Storefront Delegation
WooCommerce vs shopify — One of these keeps your zone. The other borrows the top of your name.
You are weighing software you own against a platform you rent by the month, and the part nobody itemises is what each option asks of your domain: which records it wants, who sends your order confirmations, and what has to be rebuilt if you ever leave.
The short answer
Shopify earns its fee when you never want to think about maintenance, while WooCommerce on tuned hosting wins on margin, control and ownership — and on the domain side it also keeps the zone, the mail and the URL structure entirely in your hands, which is the part that decides how expensive leaving is.
What follows is the record-level reading: where your name points in each model, who is authorised to send as you, and which parts of an exit travel and which are rebuilt.
By the Hosting & Domains team · Reviewed 24 August 2026
NVMe
Disks under every tier
Free
Year one of the name
99.9%
Uptime we aim at
Flat
Renewals, year on year
This page is for store owners weighing software they own against a platform they rent by the month. The cost comparison has been done to death. The ownership comparison is more useful and much shorter.
Per-sale fees work like a levy on growth: the rate never moves, so the amount handed over rises in step with revenue. The same asymmetry exists in the namespace — the more of your name a platform holds, the more the exit costs.
Where your name points in each model
Run the store on your own hosting and the name points at your account: an address record at the apex, www alongside it, mail records untouched, and every other label of the name available for whatever you want.
Run it on a hosted platform and you are asked to point the top of your name at their infrastructure and send www to it. That is a normal arrangement and it works well — but from then on the apex answers with somebody else's address, and what your name may be used for is set by their documentation.
The registration is yours either way. What differs is how much of the zone is doing your bidding, and how many labels are left over for the mail, the staging site and the tool you have not bought yet.
Order confirmations leave under your name either way
Whichever platform you choose, transactional mail goes out claiming to be from your domain, and whether it arrives is settled in your records rather than in the platform's dashboard.
That means an SPF entry naming the platform's sending service, a DKIM key published where they tell you to publish it, and a DMARC policy consistent with both. A store whose receipts land in spam has a support burden nobody budgeted for.
It is also the argument for keeping your MX independent of the storefront. Receiving mail and sending receipts are separate jobs, and tying both to the shopping platform means a platform migration becomes a mail migration too.
The exit, itemised
Exporting and importing products, orders and customer records goes reasonably smoothly. What does not come through are the themes, the apps and the URL structure your rankings were built on.
The domain-side version of that list is shorter and more encouraging: the registration travels, the mailboxes travel if they were never on the platform, and the zone is edited rather than rebuilt. What you rebuild is the mapping between old URLs and new ones, which is content work, not DNS work.
Either direction is a real project, which argues for choosing on a five-year view rather than on first-month comfort — and for keeping as much of the namespace under your own control as the platform allows.
What we would recommend, working shown
Shopify earns its fee when you never want to think about maintenance, while WooCommerce on tuned hosting wins on margin, control and ownership, and merchants tend to redo this calculation in that direction once volume climbs.
In our range that means the Turbo Store plan — SSL, the move and mail already inside, renewal charged at the order rate, and an upgrade path so this decision never has to be made twice.
A copy is taken daily on every plan, and putting a file or a database back is one click in the panel rather than a support ticket.
Check every word of this yourself. Ask any platform what it needs in your zone, whether the apex has to point at them, and where your MX records are expected to live. The answers tell you how reversible the decision is.
The company here is Azaanex Inc., federally incorporated in Canada, on the public register.
The refund window covers the rest — bring a live site over, run it for two real weeks, and let ordinary use answer what no sales page can.
Our interest, declared up front
We sell the hosting the self-managed option runs on, so the preference is obvious. What we have no interest in is you buying a plan and then discovering the platform wanted records we had not mentioned.
Mailboxes at your own name are part of the plan — mail is included, not sold back to you at the checkout.
- The apex record left in your hands
- MX kept independent of the storefront
- The whole zone available, not a short list
- Renewal figures published, not footnoted
Why Hosting & Domains
Standard on every plan
One rate, published in the open
What you order at is what you renew at — the only comparison that counts is one we win by default.
Mail that does not move with the store
Keep MX pointed at your own mailboxes so a change of shopping platform never becomes a change of email.
