Mautic Community
Hosting

Mautic is the most powerful self-hosted marketing automation platform that exists, and it\'s also the most resource-hungry application I host with any regularity. Both of those things are true, and people thinking about Mautic need to understand both before they install it.

The capability is genuine. I\'ve seen Mautic running multi-step nurture campaigns, deep behavioural segmentation, scoring, lead handoff to Salesforce, A/B testing on subject lines, and webhook integrations with marketing analytics platforms. For a marketing team that wants HubSpot Marketing Hub Professional capability without the £700-£3,000/mo HubSpot bill, Mautic is the most credible answer.

"Mautic in production needs a cloud server. I won\'t put a paying customer on shared hosting for Mautic, even if they ask. Background workers, large database, real-time campaign processing, and high-volume email sending need real resources. Trying to save £80 a month on hosting will cost you a thousand in deliverability problems."

Mark McNeece, Founder, 365i Hosting

Let me explain why. Mautic\'s data model is designed for a real CRM scale. A marketing automation platform with 50,000 contacts isn\'t big; that\'s a small B2B audience. With 50,000 contacts, even a moderately segmented database produces millions of rows in the lead-tracking, page-hit, and email-stat tables. Background workers are constantly processing campaign decisions, segment recalculations, and email queue items. The database is doing real work, often more than the public-facing website.

On our managed cloud servers from £9.99/mo (and realistically £19.99/mo or above for serious use), Mautic gets PHP-FPM tuned for the workload, supervisor managing the queue workers (which need to keep running 24/7), Redis for cache and session storage, and dedicated CPU and RAM that doesn\'t share with other accounts. We can also configure SES, Postmark, or SendGrid for outbound mail with proper SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records on your domain.

For evaluation and testing, Mautic on shared hosting is fine. You can install it through the one-click installer, kick the tyres, build a campaign, and see if it fits your needs. What I don\'t recommend is moving from "kicking the tyres" to "this is our production marketing platform" without upgrading the hosting first. We\'ve had clients who pushed Mautic on shared hosting into production and run into queue worker failures, slow segment rebuilds, and email deliverability issues during their first big send. All of those are infrastructure problems, not Mautic problems.

The migration path we use is: install on shared for evaluation, migrate to a managed cloud server before going live, monitor for the first month, and adjust queue worker count and PHP-FPM settings based on actual load. We\'ve had Mautic installs handle a million contacts on a single £39.99/mo cloud server with proper tuning. We\'ve also had clients who only had 5,000 contacts but had complex campaigns that needed cloud anyway because the worker workload was high.

The other thing worth flagging is email deliverability. Self-hosted Mautic sending through your own SMTP server is a deliverability nightmare. Use a transactional email provider, configure SPF, DKIM, and DMARC properly on your sending domain, warm up new domains slowly, and monitor reputation. We help with all of this as part of cloud onboarding, and it\'s the difference between Mautic being a great platform and being a frustrating one.