHisHead]

I wasn't slating magento. I agree that you can code badly on asp.net and make a terrible app that is slow. Often its poor SQL queries that are the real drag on an application.

Its just that PHP is a curious choice of technology to attempt to write a complex application in.

I understand that C++ which would have had highest performance would not be very accessible for most users. But something like java would have given them cross platform support at much faster speeds.

Perhaps an ideal solution would have been a compiled C++ core with scripts around it controlling page layout etc (the less demanding CPU tasks). Most linux users don't compile linux, apache, mysql themselves. So why do that with magento - why not have a super faster core that is open source but compiled (eg C++) but have the wrapper around it scripts to make day to day modifications more efficient.

I've seen people write complex applications in classic ASP and its the same problem - it doesn't matter how great your coding is, a good coder on eg asp.net or java is going to blow your classic ASP code out of the water in terms of execution speed and server resources. So these guys end up getting free or cheap software and then paying over the odds each year to host it because its so demanding on server resources.

I had a customer recently who built his own database and classic asp system. The classic ASP wasn't too bad, but the database was very poorly constructed, no indexes, no indexed views etc. As his site grew he'd ended up with an 8 core server to run the thing, costing him thousands per year. In 30 mins of just adding some indexes I got the slowest queries (had taken 6 or 7 seconds on his super powerful server) down to milliseconds, and I was just picking the low hanging fruit (I'm not a sql server guru by any stretch). All those years he's been paying a fortune for hosting and still has a sluggish site, when he could have hired a DBA to sort out the problem with the software (in this case the database optimization) and saved himself a fortune, for perhaps a couple of hours of the DBA's billable time.

 

[makeusvisible]

We charge Magento customers between £30 and £40 per month for hosting, but do give them support for that too. £100 seems very high unless you are talking about a store with tens of thousands of products.

 

[dx3webs]

I am sure you are correct about the difference in speed between the different languages.. however, if you take a look at our magento demo store this loads in 0.4 seconds.. (without varnish... 14ms with varnish) how fast do you need a store to load?

If the hosting stack is setup correctly php is plenty fast enough to deliver the goods. Oh and this is for £14.50 a month inc Magento specific support.

 

[Dominic Taylor]

[snip]

As you mentioned in your last paragraph it's not the language which is the issue - it's the complexity of what it does. It's simply a complex system, which runs through an awful lot of code on each page, in order to provide the level of flexibility which makes it so popular. Doing it in a faster language would probably be quicker but it'd still be inefficient compared to the runtime of any other app in that language (perhaps like comparing Magento to Prestashop - Prestashop runs very well indeed as do most others)

It's mostly plugins and poor configuration that slow it down.

Opcode caching with PHP gives a good speed boost but anyone running a larger Magento site (as in a reasonably busy one) should/will also stick Varnish in front of it (as with any busy site) which gives the ability to scale very easily by minimising the number of requests that reach the backend. We do this for some clients and things fly

dx3webs, how do you do the opcode caching in (presumably) a shared environment or do you use openvz or something similar?

 

[AndyP]

......Opcode caching with PHP gives a good speed boost but anyone running a larger Magento site (as in a reasonably busy one) should/will also stick Varnish in front of it ....

Maybe a novice question but what's "varnish"?

 

[edmondscommerce]

https://www.varnish-cache.org/

saw a really interesting talk about using varnish with Magento at a PHP conference recently

 

[ManWithBagOverHisHead]

It's mostly plugins and poor configuration that slow it down.

Opcode caching with PHP gives a good speed boost but anyone running a larger Magento site (as in a reasonably busy one) should/will also stick Varnish in front of it (as with any busy site) which gives the ability to scale very easily by minimising the number of requests that reach the backend. We do this for some clients and things fly

This is the point I'm making. PHP just isn't suited to massively complex systems. Its great for a simple site, but not something like a large ecommerce store with a hundreds of thousands of products and hundreds of thousands of visitors.

Many years ago I implemented an encryption algorithm (DES, the then US standard) in vbscript (classic ASP). I did it as efficiently as possible, but it was slow, because the language limited the level that I could code at. But code it in pascal or C, or even full vb and it went hundreds of times faster. This wasn't due to my bad coding in classic ASP - its just a limitation of what can be done with such scripts.

PHP is faster than classic ASP, but not by orders of magnitude.

The classic ASP encryption was great if you were encrypting something small (an email, a credit card number) - fractions of a second. But if you wanted to encrypt larger amounts of data (eg images or video) it would take hours (literally). Whereas a C++ com object took milliseconds.

Hence with PHP people end up having to run "varnish" and all types of other bodges to get acceptable speed from it when they try and go beyond small mom and pop stores. What they need is a new architecture, based around asp.net or C++ or Java or something compiled to do the grunt work, and then stick some scripts around it for the visuals (I think facebook and some industrial scale ecommerce apps do something similar). If not magento users (with sites of any significant size) are always going to have to run it on overly specced hosting with middleware bodges installed to speed it up (great if you're a hosting company)

To me asp.net is THE platform because it has the efficiency of C++ (well not as fast, but getting on for it) but is far simpler to deploy. I think the problem is most developers don't even experiment, they just download some free PHP application never look at anything else, and if its slow they stick some caching software in front of it or boost the hosting horsepower, rather than trying to address why its slow. You can get away with that for the small mom and pop store, but you're going to get in a mess with a really big one. ASP.net also enables a relatively smooth transition to Azure for cloud hosting.

 

[ManWithBagOverHisHead]

I am sure you are correct about the difference in speed between the different languages.. however, if you take a look at our magento demo store this loads in 0.4 seconds.. (without varnish... 14ms with varnish) how fast do you need a store to load?

If the hosting stack is setup correctly php is plenty fast enough to deliver the goods. Oh and this is for £14.50 a month inc Magento specific support.

How many hundred thousand products in your demo store?

 

[K9-Steve]

With Magento, despite their used caching techniques a shared hosting package often cannot handle the load required to maintain the visitors to the website.

The Magento platform developers themselves do not recommend a basic shared hosting environment for an online shop with a vast amount of products and visitors.

 

[kulture]

With Magento, despite their used caching techniques a shared hosting package often cannot handle the load required to maintain the visitors to the website.

The Magento platform developers themselves do not recommend a basic shared hosting environment for an online shop with a vast amount of products and visitors.

There is a vast variety in shared hosting. For example if you share a machine with a few other sites, then you can be much better off than a VPS. It is all down to the number of sites crammed onto the server.

What people seem to have missed is the overal running costs. Magento is expensive. Not only does it need decent hosting, it also needs a fair amount of care and attention. There are frequent updates and upgrading costs time and money. It is a feature rich application, and has some killer features which I like, but it is not the cheapest cart to run.

 

[Dominic Taylor]

What people seem to have missed is the overal running costs. Magento is expensive. Not only does it need decent hosting, it also needs a fair amount of care and attention. There are frequent updates and upgrading costs time and money. It is a feature rich application, and has some killer features which I like, but it is not the cheapest cart to run.

Absolutely - this is the main point people seem to miss. People time (ie hiring a web developer) is far, far more expensive than decent hosting.

 

[dx3webs]

How many hundred thousand products in your demo store?

lol 120

However, we do have stores with 100000+ .. though dedicated server required.

If you want to try varnish out on magento try this free extension.. works a treat

http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/cache-extension-powered-by-varnish.html

 

[DanLFB]

Hi,

I was in similar situation to the OP and found it hard to get a definitve answer as to how well a Magento installation would run on a budget hosting package.

I did a lot of research and ended up opting for a package that cost £15 per year.

Im delighted with the performance considering the price. Webmaster tools puts me on an average page load time of 2 seconds (apparently faster than 60% of sites) and this is without any performance optimisation (we also have a lot of large images if that makes any difference).

We are a low traffic site comfortably fitting into our 5GB bandwidth allowance (we have around 150 product lines) so cant comment on how this would look with more traffic but worth considering...

 

[turnips]

I have a clothing site called purple pop vintage which i did have launched but took it back down as we tried to do an upgrade from 1.4 to 1.6 and it corrupted the DB. We had a backup of the system but i believe the DB was corrupted when we tried to apply the new version...this is what my developer tells me anyway and i have no reason not to believe him..

As it corrupted during the upgrade, i figured we may aswell address the situation of getting the hosting service brought over to the UK (currently hosted in the US), with a view to hopefully improving the speed of the site. We have not formally launched yet so taking the site down was no biggy.

Anyway, with the amount of hosting service providers out there, it's difficult to know who is any good as they all obviously claim to be! I think we may have hit on one anyway evohosting.co.uk are hopefully going to give us everything we need but if anyone knows of any reason why not to go with them then i'd love to hear it?

It's very difficult knowing which direction to head in when there's so much choice but they seem reasonably priced and there communication with me has been fairly comprehensive so far!!??

 

[gbsales]

webhosting.uk.net are you sure this is correct? On my accounts you have suspended services but never confirmed why? Also otherways to maintain quality are to reply to support requests. Im still waiting.

Hmm, I would love to hear what webhosts have to say about this comment. I was just about to sign up with them, then read this post. :|

 

[turnips]

Yeah like so many of these hosting services they don't offer telephone support, just email so it's all on their terms! Makes you feel a little isolated have to say!