Insights
Magento Hosting on AWS vs Managed UK Hosting: An Honest Comparison
Magento hosting on AWS gives you building blocks, and you run them. A managed UK host runs the server and the Magento stack for you, at a fixed monthly price. AWS suits stores that need elastic scaling and have people to operate it; managed hosting suits stores that want predictable costs and the work done for them. Below, we price a typical highly available Magento setup on AWS in London from AWS's own published rates, and set out who does what.
How Magento runs on AWS
AWS publishes a reference architecture for running Magento Open Source or Adobe Commerce on its services (AWS reference architecture, published 25 April 2022). In outline:
- Route 53 handles DNS.
- AWS WAF "helps protect Magento from common web exploits".
- CloudFront is the content delivery network.
- An Application Load Balancer sends traffic to Varnish servers in an Auto Scaling group across several Availability Zones.
- A second, internal load balancer sends traffic on to the Magento servers on EC2, also in an Auto Scaling group that "provides high availability and dynamic scaling".
- Amazon OpenSearch Service runs catalogue search.
- ElastiCache holds sessions and caches.
- Aurora is the database, where "Multi-AZ deployments provide high availability".
- EFS shares files such as media between the servers.
Adobe supports these managed services. Its on-premises requirements for 2.4.9 and 2.4.8 list Aurora MySQL, S3, Amazon MQ for message queues, ElastiCache ("Valkey 8 is available") and OpenSearch Service 3.1 or later (Adobe system requirements, checked 11 October 2026). An older AWS whitepaper on Magento is marked "for historical reference only" and describes out-of-date versions, so use the diagram and Adobe's current table instead.
What Magento AWS hosting costs in London
AWS prices each service separately, so the honest way to answer "what does Magento on AWS cost?" is to price a real configuration. The example below mirrors AWS's own diagram at a modest size, with two of everything for high availability. It is an illustration, not a sizing recommendation: use our Magento server sizing guide and Adobe's hardware guidance to size your own store.
Method: on-demand prices in US dollars for the Europe (London) region, eu-west-2, from AWS's public price list files, priced 11 October 2026. AWS's calculator assumes "730 hours in a month" (AWS calculator assumptions). Quantities marked "assumed" are illustrative; change them to match your store.
| Line | Calculation (illustrative, on-demand, London, priced 11 October 2026) | $ a month |
|---|---|---|
| Web servers: 2 x EC2 m7i.xlarge (4 vCPU, 16 GiB) | 2 x $0.2331 an hour x 730 | 340.33 |
| Varnish servers: 2 x EC2 m7g.large (2 vCPU, 8 GiB) | 2 x $0.0944 an hour x 730 | 137.82 |
| Two load balancers (external and internal) | 2 x $0.02646 an hour x 730 | 38.63 |
| Load balancer capacity: assumed 2 units each | 4 x $0.0084 an hour x 730 | 24.53 |
| Aurora MySQL: writer and reader, db.r7g.large | 2 x $0.323 an hour x 730 | 471.58 |
| Aurora storage: assumed 50 GB | 50 x $0.10 a GB-month | 5.00 |
| Aurora I/O: assumed 200 million requests | 200 x $0.20 per million | 40.00 |
| ElastiCache Valkey: 2 x cache.m7g.large | 2 x $0.1456 an hour x 730 | 212.58 |
| OpenSearch Service: 2 x m7g.large.search | 2 x $0.157 an hour x 730 | 229.22 |
| OpenSearch storage: assumed 2 x 20 GB | 40 x $0.1415 a GB-month | 5.66 |
| Server disks: assumed 4 x 30 GB | 120 x $0.0928 a GB-month | 11.14 |
| Disk snapshots: assumed 120 GB | 120 x $0.053 a GB-month | 6.36 |
| Shared media on EFS: assumed 50 GB | 50 x $0.33 a GB-month | 16.50 |
| Two NAT gateways, one per Availability Zone | 2 x $0.05 an hour x 730 | 73.00 |
| NAT data: assumed 50 GB | 50 x $0.05 a GB | 2.50 |
| Public IPv4 addresses: assumed 4 | 4 x $0.005 an hour x 730 | 14.60 |
| CloudFront flat-rate Business plan, including CDN, WAF, DDoS protection and DNS | flat monthly price | 200.00 |
| Infrastructure subtotal | 1,829.44 | |
| AWS Business Support+ | greater of $29 a month or 9% of charges up to $10K | 164.65 |
| Total before VAT | 1,994.09 | |
| UK VAT at 20% | 398.82 | |
| Total including VAT | 2,392.91 |
That is around a dozen separately billed AWS services for one store. At the Bank of England's latest published rate when we priced this, $1.3226 to the pound on 8 October 2026 (Bank of England database, checked 11 October 2026), the total before VAT is about £1,508 a month, or about £18,100 a year. AWS bills UK accounts through AWS Europe UK Branch, which "charges VAT on service charges incurred", at 20% whether or not you add a VAT number (AWS UK tax help; AWS VAT rates).
