Selling online is a different hosting question: assemble the stack yourself around WooCommerce, or subscribe to the whole thing as a platform. The trade, priced honestly.
Affiliate disclosure: this guide mentions hosting partners; the partner links are affiliate links that may earn us a commission at no extra cost to you. The advice stands either way.
A store is not a website with prices. It's checkout flows, payment processing, tax rules, fraud handling and security obligations — running 24/7 with money in the pipe. That's why 'what hosting for my shop?' has a different answer than every other page on our hosting guide: the first decision isn't which server, it's whether to run servers at all.
On Shopify, commerce arrives as a finished product: storefront, checkout, payments and compliance operated by the platform, traffic spikes included. There's no hosting decision because there's no hosting — it's software as a service, full stop. The costs are structural: a subscription, payment processing, and fees shaped as a percentage of selling — painless early, a real line item at volume. The other cost is control: customization ends where the platform says it does.
WooCommerce on your own hosting buys ownership: the data, the stack, unlimited customization, no platform percentage. The honest price is that every platform service becomes your job or your host's — performance under load (carts defeat caching, so real database muscle matters), security, backups, updates with staging. This is why serious self-hosted stores skip straight to managed infrastructure with WooCommerce specialization — Liquid Web's exact territory — rather than assembling from parts.
The hybrid nobody mentions
Content site on one path, store on the other, stitched by links and a shared domain — a WordPress site with a Shopify store on a subdomain is a legitimate, common architecture. You don't have to make one decision for both problems.
Selling online without assembling hosting, software, payments and security yourself.
Business-critical sites and WooCommerce stores where downtime costs real money and support must answer.
At launch, usually Shopify once WooCommerce is priced honestly (hosting, premium plugins, maintenance hours). At scale, percentage-shaped platform costs grow while assembly costs flatten. There's no universal crossover — plug your volume into both models yearly and let the number decide.
Technically yes, and for a first experiment it's fine. The problems arrive with success: checkout is uncacheable dynamic work, and pooled resources show exactly there — as slow carts at your busiest moments. Treat revenue as the signal to move the store onto real infrastructure.
On a platform, largely yes: payments and PCI compliance come bundled. Self-hosted, you'll use a payment provider (Stripe, PayPal and peers) that carries most compliance weight, but integration correctness and TLS hygiene are on your build. It's the least visible and least skippable part of the assembly path.
