WooCommerce is a free eCommerce plugin for WordPress that enables anyone to start an eCommerce business without much technical knowledge. However, to ensure that it runs smoothly and provides a good user experience to your visitors, you need a WooCommerce-optimized hosting provider.
WooCommerce hosting comes with a pre-installed WordPress and WooCommerce plugin, ensuring that the servers are entirely compatible with the software. Moreover, it handles basic website maintenance and security for you, which lets you focus on other aspects of your eCommerce business– generating more sales.
There are hundreds of hosting services offering WooCommerce hosting plans, which makes it difficult for anyone to pick the right hosting provider for your site. That’s why we did the leg work for you and compiled a list of the best WooCommerce hosting providers you can choose from.
Here’s a quick overview –
| Hosting | Price | Free Domain | Free SSL | Free Migration |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bluehost | $2.95/month | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Hostinger | $1.99/month | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Siteground | $3.99/month | No | Yes | Yes |
| WP Engine | $50/month | No | Yes | Yes |
| Kinsta | $35/month | No | Yes | Yes |
| Dreamhost | $12.95/month | Yes | Yes | No |
| Nexcess | $13.30/month | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Cloudways | $10/month | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Now, let’s dive deep into these hosting providers to find the best one for your WooCommerce store.
1. Bluehost – Best WooCommerce Hosting
Bluehost is one of the best WooCommerce hosting platforms that WordPress.org officially recommends. It offers a list of features for increasing your store’s performance, security, and plugins in various categories like shipping, payment, marketing, etc.
It allows you to manage your site performance from a centralized dashboard to track and update changes. You can choose from plenty of storefront themes, handle products, increase traffic with unmetered bandwidth, and offer multiple caching layers to improve efficiency.
Bluehost’s WordPress hosting plan starts at just $2.95/month. The platform is suitable for WooCommerce stores. However, if you want WooCommerce-optimized hosting, Bluehost has two plans starting at $9.95/month with a 12-month package.
2. Hostinger – Cheapest WooCommerce Hosting
Hostinger is the most affordable WooCommerce hosting platform, packed with everything you need to set up a robust eCommerce website and manage it smoothly. From the latest PHP version to HTTP/2 servers, Hostinger ensures your website is backed with the latest technology for high performance.
It has an intuitive and beginner-friendly user interface that lets you easily set up your WooCommerce store without any technical hassle. Moreover, if you are already running a WooCommerce store, Hostinger offers free migration support with minimal site downtime.
Overall, if you are on a tight budget and looking for a feature-rich WooCommerce hosting platform, Hostinger might be the perfect choice for you. Its pricing plan starts at just $1.99/month with access to all the essential features. However, for eCommerce websites, I highly recommend the Business Plan, which costs $3.99/month and gives you access to 200GB of storage space and unlimited bandwidth.
3. SiteGround – Fast WooCommerce Hosting
SiteGround is another popular WooCommerce hosting provider with the fastest loading speed. It provides multiple software enhancements like Memcached, HTTP/2, and additional PHP optimization via the OPCache extension that outbursts your Woo store performance.
It has WooCommerce pre-installed, so you need not waste time with complex configurations. You can access its free Cloudflare CDN, serve data instantly via smart caching exclusively created for WooCommerce and shield your site from threats via an AI anti-bot system.
SiteGround has affordable pricing plans starting from $3.99/month. The plans scale up based on the number of sites, storage, and monthly visits. All the plans include unmetered traffic, free SSL, out-of-box caching, unlimited databases, etc.
4. WP Engine – Managed WooCommerce Hosting
WP Engine is a popular WordPress-managed host packed with great features to host your WooCommerce store. It can potentially handle large traffic, which means it best suits enterprise stores that require optimized infrastructure to scale up quickly.
You can enjoy automated plugin updates and advanced product search, which lets you build faster with Woo blocks. It also offers automatic backups, one-click staging, global data centers, and integrated CDN that helps create a full-fledged WooCommerce online store.
The pricing plans start at $36/month for starter sites and level up to the custom plan. The plans differ based on the number of sites, visits/month, local storage, and bandwidth. However, in all the plans, you get free SSL, an optimized store theme, daily backups, free migrations, etc.
5. Kinsta – Premium WooCommerce Hosting
Kinsta is a premium WooCommerce hosting provider backed by the Google Cloud Platform and other premium tier networks. Its infrastructure is exclusively optimized for WooCommerce, so it can handle multiple simultaneous requests during peak traffic.
An interesting fact is that your site is monitored 720 times daily to protect it from vulnerabilities. It has 28 global data centers to serve your local customers and supports custom SSL certificates rated as ‘A plus.’
Kinsta comes with a long list of pricing options. The plans start at $35/month and level up to the Enterprise costing $1650/month. The pricing increases depending on the number of WordPress installs, monthly visits, and disk space.
