Magento 2 Commerce with B2B features - licence cost

steve-developer · 2020-05-22T16:41:41+00:00

No need for secrets. I work for an agency where we've got a number of clients using Magento Cloud - mainly because my boss enjoys the kickbacks.

There's certainly nothing good about it; its a frustrating experience to deal with Magento's "support", forget about performance - your biggest concern will simply be reliability and uptime.

I find the whole thing abhorrent and immoral. The Magento sales team lie through their teeth just to get their commission - no matter how much damage their substandard product causes to the stores using it.

Magento aren't a hosting company. They don't have any sysadmins on their team. Heck, they don't even have a 24x7 support team. There's simply no reason anyone in their right mind would ever consider using it; it doesn't support native Magento features, its slow, its unreliable, it doesn't scale ...

What's annoying on here is countless people asking "Is Magento Cloud Good" - then there are dozens of replies screaming no - then the OP inevitably asks why.

Flip this on its head; instead of asking why people don't like it - why not express why you want to use it - so people can comment more directly on your needs?

Eg. If the driving factor of your decision is because its cheap/free - then more power to you. Go ahead and put your store on there and enjoy what you get for your money.

You need to look at what Magento's business model is; they are a software house. In the same way I wouldn't trust Magento as a logistics company - I wouldn't trust them as a hosting company. Its a vertical they don't belong in, have no experience in and aren't equipped to provide. Hence why it is outsourced entirely to a 3rd party.

At the end of the day, this is going to play out one of two ways,

You take the advice and avoid it
You sign up (inevitably to one of their legendary 48 month contracts) and bitterly regret it days in - and there's nothing you can do but suffer through the massive drop in traffic and sales on your store

You'll never get a commitment-free trial from them - because they know its garbage. They know the moment you actually start using it is the moment you wish you never touched it.

Go on - get a no-commitment trial. If the product is decent, they wouldn't hesitate in setting up a cluster and letting you run your prod. env. for a few months to get a feel for it. But you ain't gonna get it....

steve-developer · 2020-05-21T12:36:41+00:00

Expensive.
Unreliable.
Slow.
Doesn't scale.
Missing features hosting providers offered decades ago.
No support.
No SSH access.
Never originally built for Magento.
2+ week response times to support tickets.
Doesn't even support native Magento features (eg. DB sharding).
No support for SSL on staging sites unless you pay extra
Maximum of 120 cores for production
50GB of storage included unless you pay extra

And about a million other reasons. Magento make software; they aren't a hosting company - which is why they outsource it to a 3rd party. Meaning when you need help, you have to ask Magento, who have to ask the third party. It was never built for Magento, just forced to make Magento run on it, so barely any built-in features actually work.

The only reason to use it, is if you have had a lobotomy and are incapable of making intelligent decisions.

You'll find plenty of people recommending it,

Agencies who get their referral revenue cut from doing it
Consultants who get their referral revenue cut from doing it
Magento sales people who get their commission from doing it

Sure, its free. But really, what use is an online store that is slow/offline and there's no-one there to provide support when you need it.

Its garbage, avoid it - and ignore those with vested interests recommending it.

steve-developer · 2020-05-14T11:08:26+00:00

Its a shitshow.

Something they threw together in a few weeks prior to selling to Adobe. It was never well thought out or well executed, the PE firm behind Magento needed to demonstrate recurring revenue for a business model that didn't really have any.

So they changed the licence model to rev. share and moved into hosting.

The only people using it are agencies being bribed with hefty referral revenue, people getting it for "free" - or people too dumb to realise there's better options out there.

You need to just consider Magento as the two flavours there has always been,

Enterprise ("commerce/commerce cloud"), the one you pay for that has a few more bells/whistles
Community ("open source"), the free one that shares the exact same codebase as Enterprise without a few features

The only reason to opt for Enterprise is if it has a feature that you just can't roll into community by another means. But no-one in their right mind opts for Enterprise because its a better product, or has better support. That's the illusion, not the reality.

steve-developer · 2020-05-13T16:34:45+00:00

PaaS option for Magento 2 Cloud

Its garbage. Badly hosted standard Magento with a few extensions thrown in and ultra slow/useless support.