A refund without an argument
If we are not the fit, leaving is one request rather than a negotiation — which is why we invite the test.
Every label of the name available
Staging, docs, a booking tool, a second brand — nothing in the zone is reserved by somebody else's product.
The verdict, turned into an order
The Turbo Store plan is this page's conclusion in product form — one rate, essentials inside, upgradeable in place.
A company you can look up
Azaanex Inc., federally incorporated in Canada — a host whose filing you can read before committing to anything.
Prices Side by Side
How our prices sit against the majors
What the market typically charges to join and to renew, set beside ours, including the renewal figure most comparison charts leave out.
| Feature | Hosting & DomainsMost popular | Typical household-name host | Typical bargain host | Typical loss-leader deal |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starting price / mo* | $2.42/mo | $4–$6 | $2–$4 | $1–$3 |
| Renewal price / mo | $2.42/mo | $10–$15 | $8–$12 | $4–$6 |
| Entry-level plan renews at the price you signed up at | ||||
| SSL as standard | ||||
| Migration done for you | ||||
| NVMe drives on the entry-level tier | ||||
| Backups run every day from the first tier up | ||||
| Real humans on support, 24/7 |
*Our own column shows the lowest-priced annual plan on our books, pulled live from the same catalogue that feeds the pricing page, which is why it cannot go stale. Beside it sit three columns holding the ranges that hosts in each bracket tend to advertise: introductory rates that normally ask for one to four years up front, then climb once the term runs out. Naming rivals and printing their figures is something we gave up, since a price nobody can verify on the day you happen to read this has no business on the page. Measure us against the host you are actually weighing up, and give the renewal row the hardest look of the lot.
Quick Start
Order placed to site online
- 1
Ask what the platform wants in your zone
Apex, www, mail, verification strings. Get the list before you commit, because it is also the list you will have to unpick if you leave.
- 2
Authorise the sender before you take an order
SPF naming their service, the DKIM key published, DMARC consistent with both. Receipts in spam is a support cost nobody forecasts.
- 3
Keep MX away from the storefront
Receiving mail and sending receipts are different jobs. Separate them and a platform migration stops being a mail migration as well.
Built In
Fitted to every plan
- An apex address record you can edit yourself
- MX and mailboxes independent of the store platform
- LiteSpeed caching in the server itself rather than bolted on by plugin
- WordPress and 400+ further applications installed in one click
- Staging copies for trying a change before it goes live
- WebP image optimisation built in, at no extra charge
- cPanel, which is what most of the industry already runs
- No set-up charge at any point, and no joining fee
- Upgrades applied in place, with no migration when you change plan
- 99.9% uptime as the target, watched around the clock
Frequently Asked
Questions we field again and again
What does a hosted store platform need in my DNS?
Typically an address record at the apex pointed at their infrastructure and a CNAME on www, plus whatever they ask for to authorise sending. Get the full list in writing before you commit, since it is also the list you unpick if you move.
Who sends my order confirmations, and does it affect delivery?
The platform sends them claiming to be your domain, so delivery is decided in your records. An SPF entry naming their service, their DKIM key published, and a DMARC policy that agrees with both. Miss one and receipts start landing in spam.
Should my business email live on the store platform?
We would keep it separate. Point MX at your own mailboxes and let the platform only send. Otherwise a change of shopping cart turns into a change of email provider, with an archive to move at the same time.
What actually travels when a store changes platform?
Products, orders and customers export reasonably well. Themes, apps and URL structure do not. On the domain side the registration and the mailboxes travel, and the zone is edited rather than rebuilt — the rebuild is your URL mapping.
Keep reading
WooCommerce Hosting
Store-ready hosting with Redis caching, headroom for checkout traffic, and the zone in your hands.
Ecommerce Hosting
Quick, well-defended foundations for online stores on any platform.
Changing provider? Work through this checklist beforehand.
A straightforward running order for a migration your visitors never spot: which files travel first, how to bring the mail across without dropping a single message, the right moment to repoint DNS, and the two errors that sit behind almost every outage we get called in to fix.
Keep the whole name, sell from it.
An apex you control, mail kept independent, and store-ready hosting at a renewal figure that does not move.
View WooCommerce Hosting plans