Top Six Hosting Options Compared! (2020)

By Karol K
March 10, 2020

Choosing the best WooCommerce hosting is much like choosing the best bicycle.

It all depends on what your needs are.

If you’re all about taking it to the limits on mountain roads, you should get a light road bike. For off-road riding, a classic mountain bike would be better. For wandering around the city, you should probably get a commuter or a city bike.

But, wait, why am I even telling you this?

There’s one main idea I want to convey here, and it’s that everyone’s perfect bike is a different bike.

It really is the exact same thing with hosting – best WooCommerce hosting especially.

So instead of comparing various hosting plans number by number and parameter by parameter, what I’m going to do is focus on you instead.

This post is divided into a couple of sections. Each section represents a single user persona and points out which hosting options are the best for their specific requirements.

How to read this resource? Find the persona that sounds the most like you and get the recommended solution (or don’t; hey, it’s your decision).

The TOC for what’s to come:

No time to read?

Here’s a quick summary:

💸 Budget pick: SiteGround – $3.95 or $5.95 / month; gives you all the features and parameters that an online store starting from scratch might need
⭐ Overall best: Liquid Web – from $190 / year; the best all-around WooCommerce hosting solution on the list
💪 Power pick: Cloudways – from $36.51 or $33.30 / month; for high-end server performance, pick one of the plans based on Amazon AWS or Google Cloud

👉 Shortcut: click here to scroll to our roundup of the best WooCommerce hosting.

What to look for in your best WooCommerce hosting?

Before I can point out some optimized WooCommerce hosting solutions based on your individual needs, I want to take a minute to talk about a handful of web hosting features/traits that are particularly important in the eCommerce world (and for WooCommerce hosting as well).

Hosting plans come in all shapes, sizes, and price points. Some of them are just ~$4 a month, while others are $100+. Knowing what makes them different will help you understand why the more expensive plans might be worth their price tags and also what trade-offs you have to make when opting for a cheaper one.

Onwards then! Here are some of the things that your best WooCommerce hosting should offer:

PCI compliance

Back in 2006, something called the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council was established. They make sure that transactions are safe, money gets where it should, and that no bad guys are looking over your shoulder and stealing your credit card data.

Now, the part that concerns you is this (source):

The PCI DSS applies to ANY organization, regardless of size or number of transactions, that accepts, transmits or stores any cardholder data

In other words, if you intend to do anything at all with the credit card data of your customers, then you have to make sure that your server is PCI compliant.

Unfortunately, the general rule of thumb is that cheap shared hosting plans are not run in environments that are PCI compliant. Always look for this specific piece of info on your web host’s sales page or in the docs.

Now, with that said, there is a workaround. Modern payment gateways – the tools that actually handle the payments online – work in a way that doesn’t store or process any credit card data on your server. The data gets sent straight to the payment processor without spending a second on your site.

For example, if you’re only going to be accepting PayPal payments, then your server doesn’t have to be PCI compliant.

Dedicated IP addresses and SSL certificates

An IP address is simply the address that identifies your site on the internet.

Most of the cheap WooCommerce hosting plans will assign you a dynamic IP address. Such an IP address is going to be shared with other people. When you sign up for a slightly better hosting plan, you will get an exclusive private IP address – a dedicated IP.

Think of it as living in an apartment with ten other people vs living in it on your own. I’m sure it’s clear that if you want to be running a business under a certain address, then you don’t want ten other people also living there, right? It’s the same thing on the web. Dedicated IP addresses are generally better for SEO and better for eCommerce.

This is also where the other piece of the puzzle comes into play – an SSL certificate.

An SSL certificate supports encryption and authenticates your business on the web. In other words, it ensures the customer that you really are who you claim to be.

SSL certificates can be purchased either directly from your host or from a third party. The certificate can then be installed on the aforementioned dedicated IP address.

The good news is that you can also get an SSL for free from an organization called Let’s Encrypt. Most web hosts do offer them included with their hosting plans (free of charge). Just make sure the host you’re choosing has that.