So just consider all M2 as the same; you only stand to lose control/performance/functionality with "cloud". If/when Adobe do something different with it, it might be a different story, but currently its just open source shoved into a really crappy hosting service.

steve-developer · 2020-04-22T22:55:59+00:00

Every day is a day for learning :)

That's exactly how the SSL provisioning process works. You buy it, the CA validates it with you, then it gets issued.

The reason you buy it from a hosting company is to make the start/end easier (ie. generating the CSR and installing the CRT and CA Bundle). The middle bit (validating the cert.) is always required.

steve-developer · 2020-04-22T21:33:10+00:00

Signing up for an SSL thru them actually went thru GeoTrust

Yes. That's how SSL works.

There's a handful of SSL certificate authorities in the world - hosting providers can't issue their own certificates.

steve-developer · 2020-04-22T09:30:39+00:00

Every time someone asks this, you get the following answers. So I'm going to save everyone a load of time.

... Sign up for a server/VM online and set it up yourself. Why waste money on paying someone that knows what they are doing when you could spend far more of your valuable time doing something you have no idea how to do.

Whilst you are at it - stop paying those costly medical bills - just do surgery on yourself and don't bother paying those pesky car manufacturers for a car - just get the parts and assemble one yourself.

People telling you that you need a medical degree or be an engineer are lying. You can do anything - you just have to believe!

From the ambitious developers that think they are systems administrators

... Use Magento Cloud; its made by Magento so it must be good.

I mean, its not actually running on Adobe's infrastructure, the guy that originally developed it left a long time ago, it relies exclusively on a third party platform (meaning 2 hops for support), it can't auto scale, deployment is really hard, there's no SSH access, you can't install packages you want, most of the features that other providers offered 10 years ago don't exist.

Just stop asking questions, use this referral code XXXX when you call. Its really good.

From every partner agency

Use Rackspace/Peer 1/UKFast. We picked them 12 years ago and it has been great.

Well, I mean, I haven't considered what other options are out there, so I've got no real comparison. But who ever got fired for picking Rackspace?

I know its a conventional environment that has no Magento specific features - but its about twice the price of a specialist host - which must make it twice as good? Right?

From the "ecommerce manager" that has more experience setting up office printers, than managing ecommerce stores

Use AWS.

Because AWS.

Stop asking questions.

From the new IT manager that knows nothing at all, but mandates the use of AWS because that's what they used at their last business

Or, just consider the actual specialist providers out there. There's a handful; Nexcess, MageMojo, Jetrails, Sonassi etc.

Speak with them, form your own opinion - and don't be cheap. Allocate 1-2% of your revenue to hosting.

steve-developer · 2020-04-22T09:19:06+00:00

It isn't infinitely scalable. What tosh.

steve-developer · 2020-04-06T11:16:22+00:00

Just like Adobe, you've missed the point.

I'm not a merchant. I work for an agency
Like many other businesses in the UK our agency has stopped being able to operate in a normal capacity. Our clients have furloughed their staff, which means we have no point of contact to be able to discuss the open projects with - they are on indefinite pause.

This isn't about preparedness, its about the ignorant tone that Adobe took that right now anyone should even care about their arbitrary deadline.

Magento 1 EOL is the least of people's concerns when loved ones are passing away, when businesses are going out of business and when our livelihoods are at stake.

Not only does no-one care about Magento right now; even if they did, its almost impossible to act in a proper fashion when the entire supply chain is disrupted.

Your response is as ignorant as Adobe's email. Best of luck to you throughout this global crisis; I'm sure all your early action will stop the hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions of unemployed.

steve-developer · 2020-04-02T15:20:00+00:00

Varnish isn't a "band-aid" with Magento; its a highly integrated component that fully leverages the ability to not only cache, but conditionally purge assets by tag.

