Best Magento Hosting

What is Magento?

Magento is a very powerful and fast growing ecommerce script, created by Varien. It is an open-source platform using Zend PHP and MySQL databases. Magento offers great flexibility through its modular architecture, is completely scalable and has a wide range of control options that its users appreciate.

Magento features

Here are some of the features we like the best:

• Magento is very powerful and yet intuitive when it comes to presenting your products. You can easily create your products catalog and manage it. You can add more than one images for the same product, review the product and allow creating of wish lists. It allows catalog and product browsing, product filtering and product comparison. You can easily add new products, do batch product update, manage your inventory, easily manage orders and shipments, and integrate different payment methods.
• Magento has some great options when it comes to customer service. With Magento you grant your customers the option to create user accounts, track their shopping history, contact you through custom forms, you can also choose different languages and currencies, to fit the needs of your customers.
• You can easily integrate Magento into your Google Analytics account and use all its options to analyze the customer behavior on your website and optimize it for better results. You can also use the advanced SEO options of Magento to optimize your website search engine positioning, so it can be found easier by your customers.
• Magento also allows you to use many marketing promo tools – organize price promotions, use coupon codes. There are many websites out there offering beautiful Magento themes for free or paid, so you can create your unique looking online store with ease.
• And if this is not enough, there are over 1.700 extensions for additional functionalities you can install via the Magento-Connect interface.

Magento Demo and Showcase

If you want to see Magento in action, just visit the Magento demo and Magento showcase stores. Browse around and build your own opinion.

Magento Commerce Demo | Magento Commerce Stores Showcase

Magento Products

In Magento you can add products to your store manually one by one, or many products at once.

Add a single product to Magento

To add one product you have to follow these steps:

1. Login to your admin area.
2. Choose Catalog -> Magento Products -> Add products
3. On the next screen you have to choose your Product setting such as Attribute Set and Product Type. Click on Continue.
4. The New Product form will appear. Here you have to fill out the required information such as Name, SKU, Weight, Status, Tax Class, Visibility.
5. Click Create New Attribute. You can add the price and description of the item. Don’t forget to click Save and Continue Editing.
6. You can add addition information if required.
7. Add an image for the product.
8. Click Save.

Add many products in Magento at once

If you wan to add many products at one you have to export first a files with one product so you have a sample structure for the products you want to add. You have to fill in the required information – separated by commas, new line for each new products, and upload it back in Magento.

1. Go to Catalog -> Manage Categories and create the categories you wish to have.
2. Click Save category.
3. Add manually a product in each category and export the categories. Click Go to System -> Import/Export -> Profiles and choose Export all products.
4. Select Run profile.
5. When you are ready, you can use the exported file as a template.
6. Fill in the required information such as product name, price, description etc.
7. Go to your admin area.
8. Choose System -> Import/Export -> Profiles.
9. Click on Import All Products.
10. Choose CSV/tab separated as data format type and choose the .csv file you want to use.
11. Click Save and Continue Edit.
12. Then go to Run Profile, select your cvs file in the dropdown menu.

You are ready.

Magento Extensions

Your Magento store can be easily customized according to your needs by simply installing Magento extensions or modules. You only have to go to your administration area and access Magento Connect. The Magento modules available there are core modules, community modules and commercial modules, and are all approved by the Magento team members.

In order to install an extension, you need to get its module key from the module page and enter it into the web interface of Magento Connect.

Here are some of the most popular free Magento extension:

1. Fontis WYSIWYG Editor
   You can use this extension in order to enable a JavaScript WYSIWYG editor to specified admin pages. Currently the available editors are TinyMCE, FCKeditor and CKeditor.
2. Fooman Google Analytics Plus
   This Magento extension brings a lot of improvements to your Analytics. Please pay attention that v0.9.0 only works on Magento 1.4 and up, for Magento 1.3.2.4 and below you should use version 0.8.7 of this extension. With this extension you can track every individual page as well as track the actual keywords typed in by your user.
3. Blog
   With this extension you will be able to create and add a blog to your online shop. This is a great way to establish a closer connection with your customer.
4. Post Affiliate Pro Connector
   The integration of an affiliate program in your website is easy and quickly with PAP. With this module you will be able to accept referrals on any page of your website, and to track  click and sale.
5. Magento Live Chat
   This module will help you add a LiveChat support in your Magento shop.
6. Magento EasyLightbox
   Magento EasyLightbox will help you improve the frontend and functionality of your Magento store. With this module the images of your products will be displayed as a lightbox. No coding required.
7. Enhanced Admin Product Grid
   You will be able to add new columns and tools and many other features to your admin product management grid.
8. Bank Payment
   The Bank Payment module notifies the customer about the bank account he has to transfer the money to.
9. Fooman Speedster
   This plugin offers you a quick way to speed up your Magento store by combining, compressing and caching JS and CSS.
10. Canonical URL for Magento
    With this extension you can add canonical links to the head of all your Magento pages.

Magento Themes

Magento theme collection
Learn How to Install a Magento theme

Many providers offer free or paid Magento themes. If you are looking for free templates, you can visit the Official Magento themes collection. For more professional looking paid templates you might wanna check the website of Algozone. If you want to know how to install Magento theme check the instructions below.

Magento theme collection

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Learn How to Install a Magento theme

You want to install a new Magento theme on your website. If the theme you want to use is available in Magento Connect, you can simply install it through it. If it’s not available through Magento Connect, you will have to install it manually by uploading the theme into the themes folder of your Magento installation. Here our instructions for both options.

