Agency Brief
Magento hosting for small retailers — Inheriting a Magento shop, and what it will cost you to keep it
A retail client with Magento is not a website with a basket bolted on — it is a platform with an appetite, and somebody has just made it your appetite too.
Straight answer first
Put a client's Magento shop on a properly sized VPS with Redis, a search service and NVMe beneath it, and price the account accordingly — Magento repays real infrastructure and sulks at penny-pinching, and the sulking lands on your support queue rather than ours.
The trade point is that this is not a plan you can slot into a shared reseller pool. It is a machine, with a patch cycle, a compile step and a client whose till is on it. Treat it as a managed service with its own line on the invoice from the first day and the account is profitable; treat it as one more site in the book and it will quietly eat the margin from the other thirty-nine.
Written by the Hosting Seller staff · Checked 24 August 2026
99.9%
Uptime target behind your retainer
24/7
Engineers on call for you
Free
SSL on every client shop
NVMe
Disks under the whole estate
For agencies and resellers who have been handed a Magento store. Perhaps you built it, perhaps it arrived with the client, but either way the person who now has to keep the checkout answering on a Saturday afternoon is you.
One structural fact frames every decision: a search service is core infrastructure for Magento 2, not an optional extra. Hosting that makes no provision for Elasticsearch or OpenSearch is not Magento hosting, whatever the sales page calls it — and discovering that after you have quoted a monthly figure is an expensive way to learn it.
What the shop actually needs underneath it
Think in services rather than headline numbers: PHP-FPM with generous memory, MySQL with room to breathe, Redis, and a search service. In practice that means a 4 GB or larger VPS for a small shop. Under-specify it and the first symptom is the client's admin timing out while they are trying to process an order, which is the worst possible place for a performance problem to appear.
Cramming Magento onto an entry shared plan is the classic error in this market. The installer finishes, everybody relaxes, and then the platform punishes all three parties in turn — the shopper, the retailer and you.
The bill, and the parts of it clients never expect
A KVM virtual server with root, DDoS filtering in front and one flat price is the shape of the cost. Note one thing before you quote: VPS and dedicated servers are built to order the moment payment clears, so they sit outside the 30-day money-back guarantee that covers shared, business, WordPress and WooCommerce plans. Reseller hosting carries seven days.
That is not a catch, but it is a fact you should price around. Size the machine on the shop you have, not the shop the client hopes for, and use the upgrade path when the trading justifies it rather than buying the headroom eighteen months early on their behalf.
Who patches it, and does your contract say so
Magento releases security patches on its own schedule, and applying one is not a WordPress-style click. There is a compile step, a cache flush and a real chance of a regression in a customised theme. Somebody has to own that work, and the two candidates are you and nobody.
Write it down. Either patching is inside your retainer with a stated response window, or it is billable work the client requests. What you must not do is leave it unstated, because an unpatched shop that is compromised becomes a conversation about whose job it was, and that conversation has no good version.
The maintenance window you negotiate before you start
Agree the hours now, while everybody is friendly. A shop has trading peaks, and the client knows theirs better than you do — ask which hours are untouchable, then book your work outside them and hold to it.
Staging is what makes that window short. Clone, patch, prove, push. Backups run daily and restore from the panel in minutes, which means the honest answer to 'what if it breaks' is a time rather than a shrug.
We sell the hosting. That is the whole disclosure.
No affiliate table sits behind this recommendation and no fee was paid for its position. We are the supplier, we would like the account, and the rest of the page is more useful once that is said.
Order an annual plan and the first year of the domain registration is on the house — worth remembering when you are quoting a client a first-year figure.
- Tests you can run before you commit a client
- One trade price, held at renewal
- Free migration for the sites you already host
- A refund policy with no small print
Why Hosting Seller
On every plan, as standard
Root, so the stack is yours to tune
Redis, a search service and PHP-FPM settings are configuration decisions rather than support tickets when the machine answers to you.
Free migration of an existing shop
Our staff bring files, database and configuration across at no charge, and you check the copy works before the DNS moves.
Staging before every patch
Prove a Magento security release on a clone, then push it. The client's checkout never meets a change you have not watched work.
One flat price on the machine
A VPS with a fixed monthly figure means the retainer you quote in spring is still the retainer that works in December.