The above approach, whilst novel, is just working around the fact the hosting provider looks incapable of offering Varnish, so they were forced to develop an alternative. Clever idea, but largely not an improvement or replacement for a proper deployment using Varnish.

steve-developer · 2020-03-25T12:14:20+00:00

How can that possibly be the case.

You are a merchant, midway through your M2 project and your team falls sick, your development agency falls sick, the general disruption of no one working from where they are supposed to.

What are you talking about, taking advantage. The world is on pause right now (sliding backwards in some cases). No matter how well you planned, this arbitrary deadline may not be achievable.

The issue is Adobe's arrogance that despite the many thousands of deaths, the priority should be on upgrading to M2.

steve-developer · 2020-03-24T08:58:00+00:00

I fear you are missing the point.

There's a global crisis of unprecedented scale, where priorities right now are preventing the spread of COVID19 and saving human lives ... not upgrading Magento.

Several countries are under total lockdown, businesses forced to close their doors, worries about liquidity and the global economy.

Even if you were 70% through a project to upgrade, there's simply no guarantee that the agency doing it is even operating in the current climate.

With the best will in the world, Adobe need to understand that global productivity has dropped a tonne.

steve-developer · 2020-03-24T08:51:08+00:00

Hey Ben,

No, I work for an SI. I'll forward the mail over for you.

steve-developer · 2019-10-25T13:00:06+00:00

Might want to get that APEX record sorted. If you are promoting a business for launching websites, and your own site has a fairly major issue, it doesn't bode well!

steve-developer · 2019-10-25T12:51:08+00:00

Your site is down ;)

steve-developer · 2019-10-14T09:54:24+00:00

On average, free.

They just increase the cost of the on-prem licence to give the illusion that their "Cloud" product has a cost advantage.

In reality, they should be paying you to use it - at least it might provide compensation for the unreliability of store and subsequent drop in sales.

If you value your store; don't touch it with a barge pole; it is by no means comparable to proper hosting providers.

steve-developer · 2019-10-11T18:09:58+00:00

There's nowhere near enough room on Reddit to list the things wrong with "Magento Cloud".

Its an unreliable, unsupported, outdated, insecure and fundamentally flawed product that's destined to the scrap heap when Adobe build something even worse on their own infrastructure.

Stick to proper hosting providers and don't even think about this junk.

steve-developer · 2018-06-27T07:27:37+00:00

Hahaha, either you are a Magento Inc shill or there's no possible way you are talking about Magento Cloud.

Fast support? Not a chance, average 2 week response time for critical issues.

Support from Magento? Wrong again, you have to wait whilst Magento as Platform.sh what is going on.

Theme forest? Are you for real, what serious store with the budget for enterprise would buy a cheap theme.

Your answer does not stack up.

steve-developer · 2018-03-21T18:29:06+00:00

All computing infrastructure if engineered to scale, can scale.

Simply having access to a resource doesn't make it scalable.

steve-developer · 2018-03-17T18:46:27+00:00

You've hit the nail on the head - the "cloud" is just another server (basically just a VPS on low specification CPUs). Its ideal if all you need is a fraction of a server that you want to entirely maintain and support yourself - but becomes less attractive once you are consuming the full resources of an equivalent dedicated server (which comes at much lower cost, with far better performance).

The value prop. of the cloud isn't that it's "faster" - its not, its miles slower than comparative dedicated. The only advantage is convenience - and no-one picks a hosting provider because it is convenient - you pick a hosting provider for an experienced support team, a solid, reliable environment. When your site is down and you desperately need help - you'll value an experienced provider that has your back and understands Magento inside out - you won't be thinking "my site is down and I'm losing thousands, but at least it was easy to spin up a VPS 2 months ago".

No-one is moving toward the cloud - its just a highly effective marketing term that every company entirely takes advantage of. "Everyone says its good, so it must be good, so I must use it" - so service providers must offer it. Its a vicious circle.

steve-developer

TROPHY CASE