If you want to use a theme from Magento Connect, here are few steps for you to follow:

1. In order to upload and install a Magento theme, you need its Extension key.
2. Go to the detailed view of the theme and click on “Get Extension Key”.
3. You have to copy this code.
4. Go to the Magento Admin Area / System / Magento Connect / Magento Connect Manager
5. Paste the extension key in the field called “Paste extension key to install” and click “Install”
6. When you are ready with the installation, you can go to Magento’s Admin Area and activate the theme. Go to System / Configuration / Design / Themes.
7. Enter the name of the themes in the Default field and save it.
8. From Mangeto Admin Area / CMS / Manage Pages you will be able to choose between different layouts for the different pages you have.

If you want to use a theme that is not available via Magento Connect, here is how to proceed:

1. Download the file of the themes
2. The file you will get is a zip file – extract this file to your computer. The folders app and skin will appear
3. Add these folders to your Magento installation. You need FTP access to your website on the server. You need to upload the folder app to magento/app/design/frontend/default and skin to magento/skin/frontend/default
4. After you have done this, go to your admin panel
5. Goto the System/Configuration/Design Tab
6. Choose the new theme and click Save Config

You can now enjoy your new Magento Commerce Template!
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Magento Installation

Some web hosts provide professional Magento installation as paid or free additional service to their magento hosting package, or have Auto-Installers in their Control Panels. If your web hosts does not provide any of these options, or you want to install Magento manually in order to customize its settings, please read the following short manual.

• To install Magento you will have to download the latest stable Magento version from the official Magento website. You can download the full installation file package from magentocommerce.com/download . It usually comes as a zip file, so you will have to unzip it first, or upload it and unzip it on the server.
• You can upload the files via FTP to your hosting account. You can choose between the public_html folder and a sub folder, if you do not wish Magento to appear directly on your home page.
• When the package is uploaded, you will have to extract it if you haven’t done that yet, and change its file permissions (set to 755) according to the requirements listed on magentocommerce.com
• You need to create a new MySql database and new user for your future store. To do that, login to the Control Panel of your hosting account and use the MySQL databases management tool.
• Attach the user and the database together.
• Run the Magento Install Wizard. You will have to point your browser to the URL of your website – your home page or the folder you have chosen to install Magento in. Follow the instructions of the wizard.



• Fill out your database connection information – data base name, user name and password.



• Setup your administrator user. Choose an encryption key, or leave this field blank – Magento will generate it for you. Be sure to write it down, since you will need it for password encryption and other operations later on.
• That’s it! You are done.

Magento and PCI Compliance

Photo by Alek Kirstein

If you sell products online you will have to deal with the credit card data of your customers. PCI compliance is related to the storage of this data and its security. It is a standard set by credit card companies in order to prevent or at least reduce credit card fraud in the industry. To comply with this standard can be very costly and time consuming. Not to comply with it can lead to fines in case of stollen credit cards’ data.

If you as an online merchant using Magento want to achieve PCI compliance, here’s what you need to know.

There are four different tiers for PCI Compliance, connected with an annual review by a Qualified Security Assessor, and a quarterly scan by a Approved Scanning Vendor of different scope.

• Tier 1: You have more than 6 million transactions per year
• Tier 2: Your stored transactions per year are betweet 1 and 6 million
• Tier 3: In case you have less than 1 million transactions during the year
• Tier 4: If you have less than 20.000 transactions a year

Here are the requirements for the PCI Compliance

• You have to maintain a firewall in order to protect the card holder data
• Do not use default system user and password or other security parameters
• Protect the card holder data
• Data transmissions should be encrypted
• Up-to-date antivirus software
• Systems and applications security
• Restricted access to card holder data
• Unique ID for each person with computer access
• Monitor regularly the access to your network resources
• Test regularly the security systems and processes
• Policy for information security

If you have the Magento Professional or Enterprise Edition and you process payments yourself, that the full payment application is considered as a custom application and it has to fulfill the requirements mentioned above. Since this is a very time consuming and costly process, and in case you only use the Magento Community Edition, there are a few other options to be PCI compliant. Here are the other options in detail:

1. You can use a third party payment methods, for example PayPal express.
   If you choose this option you won’t have to be PCI compliant yourself, because you don’t have to store credit card information on your server. In this case you have to consider that your customers will be redirected to the site of the payment processor and will have to leave your website, which might be inconvinient and interrupt the buying process.
2. You can use a SaaS PCI compliant payment application.
   You can use for example the CRE Secure which is PCI compliant. The customer is taken to another website (URL changes), but the form may be customized to look consistent with your store.
3. You can use the Magento Payment Bridge – which is PA DSS compliant.
   It is available free of charge with Enterprise and Professional Editions of Magento and requires an upgrade from Community Edition.  In case you decide to go this way, there are technical requirements for PCI compliant hosting (website and database).  This is the best option from the three since it provides a seamless user experience but also the most expensive one.

Magento Books

Magento Requirements

In order to be able to install and run Magento without issues on the magento hosting provider of your choice, there are some system requirements you should consider. Please make sure to check if your future host meets these requirements before buying a hosting account with it! You can also take a look at our selection of tested Magento hosting providers.

• The Operating System should be Linux x86 or x86-64
• Web Servers: Apache 1.3.x, Apache 2.0.x, Apache 2.2.x
• PHP 5.2, Safe_mode off, Memory_limit no less than 256Mb (preferably 512)
• Required extensions: PDO_MySQL, simplexml, mcrypt, hash, GD, DOM, iconv, curl, SOAP (if Webservices API is to be used)
• MySQL:
  • 4.1.20 or newer
  • InnoDB storage engine

• SSL: If https is used to work in the admin, SSL certificate should be valid
• Server setup:
  • Run scheduled jobs (crontab) with PHP 5
  • Override options in .htaccess files