Open Source or SaaS? This debate often falls short in the e-commerce world. What matters isn’t the platform itself, but how well the architecture and setup align with your business model. We’ll show you what really matters when making your choice.

Complex pricing logic, large shopping carts, and ERP integrations often push many B2B stores to their limits. In this article, you’ll learn how to measurably improve your conversion rates with Shopware 6 and the right hosting strategy.

With PHP 8.5, new language features and smaller improvements for debugging and operations are being introduced. We show what’s new, what actually makes a difference in day-to-day work, and when an update makes sense for online shops.

He creates an environment where knowledge is shared and collaboration thrives: Roman Siebert, Team Lead in Service at maxcluster.

Steer your performance marketing toward profit. Practical steps to scale efficiently with a profit-first approach - less risk, more return.

Traffic records are worthless if your shop comes to a standstill. The 2025 peak season will be a test of endurance—for systems, processes, and nerves. With stable infrastructure and clear monitoring, your shop will remain confident.

When hosting becomes a growth factor: With consistent quality assurance and 24/7 monitoring, maxcluster ensures that e-commerce shops remain stable through every peak phase.
 

Instead of repeatedly buying back the same customers at a high cost, you can bring them back for free with apps, push notifications, and smart loyalty programs. maxcluster provides the performance foundation for this.

Learn how to pick the best terms and conditions generator and hosting partner to keep your e-commerce shop legally protected, compliant, and ready to scale.
 

Since June 28, 2025, digital accessibility has been legally required in e-commerce. Find out what this means for your online shop – and how to implement the requirements successfully.

How companies will use AI and predictive analytics in 2025 to predict customer behavior in e-commerce, create personalized shopping experiences, and automate business processes.

You integrate new tools and improve the user experience—but are you also keeping an eye on data protection? Many GDPR pitfalls lurk in the details: in web tracking, plugins, or the transfer of payment data.

PCI DSS 4.0.1 is here – and it’s changing the rules for online shops. Make sure your systems are ready.

Those who do not focus on user centricity, AI comprehensibility, and technical performance today will lose relevance—and valuable traffic.

Online commerce is growing rapidly - and with it the risk of cyber attacks on payment data. PCI-DSS sets clear security standards to ward off these threats and protect customer trust. From March 31, 2025, compliance with the new requirements of PCI-DSS 4.0 will become even more important.

PHP 8.4 is here! The new version not only brings more performance and security, but also makes development more efficient. In this article, you will find out why the update is worthwhile and which new functions will make your work easier.

The company ECOPLAN E-Commerce GmbH and maxcluster have been partners for more than 10 years. It was time to talk to Sebastian Ehrling, authorized signatory/head of development, and Laura Raub, marketing and sales manager of the company, about topics other than hosting and co.

Black Friday and the entire festive season have established themselves as the most important events in the E-Commerce calendar. 2024 was a year of records: sales increases, groundbreaking trends and innovative solutions characterized this season.

Retire even though you still have a lot of desire to work? Udo decided against 100% leisure time and prefers to implement quality assurance at maxcluster.

Today in an interview: Nicole Mentzen, Head of Marketing at maxcluster. Nicole talks about her path to us, the most exciting projects and what makes a perfect working day for her.

Fraudulent activities are also on the rise in the digital world and pose enormous challenges for companies and private individuals. Artificial intelligence can effectively counter these threats by recognizing suspicious patterns at an early stage and actively preventing fraud.

Artificial intelligence is fundamentally transforming the way we shop online – from personalized recommendations to automated processes.

Have you always dreamed of doing an internship in marketing? Balsam had the opportunity to complete her internship at maxcluster.

If you already have an online store running on Shopware 5 and want to upgrade to the latest Shopware 6, you'll face several challenges.

Effective software lifecycle management (SLM) plays a crucial role in the security of e-commerce platforms and online stores, as it ensures that security measures are considered at every stage of software development and maintenance.