6. Dreamhost – Popular WooCommerce Hosting
Dreamhost is another popular WooCommerce hosting provider that guarantees high speed, on-demand backups, and powerful caching. It has WooCommerce pre-installed, so you can get your site running within a few clicks.
It comes with server-side protection against traffic spikes, slow site speeds, and risk hacking attempts. You can have an additional bonanza of the Jetpack plugin that activates your store with upgrades and enhancements like downtime monitoring, brute force protection, etc.
Dreamhost’s pricing plans start at $12.95/month for 100k visitors and increase upto $79.95/month for upto 1M+ visitors. It includes a pre-installed Storefront theme, unmetered bandwidth, etc., and other optimized features that can handle anything.
7. Nexcess – Fully Managed WooCommerce Hosting
Nexcess is a managed WooCommerce hosting provider with all ‘must-have’ built-in features. It offers premium themes, plugins, and dynamically scaling server resources that keep your site running 24x7x365.
If your site encounters high traffic, Nexcess enables automatic query optimization that reduces query count by upto 75%. A significant advantage is that it lets you build a 1-click fast checkout that speeds up the billing process, eventually boosting cart conversions.
You get upto 30GB storage and 500 orders per hour in its Starter plan costing $13.30/month or $190 annually. The plans scale up heavily upto $699.30/month, allowing upto 30 stores, 800GB storage, and 10,000 orders/hour.
8. Cloudways – Managed WooCommerce Cloud Hosting
With top-notch security and 10x speed, Cloudways is one of the fastest WooCommerce hosting providers. As all the activities are carried out on the cloud, you can utilize a powerful stack that offers the latest tools and software to increase scalability.
It provides high flexibility as you can expand your storage effortlessly without changing the server parameters. With its free, lightweight, and feature-rich cache plugin, you can serve data instantly, and it comes pre-installed on your WooCommerce store.
Cloudways pricing plans vary based on the IaaS cloud vendor you select. You can choose DigitalOcean, AWS, Google Cloud, Vultr, and Linode based on your server and storage requirements.
Which is the best WooCommerce Hosting Provider for you?
You now know some of the best WooCommerce hosting providers in the market. However, choosing the right hosting plan depends on budget, business size, and more.
So, here are my recommendations –
- Bluehost & Siteground are the best WooCommerce hosting providers with the best user experience.
- Hostinger is an ideal hosting platform for beginners with a limited budget but who get all the essential features.
- WP Engine & Kinsta are premium hosting providers that are relatively expensive and most suitable for established businesses for better site speed and user experience.
- Cloudways is the perfect hosting platform for those who want to use a dedicated cloud hosting service but lack the technical skills to manage it.
Now it is your turn to choose one of the hosting platforms and start building your WooCommerce site. All the best!
WooCommerce Hosting FAQs
We have been working with eCommerce businesses of all sizes, and here are some of the common questions we have been asked repeatedly –
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Does WooCommerce offer Hosting?
No, WooCommerce doesn’t provide hosting services. It is an eCommerce plugin that needs to be installed on a WordPress site to build your online stores. So, you will need WooCommerce-optimized hosting to ensure its smooth functionalities.
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Can I run WooCommerce on Shared Hosting?
Yes, you can set up your WooCommerce store on Shared Hosting. However, shared hosting is designed for small business websites and bloggers. WooCommerce sites need comparatively more resources to handle hundreds of customers and transactions simultaneously.
WooCommerce hosting is optimized to handle such situations without affecting the user experience and downtimes.
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Which is better WooCommerce hosting or Web hosting?
WooCommerce hosting is optimized for WordPress & WooCommerce to offer an easy setup process and a better user experience. On the other hand, Web hosting is a general service that allows you to host any kind of website, but you need technical knowledge to manage it properly.
So, if you are looking for a specialized hosting service for your WooCommerce site, WooCommerce hosting providers would be the perfect fit.
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Do WooCommerce hosting companies keep backups of my site?
Yes, most hosting service providers keep a backup of websites, which you can restore anytime from the backend or with the help of their customer support. However, you shouldn’t rely on hosting companies for your backups, if they get hacked, you may lose your data forever.
So, you must create your own backup using WordPress backup plugins, which allow you to store your data at multiple remote locations like Google Drive, One Drive, Dropbox, etc.
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Do I need to buy the domain and hosting from the same company?
No, you don’t. You can buy the domain from any domain registration website and connect it with your hosting service. However, you should know that many hosting providers offer a free domain with hosting plans, which can save you money.
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Can I change my WooCommerce hosting later?
Yes, you can do it. Most WooCommerce hosting providers offer free site migration with their plans, which you can utilize to change the hosting platform with low downtime.
Do you have more questions? Feel free to drop us a message via the contact form or tweet us @ecomsutra, and we will try to help you.
I hope this article helped you pick the right hosting provider for your WooCommerce site. If you are new to the WooCommerce ecosystem, you may want to read these articles next –
