Hosting / SLA, Adobe Commerce Cloud vs Shopify managed?
Both are managed, but with very different control profiles.
Shopify Plus (managed SaaS):
- 99.99% uptime SLA, contractually backed
- Auto-scaling for Black Friday / Cyber Monday peaks, handled by Shopify, no capacity planning needed
- Zero DevOps work, no patch schedule, no PHP version pinning, no infra monitoring
- Trade: you can’t pin versions. Major checkout / admin changes are pushed to all stores simultaneously. If Shopify deprecates a feature you depend on (Linkpop, parts of Audiences, etc.) it disappears with limited notice.
- Status page transparency, dedicated Plus SRE escalation
- 99.9% standard SLA, 99.99% on the Pro infrastructure tier
- Managed but configurable, pin Magento version, schedule upgrades, choose PHP version within supported window
- Three-tier infra: integration / staging / production, all auto-deployed via Git
- Built on AWS (East / West / EU regions), Fastly CDN included, ECE-Tools for orchestration
- Trade: ~$50-80k/yr for the infra alone (separate from the Adobe Commerce license tier). Managed but you still own deployment-time issues, bad code goes live, you debug it.
- Cloudflare Magento Edge + on-edge B2B caching available as add-ons
If you self-host AC (skip Adobe Commerce Cloud): hosting on AWS / Hetzner / Cloudways runs $400-3k/mo for $50M-scale infra. You own all DevOps. Need either a competent in-house team or a $3-10k/mo managed-Magento retainer. Magento security patches must apply within 30 days or you risk Magecart-class breaches.
Verdict: Plus wins on operational simplicity. Adobe Commerce Cloud wins on configurability (pin versions, control rollouts) but at higher cost. Self-hosted AC wins on cost flexibility but trades operational responsibility.