Welcome to our blog series dedicated entirely to the topic of Cyber Security for your online shop. We understand that you're working hard to provide your customers with the best and safest shopping experience. But how secure is your online shop, really?

With a touch of Cologne's zest for life and a healthy dose of anticipation, the doors to this year's Shopware Unconf in Cologne swung open. From March 23rd to 24th, creative minds from the world of e-commerce gathered there, ready to dive headfirst into a world without predefined topics.

In this article, we will present you with 10 practical tips that have already helped many marketing experts, agencies, and shop owners achieve their goals.

In 2024, data-driven decision-making has become indispensable. The dynamics of e-commerce are constantly changing, and data-based insights are the key to success - as mentioned, data is the new gold.

The migration from Shopware 5 to Shopware 6 is not just a technical step but also a strategic decision for the security and performance of your online shop. In our blog article "Shopware 6 Migration - Opportunities & Risks", we've already discussed the impending end of support for Shopware 5. Now is the time to shift our focus to a smooth transition.

Are you looking for the optimal host for a new project, or considering switching from your current host? We're here to help you navigate this process, providing key insights to aid in your decision-making.

For many companies, an online store is often the most important source of income. The biggest challenge: appearing ahead of the competition in the search algorithms. This can be hard to achieve - even for people with a lot of experience in search engine optimization.

The month of September was all about the first maxcluster partner day for us. After intensive planning, we were very much looking forward to spending two days with our partner agencies at our premises, listening to interesting presentations and exchanging ideas.

The reliable functionality of an online shop is indispensable for webshop operators. Especially the correct execution of cronjobs and scheduled tasks is essential to ensure smooth operation.

Deciding on a suitable hosting model is crucial for e-commerce traders. But which solution is the right choice? In this blog post, we compare the two hosting variants dedicated hosting and cloud computing based on scalability, security, control, data sovereignty and other factors.

Anyone searching for specific products or categories in an online shop wants to receive suitable search results within seconds. In this blog post we show how the full-text search engine OpenSearch can support this.

After the successful premiere last year, we again supported the Shopware Community UnConference 2023 as one of the main sponsors. What we experienced from 24 to 26 March in Cologne, we report in this review.

E-mails are the most frequently used form of communication in e-commerce. In this article, we look at the SPF, DKIM and DMARC frameworks. We show how they can contribute to secure and authenticated emailing.

2022 was a special year for maxcluster. 10 years have passed since its foundation and the company has evolved from a university spin-off to an important player in the German hosting industry.

Receiving requests, retrieving data and transferring it to the client: web servers make data from websites available on the net. But which web server solution fits which requirements? Here you can find out everything you need to know about web servers in e-commerce!

Black Friday, Black Week, Cyber Monday, Cyber Week: Both in e-commerce and in stationary trade, retailers lure their customers every year towards the end of November with discounts and offers. These tips will make planned campaign days a success for shop operators.

In e-commerce, headless commerce is the term for online shops whose frontend and backend function decoupled from each other. In this article we look at the background to this solution approach and the advantages and disadvantages of its use in e-commerce.

Changes to the Google algorithm, so-called core updates, can have positive and negative effects on the findability of online stores via the search engine. In this article we show what to consider in order to be well prepared.

Whether it's a large, dynamic online shop or a small blog with exclusively static content: In our blog series, operators of web applications of all kinds will find helpful tips, tools and tweaks on the topic of performance!

In e-commerce, the saying "time is money" is to be taken literally, because slow loading times can mean direct loss of sales. Even if there is often no financial connection with static content, a fast loading time is also of enormous importance here. The following performance tips can help!

The larger the online shop, the larger the number of integrated text and image files. This can have a negative impact on the shop's performance. The use of a content delivery network may offer a solution.

Hosting is one of the basic technologies of the internet and now has an incredible number of facets. In this article we give a basic overview of web hosting and take a closer look at the special features of e-commerce hosting.

