E-commerce hosting: hosted vs self-hosted
Selling online is a different hosting question: assemble the stack around WooCommerce, or subscribe to the whole thing as a platform. The trade, priced in full.
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A store is not a website with prices. It is checkout flows, payment processing, tax rules, fraud handling and security obligations, running around the clock with money in the pipe. That is why the question of hosting for a shop has a different answer from every other page of the hosting overview: the first decision is not which server, but whether to run servers at all.
Path one: the platform (hosted commerce)
On Shopify, commerce arrives as a finished product: storefront, checkout, payments and compliance operated by the platform, traffic spikes included. There is no hosting decision because there is no hosting; the store is software as a service. The costs are structural: a subscription, payment processing, and fees shaped as a percentage of sales, painless early and a real line item at volume. The other cost is control, since customisation ends where the platform says it does.
Path two: assembly (self-hosted WooCommerce)
WooCommerce on the merchant's own hosting buys ownership: the data, the stack, unlimited customisation, no platform percentage. The price is that every platform service becomes the merchant's job or the host's: performance under load (carts defeat caching, so database capacity matters), security, backups, updates with staging. This is why serious self-hosted stores go straight to managed infrastructure with WooCommerce specialisation, Liquid Web's territory, rather than assembling from parts.
How to decide
- Team shape: no technical person and no wish for one leads to the platform; development capability the business wants to use strategically leads to assembly.
- Customisation depth: standard retail flows are what the platform does well; unusual pricing, data flows and integrations lead to assembly, eventually.
- The sums at the store's volume: platform costs scale with sales, assembly costs are flatter but include maintenance hours. The comparison is worth re-running yearly as volume grows, because the crossover point is real and specific to each store.
- The exit: either way, the domain stays the merchant's. Platform migrations are rebuilds with the data, not transfers; the address is what travels.
The hybrid option
A content site on one path and a store on the other, joined by links and a shared domain: a WordPress site with a Shopify store on a subdomain is a legitimate and common architecture. One decision does not have to cover both problems.
Recommended hosts for this path
Selling online without assembling hosting, software, payments and security by hand.
Business-critical sites and WooCommerce stores where downtime costs money and support has to answer.
Quick answers
Which is cheaper, Shopify or WooCommerce?
At launch, usually Shopify, once WooCommerce is priced in full: hosting, premium plugins, maintenance hours. At scale, percentage-shaped platform costs grow while assembly costs flatten. There is no universal crossover; the store's own volume in both models decides, and the sums are worth redoing every year.
Can ordinary shared hosting run a store?
Technically yes, and for a first experiment it is fine. The problems arrive with success: checkout is dynamic work that cannot be cached, and pooled resources show there first, as slow carts at the busiest moments. Revenue is the signal to move the store onto real infrastructure.
Is the payment side the host's job?
On a platform, largely yes: payments and PCI compliance come bundled. Self-hosted, a payment provider such as Stripe or PayPal carries most of the compliance weight, but integration correctness and TLS hygiene belong to the build. It is the least visible and least skippable part of the assembly path.
Last reviewed 26 September 2026 · Getting Digital