Magento 2 was officially released on November 17, 2015 for general availability. It had a short merchant beta period that helped get the product ready for the masses.

Magento 2 is a new ecommerce application, not just an update of Magento 1. Re-written from the ground up, it incorporates modern architecture and developer friendly technologies. We fully support Magento 2 in both our shared and VPS / Managed server environments. A list of features and fixes for Magento 2 may be found on the Magento website.

Magento 2 requirements

We have updated our environments to be Magento 2 compliant. From upgrading PHP and MySQL, to enabling features and settings to get the most out of Magento 2, LexiConn fully supports Magento 2.

Out of the box, Magento 2 has a built-in Full Page Cache system. This works in any environment, including shared hosting. For those merchants wanting to use Magento 2’s Varnish integration, this is supported in our fully managed VPS and fully managed dedicated server offerings.

We also can provide PHP 7 support for an even faster environment, as Magento 2 now works with PHP 7 out of the box.

Migrating from Magento 1 to Magento 2

Unfortunately, there is no seamless migration to go from Magento 1 to Magento 2. Because it’s a new product, existing themes and extensions cannot be ported from version 1 to 2. It requires that you re-work these themes and extensions to be Magento 2 compatible. Many extension providers have Magento 2 compatible versions out now, and many more are soon to be released.

Magento does provide a Data Migration Tool to migrate data from a Magento 1 store to version 2. It is a bit involved to successfully migrate this data.

This is something to consider if you have a Magento 1 store in use currently.

Magento 2 demos available

We have 2 demos you can try out as a customer:

Magento 2.0 shared hosting demo store – This store runs on one of our shared servers, and makes use of Magento’s built-in caching. You can see how quick each page loads.

Magento 2.0 VPS demo store – This demo store runs on one of our VPS servers, and uses Varnish as its caching solution. It’s quite snappy out of the box!

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If you have any questions about Magento 2, don’t hesitate to ask us. Magento 2 will continue to improve as updates will be released on a regular basis. We’re excited for what the future has in store for Magento 2!