Shopify
Best for: Nobody at the business who wants to own software maintenance.
No plan to buy and nothing to patch, at the cost of control. Compared properly at Shopify vs WooCommerce.
Hosting
WooCommerce Hosting for Small Business
WooCommerce turns a WordPress site into a shop. It is free software, which is the part people notice, and it is self-hosted, which is the part that decides whether it suits you. Here is what it actually needs from a hosting plan.
What WooCommerce is
A plugin that adds a catalog, a cart and a checkout to a WordPress site. It is free to install and it is self-hosted, which means the software runs on a server you rent rather than on a platform's. That single fact is what this whole page is about.
The appeal is real: your shop and your content live in one place you control, the data is yours, and there is very little the software will refuse to do. The cost is also real, and it is not mainly money.
The cost that is not on the invoice
WordPress core, WooCommerce, the theme and every plugin get updates. Somebody has to apply them, and somebody has to notice when one of them breaks the checkout. On a brochure site, falling behind is untidy. On a store, it is how customer and order data gets exposed.
So the question that decides whether WooCommerce is right for you is not technical. It is: who at your business is going to do that, and what happens when they are on holiday? If the honest answer is nobody, a hosted platform is the safer choice and we will say so.
What a WooCommerce store needs from a plan
- Headroom rather than storage. Stock lookups, shipping calculations, live carts and a checkout are processor and memory work.
- An SSL certificate. Required for the checkout, and for the browser not to warn people off.
- Backups you have restored once. Losing a day of a store loses orders, not just edits.
- Security and malware scanning. A store is a more attractive target than a brochure site.
- Email kept separate. Send order confirmations through proper business email, not from the same box as your inbox.
Which plan suits a WooCommerce store
| Plan | Suits | Who keeps the software current |
|---|---|---|
| Shared hosting | A small catalog on a site that is mostly pages, with modest traffic | You, or whoever built the site |
| WordPress hosting | A store on WordPress that somebody at the business updates themselves | A plan arranged around WordPress, so core does not fall years behind |
| Business hosting | The store as the main event, or a store that got slow on a shared plan | You keep the site current, the plan gives it more room to run |
When shared hosting stops being enough
Stores rarely announce it. They get slower. The checkout takes longer than the rest of the site, the admin area lags while the public pages look fine, backups start and do not finish, and the host starts mentioning resource limits. Before buying a bigger plan, check whether the site is the problem: uncompressed product photos and a long plugin list are slow on any hardware, and a costlier server only makes them slow more expensively.
WooCommerce, or one of the alternatives
WooCommerce is the middle column here, and it is the right one less often than its popularity suggests.
WooCommerce
Best for: An existing WordPress site, and somebody to keep it current.
Everything on this page. Your store and your content in one place you control, on a plan we sell and support.
A build by AldoMedia
Best for: A catalog or a sales process that needs building rather than configuring.
We build WooCommerce stores as well as hosting them, which is often the answer when the plugin list is getting long before launch.
Running WooCommerce, or thinking about it?
Tell us the catalog size and who maintains the site. We will tell you which plan fits, or tell you honestly that a hosted platform would suit you better.
WooCommerce hosting questions
Does WooCommerce need special hosting?
It needs a plan with enough headroom to do real work on every request, and it needs somebody keeping the software current. It does not need a plan with WooCommerce in the name. A WordPress plan or a business plan both suit it, and which one depends on how busy the store is.
Is WooCommerce free?
The plugin is. The store is not, because it runs on hosting you pay for, usually alongside paid extensions for shipping, payments or subscriptions, and it costs somebody's time to keep updated. It is a genuinely different cost shape from a hosted platform rather than simply a cheaper one.
Who is responsible for updating a WooCommerce store?
You are, or whoever you appoint. WordPress core, WooCommerce, every plugin and the theme all get updates, and a store carries customer and order data, so falling behind has consequences a brochure site does not have. Settle this before launch, in writing, rather than discovering the answer was nobody.
Should a small business use Shopify or WooCommerce?
WooCommerce if the site is already WordPress, or if you want control of the whole stack and have somebody to maintain it. Shopify if you would rather sell than administer software. The full comparison is at Shopify vs WooCommerce.
Can I move an existing WooCommerce store to AldoMedia hosting?
Yes, and the way to do it without downtime is to copy first and switch last: build a working copy on the new server, test the checkout there, then change the DNS. See website migration.