The best eCommerce web hosting is absolutely essential for an online store. Without it, you stand to lose visitors and sales. With it, you can see happier customers, easier management, and a more successful business.
eCommerce hosting is the foundation of all online stores. Get it right and you're in business. You will be taking transactions so you need high levels of security, downtime has the potential to lose you money, and slow speeds will lose you customers. You need to think about creating the store and managing it too. Don't let this put you off though. These hosts make it easy.
These are the best eCommerce hosting solutions for complete beginners, those who are more versed in creating a web store, and those that already have a successful online shop.
We've also created a list of the best ecommerce platforms.
The best ecommerce hosting of 2024 in full:
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Best for beginners
Reasons to buy
- Clear selection for choosing a plan
- abundant storage space
- Simple setup
- Free Email
- Free SSL
- Free CDN
Reasons not to buy
- Tech savvy users can get more value for money elsewhere
- Larger stores will be better hosted elsewhere
If you're new to eCommerce hosting, Hostinger have you covered. For starters, they make it really easy to select an appropriate plan by giving you clear a indication on what they think the best hosting plan is for your site. For example, they say that their Business plan is suitable for online stores that have 100 product listings and 100 orders a month. Resource planning is one of the hardest parts of eCommerce hosting and Hostinger have already made that easy before you even buy anything.
The WooCommerce plans are managed which means that once your store is online they take care of updates. To get your store online, there is a simple onboarding process. Then, there is one click to install WooCommerce. After that you can select from a range of templates that you can easily customize.
For security you get daily backups, SSL, enhanced DDoS protection, firewall, Cloudflare protected nameservers, a malware scanner, and access management controls. Hostinger's eCommerce plans all support integration with PayPal and Stripe for online payments and you can enable manual payments for cash and bank transfers too. Then, when it comes to delivery, Hostinger have shipping partners that you can use to deliver globally and locally.
For speed and reliability you get NVMe storage, a global CDN, 99.9% uptime guarantee, a cache manager, and various other technical optimizations.
Hostinger have three levels of eCommerce hosting: Business, Cloud Startup, and Cloud Professional. These plans are suitable for online stores ranging from 100 listed items and deliveries a month to 2000 product listings and 1000 deliveries a month. The only major difference apart from the increasing levels of resources is that the AI tools are only available from the Cloud Startup plan upwards.
Although these plans are suitable for beginners, there are plenty of features that more tech savvy users will find useful too such as GIT access, and DNS management. Plus, Hostinger make some of the specifications that more tech savvy users will be looking for like the number of inodes, FTP accounts, and cronjobs, and PHP workers clear when selecting a plan.
Overall, Hostinger make eCommerce hosting easy and have all the features you need to start an online store or grow an existing one.
- Read our full Hostinger review
Best for medium sized stores
Reasons to buy
- Scalable cloud infrastructure
- Add collaborators
- Great reviews
- Free private DNS
- Staging + GIT
- White-label clients
Reasons not to buy
- Onboarding is a little more difficult for complete novices
- Very large stores would do better with a cloud-VPS from ScalaHosting
SiteGround sit between Hostinger and ScalaHosting (our recommendation for large stores) in terms of price point and offerings. The GoGeek plan supports 400,000 monthly visits, unmetered traffic, and an unlimited amount of websites. Although not entirely set up for beginners, site creation and set up is still pretty simple and if you already have a store you can migrate it to SiteGround for free.
You get exactly what you would expect from a service optimized for eCommerce. There are features to sell physical and digital goods to members and to create product variations and bundles. For transactions you can accept bank transfers, checks, PayPal, and cash on delivery out-of-the-box.
SiteGround provide a CDN and smart caching. For online stores, shopping carts can cause issues for dynamic caching. To solve this SiteGround can identify when items have been left in a cart and exclude them, helping to speed up your site.
SiteGround also have a vast array of security features. SSL is preinstalled from Let's Encrypt SSL allowing your customers to know that your site can be trusted. WooCommerce updates are handled by them freeing you up to focus on business. There is a staging tool to test changes you make before they go live and an Anti-bot system and firewall to protect you from malicious actors. There are also daily backups from which you can restore your online shop should the unexpected happen.
