Shopify vs Magento: Part 2 - Hosting & Infrastructure

Any brand in the fashion space knows just how important a new collection launch or mid-season flash sale is to their business.

A new season launch is an opportunity to make a large portion of the entire collection's revenue in the first few days, so it's critical the site is responsive, quick and above all, does not go down. This is where Shopify has come in handy time and time again.

With over 29,000 CPU cores on their cloud infrastructure, Shopify boasts 99.99% uptime. Sites on Shopify can handle millions of page requests per second and thousands of checkouts per minute without breaking a sweat. Naturally, when someone comes to us and says they have big launches or big sales, this type of firepower is appealing.

Magento is a little different. Magento is server based and it's each individual merchant's responsibility to set up and maintain the infrastructure where the site is located. We leverage Amazon's AWS (one of the best hosting companies in the world) for our Magento sites, with a range of other things in place to keep the site up and running (standalone database servers, load balancers, caching tools etc), and they hold up well.

There's lots we can do to prepare for any collection launch, but it's impossible to truly know how it's going to perform until it's all underway and if the site does start to slow down, it's already too late. Customers start having a bad experience the moment things stop working as they should.

For us, we don't want our clients to have to worry about calling us to tell us they're having a sale or a new collection launch. With Shopify, all those little niggly worries - "what if we get 100, 1,000 or 10,000 people on the site at once?" - are gone. Now, our clients can focus on making the sale or launch as good as it can possibly be, and we can be alongside them with that same focus.

Shopify has a monthly fee that covers the usage of their large cloud infrastructure. Whether you're on the $29 a month plan or the $2,000 a month Shopify Plus plan, your site will always work, no matter the traffic.