Deliberately the odd one out on our hosting page: not hosting at all, but the strongest answer to the question many hosting shoppers are actually asking — 'how do I sell online?'
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.
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.
Every online shop chooses between assembly and subscription. Assembly — typically WooCommerce on managed hosting like Liquid Web — buys ownership: your infrastructure, your data model, no platform fees, any customization you can build. Subscription — Shopify — buys certainty: checkout that converts, PCI compliance handled, apps instead of plugins, and Black-Friday traffic as the platform's scaling problem, not yours. Neither is the 'real' way to sell online; they're different jobs to hold.
The platform charges a monthly subscription plus payment processing, with additional transaction fees when you bypass its own payments — the current numbers live on Shopify's pricing page, and checking them there beats trusting any review's snapshot. The structural point stays true across price changes: costs scale with your selling, which feels painless early and becomes the line item worth auditing as volume grows. That audit moment is when the assembly path deserves a second look.
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.
At small volume, usually Shopify once you price WooCommerce honestly (hosting, premium plugins, and someone's hours for maintenance). At scale, the platform's percentage-shaped costs grow while assembly's costs flatten — which is why growing stores re-run this math yearly. There's no universal answer, only your volume plugged into both models.
Products and customers export; the theme, apps and checkout configuration don't translate — a migration is a rebuild with your data, not a transfer. Keep the domain yours and the exit stays open, just not free. The same is true in the other direction, to be fair.
The other rungs of our ladder, one click away:
