Shopify: our take
The top rung of the hosting ladder, where the ladder stops being about servers at all. Choosing it is a decision to never think about infrastructure again — and that is a real hosting answer, not a dodge.
Selling online without assembling hosting, software, payments and security yourself.
Affiliate disclosure: links to Shopify on this page are affiliate links — signing up through them may earn us a commission at no extra cost to you. It doesn’t change what we say here; the caveats stay in.
What you're actually buying
Shopify is the whole commerce stack as one subscription: storefront, checkout, payments, inventory, taxes, fraud handling and the security compliance selling online demands. There is no server anywhere in your job description — the platform is a software service, operated, scaled and patched by people you'll never meet. That's exactly what 'hosting' means at this end of the spectrum: someone else's problem, completely.
Which rungs of the ladder you are skipping
Our whole hosting ladder — shared, VPS, dedicated, cloud — is a series of answers to one question: how much of the machine do you want to be responsible for? Shopify answers it by deleting the question. There is no plan to outgrow, no operating system to patch, no moment where traffic forces a migration you did not budget for.
That is worth naming plainly, because hosting comparisons usually treat it as cheating. It is not. For a store, "I never have to think about this" is a legitimate and often correct hosting outcome — the same outcome managed hosting sells, taken one step further.
What that frees you to do
- Launch before you are technical. You can be selling this week without anyone on the team knowing what a DNS record is — you will still want to understand it eventually, but not as a prerequisite.
- Survive your own success. A campaign that lands is the platform's scaling problem, not a 2 a.m. one for you. On a self-managed rung, that same spike is an outage.
- Spend the attention elsewhere. Whatever you would have spent on patching and uptime goes into product, photography and customer service — which is where store revenue actually comes from.
- Stop paying for capacity you are not using. No idle server sitting there between launches, because there is no server.
The trade-offs — percentage-shaped costs, a checkout you cannot deeply modify, and an exit that is a rebuild rather than a transfer — are real, and they belong to the commerce decision rather than the hosting one. We work through those in full on our main Shopify take, alongside when building the stack yourself wins instead.
Shopify — quick answers
Is Shopify web hosting?
Not in the classic sense — you can't host arbitrary sites or applications on it. It hosts exactly one thing, a commerce store, and does so as a closed platform. That narrowness is the product: everything a store needs, nothing a store doesn't.
Do I still need a hosting plan alongside it?
No. The store is served entirely by the platform. The one piece worth keeping in your own name is the [domain](/glossary/domain-name/) — register it yourself and point it at the store, so the address customers know stays yours if you ever move.
What about the fees and the exit cost?
Both are real and both are commerce decisions rather than hosting ones — costs scale with your selling, and migrating away is a rebuild that reuses your data. We cover them properly in [our main Shopify take](/ecommerce/shopify/).
Not convinced?
The other rungs of our ladder, one click away:
- Bluehost — Your first WordPress site or a small business site that needs to exist, not scale.
- Cloudways — Sites that have outgrown shared hosting but don't want to adopt server administration as a hobby.
- Liquid Web — Business-critical sites and WooCommerce stores where downtime costs real money and support must answer.
- DigitalOcean — Developers and the developer-curious: custom stacks, side projects, and learning how servers actually work.