Buying Guide
The pick we would make on WooCommerce vs Shopify
A direct answer for store owners weighing software they own against a platform they rent by the month: how to weigh the field, what to rule out early, and the setup we would take ourselves.
The short answer
The verdict up front, the reasoning after: 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.
The working sits below: the checks, the reasoning and the trap — written for store owners weighing software they own against a platform they rent by the month, without the affiliate league-table theatre this topic usually attracts.
By the Hosting & Domains team · Reviewed 18 August 2026
NVMe
Storage, every plan
Free
First-year domain
99.9%
Uptime, monitored
Flat
Renewal pricing
This page is written for store owners weighing software they own against a platform they rent by the month. If that is you, the decision does have a right answer — it simply rarely matches what commission-funded ranking tables are paid to print.
Begin from one fact about this market and the rest falls in behind it: per-sale fees work like a levy on growth: the rate never moves, so the amount handed over rises in step with revenue. That single mechanic explains why merchants revisit this decision at precisely the moment things start going well.
The checks that settle it
Set the feature-grid filler aside and only a few checks genuinely move this decision:
The all-in figure at your revenue, weighing subscription plus per-sale percentage against hosting plus extensions.
How far each will bend, meaning open source you can edit against a platform boundary you cannot cross.
How much maintenance you are prepared to own, from full assembly down to none at all.
Exit cost, since relocating a trading catalogue is surgery whichever way you go.
The trap most first buyers walk into
Comparing headline subscriptions and overlooking the per-transaction percentage, which is the line scaling with your success rather than your plan.
It survives because it lands on newcomers: the cost is deferred, dressed up, or only shown at renewal, long after the choice was made. The one habit that beats it is to price year two rather than year one.
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
Put us through the same checks: write to support before paying and see who answers, compare the renewal rate with the order rate, read the refund terms in full, and look the company up — ours is UK Health Care Support Ltd, registered in England and Wales, on the public record.
The refund window covers the rest — bring a live site over (the free migration makes that easy), run it for two real weeks, and let ordinary use answer what no sales page can.
Our interest, declared up front
Most 'best hosting' writing is ranking for hire. Our motive is simpler and stated plainly: we recommend the setup we would sell you either way — which leaves the rest of the page free to be useful.
Mailboxes at your own name are part of the plan — mail is included, not sold back to you at the checkout.
- Checks you can run again yourself
- Renewal rates published, not footnoted
- A free migration makes the trial easy
- Refund terms with no small print
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.
Support you can test before paying
Put a hard question to us before you pay — how a host behaves pre-sale is the best it will ever treat you.
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.
NVMe and LiteSpeed as standard
The hardware other hosts keep behind premium tiers is simply the baseline build here.
Written out of real conversations
Every check here traces back to real exchanges with store owners weighing software they own against a platform they rent by the month, not to a features spreadsheet.
A company you can look up
UK Health Care Support Ltd, registered in England and Wales — a host whose filing you can read before committing to anything.
Prices Side by Side
Our figures beside the big names
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 |
| Cheapest plan renews at its sign-up price | ||||
| SSL as standard | ||||
| Migration done for you | ||||
| NVMe drives on the cheapest tier | ||||
| Daily backups from the first tier | ||||
| Real humans on support, 24/7 |
*The figure in our column is the cheapest annual plan we sell, read live from the catalogue behind our pricing page, so it cannot drift out of date. The three columns beside it give the ranges hosts in each bracket tend to advertise: opening offers that usually want one to four years up front, then rise when the term ends. We stopped naming competitors and printing their prices, because a number we cannot check on the day you read it does not belong here. Set us against whichever host you are genuinely considering, and read the renewal row hardest of all.
Quick Start
Order placed to site online
- 1
Write the job down in one sentence
Write the workload and the audience in one line — for store owners weighing software they own against a platform they rent by the month, that line alone usually removes half the candidate plans.
- 2
Compare on what year two costs
Take the renewal figure, multiply by the term, add every extra you would genuinely need — the lowest headline price rarely wins that sum.
- 3
Run a real trial inside the refund window
Sign up, have a real site moved in free, and work it hard for two weeks — the day-to-day feel is the actual product, and the window makes the test free.
Built In
Fitted to every plan
- 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
- Softaculous included for one-click application installs
- Upgrades applied in place, with no migration when you change plan
- 99.9% uptime as the target, watched around the clock
- DDoS filtering absorbed at the network edge
Frequently Asked
The questions that come up most
Is WooCommerce genuinely harder to run?
The initial build asks you to make decisions Shopify makes for you. Managed WooCommerce hosting closes most of that gap afterwards, since updates, backups, caching and security happen at the platform layer while the code stays yours to change.
How painful is migrating between them?
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. Either direction is a real project, which argues for choosing on a five-year view rather than on first-month comfort.
Is there a safe place to try changes?
Yes — plans with staging let you copy the live site, work on the copy, then publish it once it behaves. That turns 'hope the update works' into 'know it works' before a single customer meets it.
Does hosting include mail?
Yes — every hosting plan includes mailboxes at your own name, with webmail, IMAP, POP and SMTP plus spam filtering on from the start. There is standalone email hosting too, for a name whose website lives somewhere else.
Keep reading
NVMe Hosting Plans
A buying brief without spin, written for buyers who have realised the storage layer decides how a site feels from one minute to the next.
LiteSpeed Hosting
A buying brief without spin, written for WordPress owners chasing the caching combination that keeps finishing first in independent tests.
How to Install WooCommerce
The way it is really done, in order, with the usual mistake pointed out.
WooCommerce Hosting
Store-ready hosting with Redis caching and headroom held back for checkout traffic.
Ecommerce Hosting
Quick, well-defended foundations for online stores on any platform.
Changing hosts? Run through our checklist first.
A plain order of work for a move nobody visiting will notice: which files go over first, how to carry the mail across without losing a message, when exactly to repoint DNS, and the two mistakes behind nearly every outage we are asked to rescue.
The name is waiting.
Every plan carries the essentials other hosts bill as extras — and support that answers.
View WooCommerce Hosting plans