Top 5 Reasons why Shopify’s Architecture is More Scalable than Magento

Both Shopify and Magento are known for their abilities to facilitate the development of remarkable eCommerce websites. However, when it comes to scalability, Shopify’s architecture offers several distinct advantages over Magento. The strength lies in its managed hosting and performance optimization, making it a go-to solution for businesses looking to expand their online presence.

In contrast, Magento’s architecture often necessitates businesses to manage their hosting arrangements, which can be complex and resource-intensive. Hence, by choosing Shopify over Magento, businesses can streamline their eCommerce operations and leverage the scalability benefits with superior performance.

Read on to discover the key factors that make Shopify’s architecture the most preferable choice for scalability over Magento.

Reasons why Shopify has an edge over Magento in terms of scalability

Managed hosting infrastructure

Shopify provides a fully managed hosting infrastructure, which means businesses are not concerned with server maintenance or performance optimization. This hands-off approach simplifies scalability. This not only reduces the complexities of server management but also ensures that eCommerce websites are capable of handling scaling needs without major manual adjustments.

Advantages

• Managed hosting usually includes automated backup systems. It ensures that your data is regularly backed up and can be restored in case of data loss or other issues.
• With managed hosting, Shopify takes care of all the technical aspects of hosting your eCommerce website. This includes server setup, software updates, security patches, and routine maintenance. It lets store owners focus on running their businesses rather than managing servers and infrastructure.

How is it beneficial over Magento?

Magento is a self-hosted platform that requires businesses to manage their hosting arrangements, including choosing a hosting provider and setting up or configuring servers. 

Unlike Shopify’s managed infrastructure, which is designed to automatically scale resources as needed, Magento requires more manual intervention, including upgrading hardware and configuring servers to accommodate traffic spikes. This added responsibility of server management might require businesses to avail technical expertise by hiring a Magento developer.

Cloud-based architecture

One of the major advantages of cloud-based architecture is scalability. It lets organizations easily adjust their resources to match demand, whether it’s a sudden spike in user activity or a need for additional storage.

Shopify’s architecture is primarily cloud-based, which provides flexibility, scalability, and reliability for its users. This eCommerce platform’s infrastructure is built on top of cloud computing platforms like Amazon Web Services (AWS), making it easier to effortlessly adjust resources according to user demand.

Advantages

• The cloud-based Shopify infrastructure simplifies the management tasks. It allows easy automation of processes like monitoring and streamlining operations.
• Cloud infrastructure typically includes built-in disaster recovery capabilities, reducing the risk of data loss. This also makes it possible to replicate data and resources across multiple data centers.

How is it beneficial over Magento?

Only the “Magento Commerce Cloud” version is cloud-based, otherwise, Magento is a self-hosted platform. Therefore, it wouldn’t be wrong to say that Magento is both self-hosted and cloud-hosted. 

Its self-hosted version (Magento open-source or Magento community edition) requires extensive technical skills to be set up and managed. One should have expertise in server management to perform scaling with Magento. Further, they can also hire a Magento expert to scale an online store powered by Magento. Nevertheless, this eCommerce platform offers greater flexibility and control, making it the best fit for larger enterprises with complex requirements. 

Shopify’s CDN for distributed servers

CDN (content delivery network) is a distributed network of servers located in various geographical locations. These servers work together to deliver web content like images and scripts to users more efficiently. 

Shopify incorporates a CDN into its architecture that distributes the load and reduces the burden on a single server. This aids scalability by ensuring that, even during traffic spikes, the system can efficiently deliver content to a large number of users. Additionally, CDN makes your online store load quickly worldwide.

Advantages

• Shopify’s CDN caches and serves static assets like images and stylesheets that reduce the time to load web pages, resulting in a faster user experience.
• CDNs minimize network latency by delivering content from servers located closer to the end-user. This reduction in latency leads to quicker data retrieval and faster rendering of web pages.

How is it beneficial over Magento?

In Magento, users can choose their CDN providers or set up their CDN configurations. The scalability of Magento’s CDN depends on the CDN provider chosen by the user. Some CDN providers offer scalable solutions that can handle traffic spikes and growing demand, while others may have limitations.

On the other hand, Shopify’s CDN is an integral part of its fully hosted platform, designed to scale seamlessly and efficiently to meet user needs. Conversely, Magento users have more flexibility in choosing their CDN providers and configurations, but the scalability depends on their choice and ability to manage it effectively.

Load balancing

Shopify uses load balancing to distribute traffic across multiple servers. It helps improve performance and reliability and is also used to scale Shopify stores for handling high traffic volumes. 

Additionally, it ensures that no single server becomes overwhelmed during traffic spikes. If one server experiences issues or becomes overloaded, traffic is automatically redirected to healthy servers, minimizing downtime.

Advantages

• Load balancing can also distribute traffic to servers in different geographical locations. This feature is particularly useful for businesses with a global user base.
• Load balancing ensures maintaining continuous operations, even during routine maintenance activities. This will be beneficial in rolling updates and maintenance, allowing servers to be patched without causing interruptions.

How is it beneficial over Magento?

Magento does not have built-in load balancing. Businesses that use Magento need to set up and manage their load balancing, which can be complex and expensive. This makes Magento stores difficult to scale. Additionally, it requires technical expertise, which may necessitate hiring a Magento expert to achieve a similar level of scalability that Shopify has. 

Architecture supporting multiple users (multi-tenancy)

Shopify’s architecture is designed to support multiple users and lets them collaborate and work within the same eCommerce environment. These users can include administrators, content creators, marketers, and developers. Each user is provided with specific roles and permissions, ensuring controlled access to the system.

With the growing business requirements, it is essential to clearly define the roles of different team members managing various aspects of the store. This streamlined collaboration accelerates the development and growth of the eCommerce site.

Advantages

• With multi-tenancy, resources are shared across tenants, which maximizes resource utilization. This means resources like server capacity, storage, and bandwidth will be allocated dynamically as per the user’s needs. It reduces the wastage of resources and ensures optimal performance.
• Multi-tenant architecture also leads to cost-effectiveness as it eliminates the need to maintain separate infrastructure for each user.
• With a single codebase and shared infrastructure, new features and updates can be deployed rapidly. This will help keep the platform up-to-date.

How is it beneficial over Magento?

Magento is a single-tenant architecture. This means that each Magento store has its dedicated infrastructure, making it difficult to scale Magento stores, especially for larger businesses.

On the other hand, Shopify’s auto-scaling feature is an integral part of its architecture, designed to ensure that eCommerce websites can seamlessly handle variations in traffic and demand without manual intervention.

Conclusion

Overall, Shopify’s architecture sets it apart from Magento in terms of scalability. The five reasons discussed above collectively contribute to Shopify’s reputation as a scalable eCommerce platform. It is the perfect choice for businesses seeking flexibility and looking to scale their online presence in this ever-evolving digital landscape. 
Although it is a user-friendly platform, you will still need technical knowledge to work with Shopify or scale your online store. So, if you lack tech-savvy resources, the best alternative would be to hire a Shopify developer for scaling purposes or a Shopify development company to develop an online store from scratch.