In the end, if you expect anyone to submit their contact data or credit card data and purchase anything from you, you must have an SSL certificate.

Uptime parameters

The more uptime your hosting company can give you, the better. In simple terms, when your eCommerce store website is down, nobody can buy from you.

The top-of-the-line providers run on data centers classified as Tier 4, which means that you can expect to have less than 0.8 hours of downtime per year. Tier 1 data centers can give you less than 28.8 hours of downtime per year. Tier 2 and 3 fall somewhere in between (here are the detailed numbers on this). In short, the better the tier, the higher the price.

That being said, this doesn’t mean that you always have to go for a Tier 4 server. Some downtime over the span of a year won’t hurt you much. Just be aware that every once in a while, your site might be less accessible.

Speed

People are rather impatient when it comes to browsing an eCommerce store. Probably Amazon and their fast response times are partly to blame here – shoppers got used to the experience!

Anyway, if you want to stop your customers from abandoning their shopping carts, you need to go with a provider that offers good machines (good and fast specifications with lots of RAM).

But also, you should look into the location where the company’s data centers are. One of the main things affecting the speed at which your visitors can access your store is the distance between them and your server. Therefore, go for companies that offer servers near your target audience’s location.

Best WooCommerce hosting up close

Pick the persona that best describes the type of user you are:

“I’m starting from scratch with only an idea”

Read if:

you will be running a small operation with only a handful of products (or maybe even just one)
you want to keep things as low-budget as possible
you don’t have a storefront location
you have no employees and low running costs

This is the most common scenario among people looking up companies offering the best WooCommerce hosting on the web.

You’re probably sitting on a great idea, and you want to bring it to market as soon as possible. You’ve looked up “building an online store,” and the pairing of WordPress and WooCommerce came up. So now you’re here looking for some quality hosting for your future store. Sounds about right?

You’re the DIY user! Luckily, WordPress and WooCommerce have been made with you in mind!

For users who are just starting out and want to sell only a very limited catalog of products – while also not expecting huge volumes of traffic – there are tens of viable WooCommerce hosting plans out there.

Albeit WooCommerce is quite a resource-hungry script, its effects aren’t that apparent when the website has a relatively low volume of traffic.

I have one favorite company in the realm of budget WooCommerce hosting. While you will find other firms advertising similar plans, their reviews tend to vary when you do some more research. That’s why I like to stick to the tried-and-tested:

SiteGround

SiteGround is a recognizable brand in the WordPress community. They’ve been very active and kept perfecting their WordPress-specific hosting for years now.

The hosting plans they offer are very affordable, come with a number of automations to make your life easier, and give you customer support that’s highly praised on the web.

When you choose SiteGround, you also don’t have to deal with installing WordPress or WooCommerce on your own. It’s all going to be done for you. What you’ll effectively be walking into is a blank WooCommerce store that’s ready to have your products added.

There are three main plans available with SiteGround: $3.95, $5.95, and $11.95 / month. You can use either one to launch your first eCommerce store. However, you’ll probably want to keep things on a budget and opt for either the $3.95 or $5.95 / month plan.

For $3.95, you can build a single WordPress/WooCommerce website, use up 10 GB of disk space, and handle 10,000 visitors monthly.

You also get a free WordPress and WooCommerce installation, automatic updates, an SSL certificate, CDN access (makes your site faster), daily backups, and 24/7 support.

For $5.95, you can build unlimited websites, use up 20 GB of disk space, and handle 25,000 visitors monthly.

You get everything that the cheaper plan gives you, plus a website transfer service, SiteGround’s SuperCacher (caching makes your site faster), one-click staging, a Web Application Firewall with custom in-house written rules, and an AI bot actively looking for threats and keeping your online store safe.

In the end, SiteGround is your best choice when it comes to entry-level affordable WooCommerce hosting.

👉 Read our SiteGround review
👉 Go to SiteGround

“I already have a business running, but no eCommerce presence”

Read if:

your business already exists in the offline and generates sales
you want to take your business online at a reasonable cost
or, you’re still starting from scratch, but you’re ready to invest in quality hosting

If you’ve already been operating your business for a while, and you are generating revenue offline, then your hosting considerations should be a bit different from those of someone who’s starting from scratch.

First off, you’re probably already dealing with a lot of ongoing expenses involved in running a business. Things like meeting payroll, paying suppliers, handling the electricity bill, rent, and so on. These things are not cheap. At the same time, you do realize the importance of having all those elements in place and their role in letting you generate profit.

Therefore, looking for good WooCommerce hosting for a business that’s already operating is not as much about minimizing hosting costs to the extreme and saving a couple of bucks every month, but about finding a reliable solution that will perform.

Moreover, with an existing business, you probably have a customer base that you’ve built over time. These people will be interested in checking out your offering online, which means that you can expect more web traffic from day one (vs new stores with no pre-existing customer bases). You don’t want to disappoint your regular customers with a slow-performing website.

With that in mind, here are my recommendations for best WooCommerce hosts that will let you run your online store hassle-free and that also offer great performance and reliability.

Cloudways

Cloudways is a smaller company – by hosting industry standards – but they do offer excellent plans with good reliability and performance.

The fact that they actually use machines by industry-leading server houses like DigitalOcean or Amazon probably has to do something with that reliability and performance.

In other words, Cloudways utilizes third-party server infrastructure and makes it more accessible to everyday users.

Their WordPress hosting plans offer advanced cache features, server stacks that are optimized to work with WooCommerce, their CloudwaysCDN setup, dedicated firewalls to keep your store safe, one-click SSL installation, automated backups, seamless scaling as your store grows in traffic, 24/7 live support, and many more features that can be called pro-level.

The prices start from $10 / month using DigitalOcean servers. For that price, you get access to a capable machine that will be able to handle your store no problem.

👉 Go to Cloudways

SiteGround

I know I recommended this one (SiteGround) earlier in this post already, but this host is equally capable of serving stores with higher requirements.

Particularly, SiteGround’s $11.95 / month plan will do a great job here. It lets you build unlimited stores, welcome 100,000 visitors a month, and use up 30 GB of disk space.

You get a free WooCommerce installation and a website transfer service if needed, automatic updates, an SSL certificate, daily backups, 24/7 priority support, SiteGround’s SuperCacher, a one-click staging environment, a Web Application Firewall, and an AI security bot.

What’s also worth mentioning is that SiteGround’s data centers provide power and hardware redundancy.

👉 Read our SiteGround review
👉 Go to SiteGround

“I’m already running an online store, but my host is sub-par”

Read if:

it’s time for WooCommerce hosting change due to issues with your current one

WooCommerce is not just a plugin. It’s actually a whole advanced package of online software that happens to be delivered as a WordPress plugin.

What this means in plain English is that the sole fact of having WooCommerce on your site can slow it down noticeably (some sources claim that the average impact is in the range of +2 seconds).

This means that every visitor will have to deal with two additional seconds when browsing your store. Depending on the kind of audience you cater to, this can result in lost sales.

Every host that you might be using right now is technically capable of running a WooCommerce store, but it might not be the most efficient at it. And if you’re reading this, then this is probably the case.

Here are my top three recommendations – hosts that will make your online store run smoothly:

Liquid Web

Liquid Web is a company known in the hosting industry for its specialized hosting offerings ranging from cloud hosting to dedicated servers, VPS, server clusters, database hosting, and even compliant hosting for the healthcare industry.

The most interesting thing for us, however, is that they also offer managed WooCommerce hosting plans.

These plans are hosted entirely in the cloud, which means that they’re exceptionally scalable, the setup time is rated at less than ten minutes, and you get what Liquid Web calls a SaaS-like simple control panel (not cPanel, which is the standard in the industry, although not the most user-friendly solution).

However, those managed WooCommerce hosting plans are not only about the server infrastructure. You also get access to extra software that will make managing your store easier.