Another great thing about SiteGround is that they have a 100% renewable energy match and have won awards for their commitment to the environment. Their support also has great reviews so it's clear that SiteGround genuinely care about their customers and everyone else too which is nice.
For complete beginners that want to create a small store Hostinger can get you started for $13.99/mo after renewal, and for large stores ScalaHosting's mid range plans are around $100-$150/mo. SiteGround recommend their GoGeek plan for WooCommerce and it's $49.99/mo after renewal (the first 12 months are billed at $7.99/mo). This places SiteGround in the sweet spot between smaller online stores and larger eCommerce shops in terms of cost and resources.
- Read our full SiteGround review
Best for big shops
Reasons to buy
- Scalable cloud infrastructure
- Incredible reviews
- Anytime money back guarantee
- Guaranteed CPU, RAM, and Storage
- Staging, SSH, GIT & WP-CLI
- Subusers & Collaborators
- Private Nameservers (DNS)
Reasons not to buy
- If you don't do large scale sales promotions that drive large differences in peak and low traffic you can get better value from non-cloud hosts
- Support is great but you might be a little overwhelmed if you're a beginner or not be able to make the most of the tools
We recommend ScalaHosting for larger stores because small differences in hosting can have a larger impact on bigger stores. If a small percentage of customers from a small store leave because of speed, missing a small percentage isn't going to be noticed and the ROI of paying more for hosting might not be seen. For larger stores, a small percent of a large number can be a lot of money and paying $20 - $100 more on hosting is one of the best ROIs an online shop can make. Obviously it makes sense too for small stores to invest in hosting too but their needs are usually covered by the average hosting plans.
It especially makes more sense to use a cloud hosting provider like ScalaHosting if your sales promotions create large peaks in traffic. There's no point in directing people to your site if your store cannot handle the numbers.
ScalaHosting encourage you to use OpenLiteSpeed to run WooCommerce as they find it performs 5x better than nginx and 13x better than Apache when serving a cached WordPress site over HTTP/2. ScalaHosting's SPanel don't use cPanel but their own SPanel which is fully integrated with OpenLiteSpeed
As WordPress and WooCommerce make up the majority of sites they see the brunt of attacks from malicious actors. Thankfully, ScalaHosting developers have an advanced security suite specifically for eCommerce which mitigate a lot of the risks of running a WooCommerce store along with real-time malware protection, disaster recovery backups, 24/7 protective monitoring, and on demand security scans.
ScalaHosting experts will migrate your WooCommerce stores free of charge at a time you choose with zero downtime. Once you're with ScalaHosting, you get 24/7 support with a 15 min initial response time from tickets.
Studies from Akamai and Google themselves show that seconds can make the difference when it comes to sales. It's not just a case of people waiting too long and leaving. Having a slow loading page can leave a bad impression and not give users faith in your store. There is also the on ongoing debate on whether page speed will make your site rank higher in search results. While there are no definitive answers to this, better hosting has so many other advantages it doesn't really matter and might just be an added bonus.
- Read our full Scalahosting review
Best budget
Setting up an online store can seem complex and potentially expensive, but iPage shows it doesn't have to be that way. Even with the entry-level plan, iPage throws in an easy-to-use set of ecommerce features which can help you quickly build a simple shop.
Designing your store is as simple as it gets with iPage's template-based website builder. There's PayPal support for taking payments, integration with your choice of shopping cart (AgoraCart, OpenCart, OSCommerce, PrestaShop, TomatoCart, Zen Cart), a free domain for the first year, and 24/7 phone (toll-free in the US and UK) and chat support to handle any problems that might crop up.
This is very much a product for beginners and smaller sites, so there are some significant limits. In particular, the website builder only supports a maximum of six pages; that's fine for selling a handful of products from a small home business, but don't expect to be creating your own version of Amazon any time soon.