What changes the number:
- Commitment discounts. Compute Savings Plans cut compute costs "by up to 66%", and EC2 Instance Savings Plans give "savings up to 72%", on one- or three-year terms (AWS Savings Plans). In this example, those apply to the $478.15 of EC2.
- Scaling. Auto Scaling adds servers at peak, and each extra m7i.xlarge costs $0.2331 an hour (illustrative, on-demand, London, priced 11 October 2026).
- The content delivery choice. CloudFront's flat-rate plans have "no overage charges", from $15 a month for the Pro plan to $200 for Business (CloudFront pricing, priced 11 October 2026). Pay-as-you-go delivery costs $0.085 a GB for the first 10 TB in Europe, with AWS WAF billed separately.
- Message queues. Amazon MQ for RabbitMQ is optional and adds $230.83 a month for a single broker (illustrative, on-demand, London, priced 11 October 2026).
What is not included: a staging environment, extra monitoring and logs, outbound email, Magento itself (Magento Open Source is free), and the engineering time to build and run all of it. We have not put a figure on that time, because we found no reliable source for one.
Adobe Commerce Cloud is a different thing
Adobe Commerce on Cloud Infrastructure is Adobe's own platform. It "replicates each Pro project on three separate AWS or Azure Availability Zones", and the production environment "has three virtual machines (VMs) behind an Elastic Load Balancer" (Adobe Pro architecture). Staging includes Fastly CDN and New Relic, and Adobe's web application firewall "is available on production environments only" (Adobe Fastly WAF).
It needs an Adobe Commerce licence, and Adobe does not publish prices: its pricing page offers only "customized pricing" (Adobe Commerce pricing). Version deadlines also apply. Adobe's lifecycle policy sets 1 June 2027 for 2.4.4 and 2.4.5, and 1 June 2028 for 2.4.6 and 2.4.7, and says that from 1 June 2027 it may suspend traffic to Cloud environments on unsupported versions (Adobe lifecycle policy). See Magento end of life dates for the full table.
EveryHost is not Adobe Commerce Cloud. We host Magento Open Source on our own servers.
Who does the work
AWS's shared responsibility model puts the line at the operating system. AWS protects "the infrastructure that runs all of the services", and the customer handles "management of the guest operating system (including updates and security patches)", "any application software or utilities installed by the customer", and the firewall rules (AWS shared responsibility). AWS's Magento guidance puts it plainly: once deployed, "you are responsible for managing the deployment going forward including monitoring, patching, and upgrading" (AWS whitepaper).
| Task | Self-managed AWS | EveryHost managed hosting |
|---|---|---|
| Operating system patching | You | Us: server-level patches, PHP updates and security hardening |
| Magento security patches | You or your agency | Applied in staging first, then coordinated with your team |
| Stack configuration | You, though managed services remove some of it | Us: nginx, Varnish, Redis or Valkey, OpenSearch and PHP-FPM |
| Scaling | Auto Scaling, which you design and tune | Fixed server capacity: resize, or move up a plan |
| Monitoring | You configure it | Ours, with a 99.5% uptime SLA |
| Database backups | Aurora's are continuous, with retention from 1 to 35 days (default one day) | On-server backups, with restores by our engineers; Bastion off-site add-on |
| Security monitoring | You choose and run it | Sentinel on every plan: Sentinel Plus on Managed VPS, Sentinel Pro on dedicated and high availability. It is not a web application firewall; for an edge WAF or CDN, we recommend Cloudflare alongside it |
| Support | AWS Support covers AWS services | 24/7 UK support by ticket, included with hosting |
| Billing | Usage-based, in dollars, plus 20% VAT | Fixed monthly, in pounds, plus VAT |
Aurora backup source: AWS Aurora backups. On support, AWS's free Basic tier offers customer service and documentation, and technical support with a response "< 1 hour" for a production system down starts with Business Support+ (AWS Support plans). On payments, AWS "is certified as a PCI DSS Level 1 Service Provider", but "Customers must manage their own PCI DSS compliance certification" (AWS PCI FAQ).