For example, Liquid Web has partnered with Jilt (an email service for eCommerce) to help you take care of abandoned carts and improve your communication with customers in general.

There’s also migration support when moving your store over to Liquid Web, 24/7 support, an integrated catalog of WordPress themes you can choose from, and a selection of dedicated WooCommerce plugins by IconicWP.

All this you get without any extra charges above your standard hosting bill. Speaking of which, you get all these features starting from $19 / month or $190 / year when paid annually (you basically get two months for free).

If you need more server resources, you can upgrade to more powerful plans ($79, $299, $549, even $999 / month).

Liquid Web is the best all-around WooCommerce hosting solution on this list when looking at the price-to-value ratio.

👉 Go to Liquid Web

DreamHost

DreamHost is best known for its entry-level hosting plans, but they’re also a big player in the market of more powerful WooCommerce setups.

Starting from $16.95 / month (when paid annually), DreamHost gives you access to a cloud-based hosting environment with isolated resources – you’re not sharing them with other people hosting with DreamHost.

The server is ready to handle up to 100,000 monthly visitors, and you get 30 GB of storage for your files and media.

Looking through the list of available features, the things that stand out are one-click staging, built-in caching, free SSL for your store, automatic daily backups, SFTP, and shell access.

If you need it, DreamHost also gives you a free domain name and the possibility to set up email accounts for your store and host them on the server as well (not always the standard with more specialized hosts).

If you need more server resources – capacity for more visits and more disk space – you can upgrade to the $24.95 or $71.95 / month plans.

DreamHost has really high ratings on Trustpilot and PCMag.com. It’s also a platform officially recommended by the WordPress.org team (full disclosure, SiteGround has the WordPress.org seal of approval as well).

👉 Read our DreamHost review
👉 Go to DreamHost

Cloudways

Cloudways will also do an excellent job for stores that have a sub-par experience with their current hosts.

Since Cloudways allows you to pick the provider of your server infrastructure, you get a lot of freedom as to how you want to set up your environment and how high-end you want to go on the server parameters spectrum.

For example, if performance is the no.1 thing on your list, you can choose to put your WooCommerce store on Amazon AWS or Google Cloud – both of which are available through Cloudways – starting from $36.51 and $33.30 / month, respectively.

You also get all the other features that come with Cloudways setups – we talked about those in the previous sections (click to scroll).

👉 Go to Cloudways

Best WooCommerce hosting summary

We’ve just covered a handful of the best WooCommerce hosting options in the market. Here are my recommendations in a nutshell:

🌱 Top selection for users starting from scratch with only an idea for an eCommerce store:

SiteGround – the $3.95 or $5.95 / month plans will give you all the features and parameters that an online store starting from scratch might need.

🏪 Top selections for businesses that are already running, but have no eCommerce presence:

Cloudways – at $10 / month it’s a great solution if you’re looking for a good balance between performance and affordability.
SiteGround – the $11.95 / month plan will give you more server performance than SiteGround’s cheaper plans and can handle more visitors each month.

💪 Top selections for businesses that already have an online store, but their current hosting experience is sub-par:

Liquid Web – the best all-around WooCommerce hosting solution on this list; $190 / year.
DreamHost – their cloud-based setups for WooCommerce come with a lot of features and also remain affordable at $16.95 / month.
Cloudways – for high-end server performance, pick Cloudways’ plans that are based on Amazon AWS or Google Cloud; starting from $36.51 and $33.30 / month, respectively.

I hope this resource has been helpful and that you’ve made your pick of the best WooCommerce hosting for your needs.

If there’s anything else you’d like to know about best WooCommerce hosting, ask away in the comments – we’re happy to help!

Karol K. (@carlosinho) is a freelance blogger and writer, WordPress figure-outer, and published author of “WordPress Complete”. His work has been featured all over the web on sites like: Smashing Magazine, Ahrefs.com, Optimizely.com and Adobe.com.

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