Still, at an incredibly low introductory price of $1.99 per month for up to 36 months (and $7.99 on renewal), iPage offers a valuable learning environment to delve into the technology and explore its possibilities. Even if you decide to take your business online, you won't have to sell a boatload of products to cover your hosting fees.
Read our full iPage review.
Best for speed
The IONOS ecommerce website builder is an impressive tool that brings together beginner-friendly, template-based design with advanced features and functionality, making it a superb choice for creating an online store. While the template selection may not be extensive, the ones available are quite appealing and can be customized to match most styles and branding.
With an entry-level price tag of $1 per month ($25 per month upon renewal), IONOS's Plus plan looks like a decent deal. It supports up to 5000 physical products, and there's a free domain, an SSL certificate thrown in, some basic SEO, and some additional extras like TikTok ads, website analytics, and an AI-powered text generator.
The range improves significantly with the next plan Pro priced at $50 a month ($25 per month for the first six months). It supports up to 10,000 products and adds favorites, wish lists, and product filters. Plus, it'll get you advanced product SEO and website SEO supported by rankingCoach.
The top-tier plan takes your store to the next level by increasing the product support to unlimited and allows you to sell on eBay and Amazon Marketplace along with additional improvements. It's an unusual and welcome extra, but the price is high at $75 a month (the first six months are priced at $35 per month).
Read our full IONOS review.
Best for support
Liquid Web is a hugely capable hosting provider which delivers high speed, reliable and top-quality hosting for business and serious users.
The company's managed WooCommerce service offers high-end features everywhere you look. You get sales-boosting IconicWP premium plugins; professional WordPress object caching to optimize speeds; auto-scaling to keep your store running smoothly, even at peak times; and support for unlimited site admins, so you can share store management tasks with as many colleagues as you need.
If you've problems (and we've rarely experienced them with Liquid Web, but no-one's perfect), there's truly excellent help available 24/7 via email, phone and live chat.
Best of all, Liquid Web doesn't just make big promises on the website: it actually backs them up in a comprehensive Service Level Agreement. The company promises 100% network uptime, for instance; that you'll get through to someone via live chat or phone in under a minute, or get a help desk response in under 59 minutes, and you'll be compensated if this doesn't happen.
With prices starting at $17.50 a month, Liquid Web is more costly than most, but if you value speed, reliability and support, it's well worth considering.
Read our full Liquid Web review.
Best for scaling
Standing out as a highly flexible and performance-oriented cloud hosting provider, Cloudways is particularly useful to ecommerce platforms. One of the reasons is its customizable hosting environment courtesy of five major cloud providers - DigitalOcean, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, Vultr, and Linode.
Its most important features are auto-scaling for traffic spikes alongside Kubernetes integration, optimized caching, DDoS protection, auto-healing, and hourly automated backups. Other notable perks include a staging environment, built-in firewall, unlimited applications, CloudFlare enterprise CDN, SSL, migration, and 24/7 live support.
Plans are divided into Premium and Standard, as well as according to the amount of RAM offered, ranging from 1GB at $11/month to 192GB at $1,056/month. For instance, the cheapest plan comes with one processor core, 25GB of storage, and 1TB of bandwidth. The most expensive one includes 32 processor cores, 3,840GB of storage, and 12TB of bandwidth.
If you still don’t feel convinced about forking out this amount of money for any of its offerings, Cloudways offers a 3-day free trial. It will give you a taste of its cloud hosting platform’s capabilities, and the best part? It requires no payment details, so there are no strings attached.
Read our full Cloudways review.
Best ecommerce hosting FAQs
What is ecommerce hosting?
In short, ecommerce hosting is a specialized hosting service that provides the infrastructure and tools to set up and run a successful online store. Just like a brick-and-mortar shop needs a physical location, shelves, and a checkout counter, an ecommerce store requires reliable hosting to tackle customer traffic, store product information, and process transactions securely.