Managed hosting on AWS: the middle option
You do not have to choose between running AWS yourself and leaving AWS. Some Magento hosting companies run their service on AWS and manage it for you, in your account or theirs, and AWS Marketplace lists managed Magento hosting sellers. This keeps AWS's scaling and services while handing the operating work to a specialist. Compare them the same way: who patches Magento, who answers at night, and what the monthly bill includes.
When AWS is the right choice
AWS, run by you or by a specialist, tends to suit stores that:
- have in-house or contracted AWS skills, and want to own the architecture;
- need elastic, multi-zone scaling for very spiky traffic, using Auto Scaling and Multi-AZ Aurora;
- already have AWS commitments or Savings Plans, or other workloads there;
- want managed building blocks such as Aurora, ElastiCache and OpenSearch, and are happy to pay per component;
- need regions beyond the UK, or global edge delivery, in one account.
When managed UK hosting is the better fit
A managed UK server tends to suit stores that:
- have no in-house operations team, and want the operating system, stack and patching handled, with UK Magento engineers working on support tickets 24/7;
- have predictable traffic that a right-sized server handles, and prefer a fixed monthly price in pounds;
- want one UK supplier for hosting, the Magento stack and support, rather than AWS plus an agency plus a DevOps contractor;
- would rather run one server or a small cluster than around a dozen separately billed services.
Our options are a managed Magento VPS, a Magento dedicated server and high availability Magento hosting, all in our London data centre with a 99.5% uptime SLA. See plans and prices for what each includes.
Where "Magento cloud hosting" fits
"Magento cloud hosting" can mean Adobe's own cloud products, or Magento running on cloud servers such as AWS. If you are weighing virtual cloud servers against physical hardware, our page on Magento cloud hosting covers that comparison.
Like-for-like comparison
Compare the AWS example with a high availability plan, not a single server, because the AWS example is spread across several Availability Zones.
| Self-managed AWS (London) | Adobe Commerce on Cloud | EveryHost managed hosting | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it is | AWS services in your own account | Adobe's platform on AWS or Azure | Managed servers in our London data centre |
| Edition | Magento Open Source or Adobe Commerce | Adobe Commerce only | Magento Open Source, or Adobe Commerce on your own licence as self-managed hosting |
| Price model | Usage-based, in dollars, plus 20% VAT | Quote only | Fixed monthly, in pounds, plus VAT |
| Example price | About $1,994 a month before VAT for the illustrative setup above, excluding people | Not published | High availability from £799 a month + VAT: a multi-node web tier with high-availability database options, built to order |
| Operating system patching | You | Adobe, for the platform | Us |
| Magento patches | You or your agency | You or your agency | Applied in staging first, then coordinated with your team |
| High availability | Multi-AZ if you build it | Three Availability Zones on Pro | High availability plans |
| Support | AWS Support for AWS services, from $29 a month | Adobe support | 24/7 UK support by ticket, included with hosting |
Our dedicated servers start at £249 a month + VAT, but a single dedicated server is not highly available, so it is not a fair comparison with the multi-AZ AWS figure. And remember that the AWS figure excludes the people who run it, while a managed plan includes the management.
Related reading
For what any Magento server needs, see Magento hosting. If you are moving off AWS, our free Magento migration covers host moves, and if you are still on Magento 1, see Magento 2 migration. For patching and upgrades, see Magento upgrades and security patching, and for ongoing help, Magento support and maintenance. Our Magento hosting UK home page has everything else.
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