A refund without a gauntlet
Where the guarantee applies, leaving is a request rather than a negotiation — which is why we are content to be tested first.
Cover behind your helpdesk
Real engineers on the counter at any hour, so a Saturday checkout fault is not one person and a laptop.
Price Tags Compared
How we compare with the household names
Typical sign-up and renewal prices across the market, set next to ours — the second number most comparison charts leave off.
| Line item | Hosting SellerBest seller | Typical big-brand host | Typical budget host | Typical loss-leader |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Entry price / mo* | $2.42/mo | $4–$6 | $2–$4 | $1–$3 |
| Price at renewal / mo | $2.42/mo | $10–$15 | $8–$12 | $4–$6 |
| Renewal price on the entry plan is unchanged | ||||
| SSL on every plan | ||||
| Site migration included | ||||
| The entry plan uses NVMe storage | ||||
| Entry plan gets a backup daily | ||||
| Live human support, 24/7 |
*The number in our column is the cheapest plan on our shelf, priced on an annual term and pulled live from the very catalogue that feeds the pricing page, so it cannot drift out of date. Other columns show the ranges shared hosting tends to advertise inside each bracket: introductory rates that normally ask for a one-to-four-year commitment, then climb once that term expires. Naming individual competitors and printing their prices is something we have stopped doing. A figure we cannot re-check on the day you read it has no business sitting in front of you. So compare us with whoever you are genuinely weighing up, and read the renewal line first. That line tells you more than the headline ever will.
First Steps
From choosing to live
- 1
Ask which hours are untouchable
Get the client's trading peaks in writing before you agree anything. Every maintenance decision for the next three years follows from that list.
- 2
Size the machine on today's shop
Buy for the catalogue and the order volume that exist now, and use the upgrade path when trading justifies it. Buying headroom early spends the client's money to reduce your own risk.
- 3
Name the patch owner in the contract
State who applies Magento security releases, within what window, and at whose cost. An unstated answer always resolves to nobody, and then to you.
In the Box
Packed with every plan
- Root access on KVM virtual servers, with the stack yours to tune
- DDoS filtering handled at the network edge in front of the shop
- Staging copies so a patch is proved before the checkout meets it
- A backup taken daily, with restores you run yourself
- Free SSL on every site, reissued before it lapses
- Site migration done for you by our staff, at no charge
- Mailboxes on the client's own domain, included
- cPanel available on the machine if the client's team needs a panel
- Nothing added at setup — no joining fee, ever
- The renewal price on the tag matches the order price
Across the Counter
Things people ask us all the time
Can I run a client's Magento shop from my reseller pool?
Not sensibly. Magento wants memory, workers, Redis and a search service in quantity, and a reseller pool is designed to spread modest accounts widely. Give the shop its own machine, bill it separately, and keep the pool for the sites that suit it.
How do I price a Magento retainer so it does not eat the rest of the book?
Separate three things on the invoice: the machine at a flat monthly figure, a stated allowance of maintenance time, and patch work as its own item. The accounts that lose money are the ones where all three are blended into a single number that was set before anybody knew how often Magento releases.
Is a small retailer better off on Magento at all?
Only for what it genuinely does better: complicated catalogues, trade accounts, several storefronts. If the client is already on it, host it properly. If they are still choosing, our Magento-versus-WooCommerce comparison is the more useful page, and the cheaper answer for both of you.
Does the price climb when the term is up?
No. What you pay to order is what you pay to renew, year after year. There are no teaser rates here, so a retainer you priced against this month's cost still works next year, and your bookkeeping can treat the platform line as a fixed number.
Read next
Reseller Hosting for Agencies
Turning finished client builds into monthly income, and the panel that makes it administrable.
Reseller Hosting vs Affiliate Programs
Owning the customer or passing them on — the two ways into this trade, costed honestly.
Magento Hosting
Hosting with the memory and PHP room Magento genuinely asks for.
VPS Hosting
KVM virtual servers with root access, DDoS filtering and one flat price.
Moving your site to another host? Start with this checklist.
A step-by-step order of work for a move your visitors never spot: which files to copy first, how to carry email across without losing one message, the right moment to repoint DNS, and the two mistakes behind nearly every hour of downtime people ring us about.
Take the shop on with a machine behind it.
Root access, DDoS filtering, staging before every patch and free migration of the shop you already look after.
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