With ecommerce hosting, you should expect essential features like secure payment gateways, inventory management tools, marketing integrations, and a collection of customizable templates. Like with any other web hosting service, it's important to choose a reliable hosting provider that meets your business requirements and ensures a secure and enjoyable shopping experience for your customers.
Why is it important to get the best ecommerce hosting?
While ecommerce has become a massively lucrative channel for retailers, the quality of the hosting services that many small businesses are using often leaves a lot to be desired. A recent report showed that one in three Britons have abandoned their online transactions because of poor website design and inefficient hosting.
This dissatisfaction with small business websites poses a clear risk, as almost half of consumers believe that a bad website has a more negative impact than having no website at all. As a result, a substantial percentage of consumers have chosen to switch to competitor websites or reduce their spending with companies that offer a poor online experience.
In light of these findings, businesses must prioritize their web presence and invest in a user-friendly and reliable website. By doing so, companies can expect higher customer satisfaction, increased sales revenue, and improved customer retention and referrals.
How much does it cost to host an ecommerce website?
When it comes to hosting an ecommerce website, the cost depends on your specific needs and the hosting provider of your choice. In addition to the type of hosting (shared, VPS, or dedicated hosting), some factors that impact the cost are server resources, storage space, bandwidth, security features, and additional services.
Shared hosting is a budget-friendly choice for small businesses, where you share server resources with other websites. It can cost you anything from $15 to $150 per month, and more. However, many hosts provide introductory prices as low as $1 (such as IONOS's cheapest plan).
On the other end, dedicated hosting is a pretty pricey (from $100 per month up to a few thousand) option that gives you complete control and robust resources. Meanwhile, VPS is like having your own designated space in a shared building, while cloud hosting is a flexible and scalable solution, like a pay-as-you-go model. However, it's not only about the price tag but about the value you get.
How to choose the best ecommerce hosting providers for you?
When searching for the right ecommerce hosting solution for your business, there are a few factors you should consider:
1. How big is your budget?
Before making your choice, it’s critical to consider the size of your budget and how much money you're willing to set aside every month for ecommerce hosting. If you’re working on a tight budget, you wouldn’t want to blow it right at the beginning.
2. Do you have development experience?
When it comes to your level of experience in web development, it's crucial to choose an ecommerce hosting solution that matches your skillset. If you're just starting out as a beginner, you'll want to opt for a hosting solution that offers user-friendly interfaces and intuitive tools.
On the other hand, if you're a seasoned webmaster with years of coding under your belt, you'll want a solution that caters to your technical expertise.
3. How much support do you need?
Navigating the world of ecommerce hosting can be overwhelming, especially if you're new to it. So, if you're a novice and in need of guidance, picking out a provider known for its responsive and helpful customer support is critical. Look for a host that provides 24/7 customer support through various channels, such as live chat, email, or phone.
Meanwhile, if you possess technical know-how and prefer to handle things by yourself, you may opt for a solution that allows you to take charge and make decisions without relying heavily on support.
4. What are your website's requirements?
Think about the factors such as the type and number of products you plan to sell, expected website traffic, and any specific features or integrations you may require. This will help you determine if a hosting provider has the required resources and capabilities to support your website effectively.
5. What security features does the host provide?
Protecting your customers' sensitive information and ensuring the security of your online store is critical for its survival. Look for a host that offers robust security features, such as SSL certificates, firewalls, regular backups, and malware scanning.
6. What is the track record and reliability of the hosting provider?
In addition to reading our review, you could go through customer reviews, ratings, and testimonials to check the host’s track record. A reputable hosting provider should have a high uptime guarantee, making sure that your website remains accessible to its customers consistently.
The best ecommerce hosting providers: How we test
When testing the best ecommerce hosting providers, we looked at various aspects, from their pricing and ease of setup to the interface and security. We evaluated their uptime guarantee, daily backups, and storage.
To assess their customer support, we tested the response times and the quality of support given to users using some common stumbling blocks that may arise when setting up a store. We judged the different hosting providers based on what size businesses they'd be best suited for.
We also looked at their third-party integrations and their migration options, among other aspects.
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