When the term Open Source is mentioned, developers' hearts often beat faster. The concept of Open Source promises great creative opportunities and a lot of freedom on the code level.

The conversion rate is an important key figure for performance marketers and in e-commerce is often directly related to the sales of an online shop.

Good performance is the be-all and end-all of any online shop. A decisive factor here is the load time. If a shop loads too slowly, the user experience suffers considerably. This has a negative impact on the conversion rate and quickly leads to a loss of sales.

How does one actually come up with the idea of extending a support end? Carmen Bremen, co-founder of [Mage One](https://mage-one.com/), chats in this guest article and lets us take a look behind the scenes:

It cannot be emphasised often enough: Successful online shops not only offer an extensive, attractive range of products, but are also, above all, high-performing.

For a successful online shop, it is not enough if the products on offer are particularly beautiful, cheap or fancy. To appeal to customers and encourage them to buy, the user experience (UX) must also be right.

2020 - what a year. The last few months have held special challenges in store for everyone. Managing directors Sebastian Ringel and Alexander Wilhelm report on what these were for maxcluster in an interview.

The 26.11.2020 was circled in red in the calendars of many developers, because then the long-awaited version PHP 8.0 was released. What new features and improvements does the new version contain and how and when should you switch to PHP 8.0?

It is now a few weeks after the official end of support for Magento 1 and for most online shop operators little or nothing has changed since then. Nevertheless, many people are pointing out that there are many risks associated with the Magento 1 EOL.

PHP 7.4 was released at the end of November 2019 and is the last minor version before the release of PHP 8. What new features does PHP 7.4 bring? What are the advantages and when does it make sense to switch to PHP 7.4? We explore these questions in our article.

A functioning shop system is the basis for every online shop. And the choice of solutions is constantly increasing. So how should one make the right choice? This question is not only asked by new shop operators, but also by those whose shop has been on the market for some time in view of the EOL of Magento 1 at the end of June.

Today, anyone searching in an online shop or web application not only expects meaningful results immediately, but also support in the form of autocompletes or search suggestions.

We are constantly working to not only provide our customers with high-performance eCommerce hosting, but also to make the user experience as straightforward as possible. In our specially developed [Managed Center](https://demo.maxcluster.de/?_locale=en), our customers can not only install their tools and features with a few clicks, but also make extensive changes to the configuration of their cluster, their servers and services.

June is approaching in leaps and bounds, and with it the date that Magento fans have long refused to believe: Magento 1 EOL. But what does this date actually mean for all online shop operators whose shops run with Magento 1? And how should they prepare for this date? We explore these questions in an interview with Rico Neitzel, managing director of the advertising agency "Büro 71a" and co-founder of "Mage One".

The security of their online shops should be a high priority for operators, in addition to customer orientation and usability. We have the vision to support our customers in this and to offer them the best performing and most secure eCommerce hosting in Germany.

The e-commerce agency Mothership has launched its first Magento2 PWA shop, which we host. In the interview, you can find out what experiences the Mothership team has had with Magento's "PWA Studio", what pitfalls there were and how well the shop is performing now.

Our e-commerce stack consists of many web services, tools, functions and an optimised hosting architecture for online shops. Our experience with over 500 e-commerce customers is constantly flowing into the expansion and improvement of the stack. Online shops can be customised, configuration errors are avoided and configuration time is significantly reduced. Learn more about why maxcluster's e-commerce stack is like no other stack.

New Relic APM is the most comprehensive tool we present in this [blog series](https://maxcluster.de/en/blog/2017/04/identifying-bottlenecks-profiler-blogseries). The article describes how bottlenecks can be detected with New Relic APM and how online shops can be monitored efficiently.

In the first part of our [blog series](https://maxcluster.de/en/blog/2017/04/identifying-bottlenecks-profiler-blogseries) "Identifying bottlenecks with 3 efficient profiling tools", we present the application possibilities of Blackfire IO for online shops in detail.