| Rank on this site | 3 of 8 (see the ranking) |
| Headquarters | Manchester, United Kingdom |
| Founded | 2008 |
| Website | sonassi.com |
| Hyvä tier | Not listed on hyva.io/partners (hyva.io) |
| Best for | Choose Sonassi when the codebase is healthy, cold-cache response time is the whole problem, and you want a Magento-only host with a stated 1-hour response time and support tiers priced per server. |
| Not for | Not for a store that needs code or storefront work; its site states it stopped building Magento stores in 2015, and hyva.io does not list it. |
| Pricing as stated | Hosting is priced per server on a build-a-server page without list prices. Support tiers on sonassi.com/plans: Standard included, Enhanced at £80 a month per server, Intensive at £150 a month per server. |
What the published record shows
Sonassi states on its site that it was founded in 2008 and is based on the third floor of 6 Archway, Manchester. The defining statement on its homepage is that in 2015 it made the commitment to stop building Magento stores and fully dedicate itself to Magento hosting, which is why it appears here as a server-tier specialist rather than a development agency. It does not appear on hyva.io/partners and claims no Adobe or Hyvä tier. No team size is stated, and no Clutch profile was found for it.
The product is MageStack, which the site describes as an operating system with container isolation and scalability, full management with root access, high availability storage, power and network, a PCI compliant environment, managed on-site and off-site backups and free SMS and email site monitoring included as standard. A June 2018 post on its blog sets out the architecture as role-based containers: load balancer with WAF, caching and SSL termination, web, database with memory cache stores, mail, search, monitoring, queue and access. It describes overflow servers for horizontal scaling that can come up within a 2.5-minute window and run for as little as 1 hour, and states that each customer gets a private network segment, dedicated firewall policies and dedicated underlying servers. Regions are stated as UK, US and Asia Pacific.
Terms are on the plans page. Standard support is included with hosting and states a 99.95% uptime SLA, 4-hour hardware replacement, 24/7 emergency support and a 1-hour response time. Enhanced support is £80 a month per server and adds store monitoring with engineer corrective action and quarterly server and store performance audits. Intensive is £150 a month per server and adds emergency development support for critical Magento issues. Server pricing itself is configured on a build-a-server page with no list price. Its July 2026 post describes optimization workshops that prepare a major deployment for MageStack, with no numbers.
The technical writing is older but specific. The Varnish debugging post, published in November 2019 and updated in August 2022, states that a Varnish hit is approximately 80 milliseconds on a command-line check, recommends reading the MageStack-Cache headers instead, and states that one block with cacheable="false" disables the cache for the entire page type, with a code change to dump the offending blocks. On GitHub the organization shows 22 repositories, including magestack-varnish, described as a MageStack Varnish module for Magento and last updated in November 2017, and magestack-scripts, last updated in January 2021.
On the six criteria Sonassi scores full on hosting layer control, high on backend depth and published terms, moderate on open engineering material because of the repository dates, nothing on Hyvä tier, and low on published results, because its homepage's statement that every migrated store improved in speed carries no figure. That places it third, behind MGT-Commerce, whose guides are current and carry numbers, and ahead of the development agencies for any store whose problem is the server.
Evidence used for this profile
- Founded 2008 in Manchester; in 2015 it made the commitment to stop building Magento stores and fully dedicate itself to Magento hosting; low latency UK, US and Asia Pacific hosting sonassi.com
- Plans: 99.95% uptime SLA, 4-hour hardware replacement, 24/7 emergency support and 1-hour response time as standard; Enhanced £80 a month per server with quarterly performance audits; Intensive £150 a month per server sonassi.com
- MageStack architecture post, June 2018: eight container roles; overflow capacity within a 2.5-minute window that can run for as little as 1 hour; dedicated network segment and servers per customer sonassi.com
- Varnish debugging post, November 2019, updated August 2022: a Varnish hit is approximately 80 milliseconds; one cacheable="false" block disables the cache for the entire page type sonassi.com
- GitHub: 22 repositories including magestack-varnish (5 stars, updated November 2017) and magestack-scripts (7 stars, updated January 2021) GitHub
Questions people ask about Sonassi
- Does Sonassi still do Magento development?
- No. Its site states that in 2015 it made the commitment to stop building Magento stores and fully dedicate itself to Magento hosting. Its July 2026 post describes optimization workshops that prepare a deployment for MageStack, and its Intensive support tier includes emergency development support for critical issues, but code and storefront work is not a service it sells.
- What does Sonassi's hosting cost?
- Server pricing is built per configuration on its pricing page, with no list price shown. What is listed is the support layer, with Standard included with hosting, Enhanced at £80 a month per server with store monitoring and quarterly performance audits, and Intensive at £150 a month per server with emergency development support. A quote for the servers themselves comes from the build-a-server page.
- Where are Sonassi's servers?
- Its site states low latency UK, US and Asia Pacific hosting, and its 2018 MageStack architecture post describes each customer getting a private network segment, dedicated firewall policies and dedicated underlying servers. The company itself is at 6 Archway, Manchester, per its site. Which region a store lands in is a contract question that the public page does not settle.
- Is Sonassi a Hyvä partner?
- No. It does not appear on hyva.io/partners, and its site publishes no theme or frontend work, consistent with its statement that it has run hosting only since 2015. A merchant whose problem is in the browser lane needs one of the Hyvä partners on this page; a merchant whose problem is a slow cache miss on a healthy store is in the right place.
Sonassi did not contribute to or review this profile. Corrections: editorial policy.