There has never been a better time to go shopping for a new platform for your online store. There are so many hosting services now and at such a range of price points, you’re sure to find a solution that solves your small business goals.
Our list of the best e-commerce hosting options is as varied as the wares now offered for purchase online. They include low-cost services with surprisingly powerful features and higher-end offerings that promise to get an attractive, full-featured shop up and running quickly — and keep it running safely and securely.
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Plans starting at $1.99 per month
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Best e-commerce hosting in 2024
Why trust our small business experts
Our team of experts evaluates hundreds of business products and analyzes thousands of data points to help you find the best product for your situation. We use a data-driven methodology to determine each rating. Advertisers do not influence our editorial content. You can read more about our methodology below.
- 14 companies reviewed.
- 2,322 data points analyzed.
- 100+ hours of research.
Best e-commerce site management tools
Best for high-performance online stores
Best e-commerce security
Easiest to use
Best for large-scale e-commerce
Best for affordable unlimited site storage
Best for auto-scaling to handle peak traffic
Most affordable
Best for free online store migration
Best for global server locations
Featured web hosting offers
Price
Plans starting at $1.99 per month
Price
Plans starting at $2.56 per month
Price
Plans starting at $2.75 per month
Best e-commerce hosting comparison
We extensively research the key competitors within an industry to determine the best products and services for your business. Our experts identify the factors that matter most to business owners, including pricing, features and customer support, to ensure that our recommendations offer well-rounded products that will meet the needs of various small businesses.
We collect extensive data to narrow our best list to reputable, easy-to-use products with stand-out features at a reasonable price point. And we look at user reviews to ensure that business owners like you are satisfied with our top picks’ services. We use the same rubric to assess companies within a particular space so you can confidently follow our blueprint to the best e-commerce hosting in 2024.
Expert score (10%): This overview rating gives equal weight to four aspects of the e-commerce hosting services: the quality of their features, return on investment, popularity and ease of use.
Value (27%): The most important value factors are monthly subscription cost for month-to-month, annual and multi-year agreements; how much the prices increase when introductory offers expire; whether free trials are offered and the trials’ duration; and whether the vendor’s prices are publicly available. Also considered in this category is how customizable the products are.
Features (46%): Provision of unlimited storage and bandwidth accounts for 8% of each vendor’s total score. Other important features are storage capacity, the provision of one-click WordPress installations, control panels, page load speeds, DDoS protections, domain management tools and automatic backups.
Service and support (8%): The vendor’s score in this category is based on four evenly weighted factors: whether support is available by telephone, live chat and email; and whether the company provides a knowledge base.
Customer reviews (9%): To determine how responsive e-commerce hosts are to customers, how reliable the services are and how easy it is for people to use them, we aggregate scores in these categories from user rating sites such as Trustpilot, G2 and Capterra.
What is e-commerce hosting, and how does it work?
E-commerce hosting is a service that provides the web servers used to store and access the pages and tools that comprise a business’s online sales operations. The services host e-commerce sites on shared servers, dedicated servers or virtual private servers (VPS), depending on the amount of traffic the store is expected to generate. Most rely on cloud hosting for enhanced scalability and flexibility.
Many e-commerce hosting services provide managed services that make the host responsible for maintaining and securing the online store. Managed e-commerce hosting services tend to be more expensive than shared hosting solutions, but they also tend to provide enhanced performance and reliability.
How to choose the best e-commerce hosting
The first two considerations when shopping for the best e-commerce hosting solution for your business are ensuring the site will have sufficient storage and bandwidth to provide customers with fast and easy access to your product pages and other content and tools. Other aspects influencing your choice are the plugins you’ll need (such as shopping carts) and how well the store will integrate with your other business processes.
Key features to look for
For many small businesses, the most important feature of their e-commerce activities is scalability. Online stores typically start with a simple design and relatively small product catalog and then add new tools, features and product listings over time. Most e-commerce hosting services provide SMBs with a clear, straightforward upgrade path.
- Storage and bandwidth: While some e-commerce hosting services offer unlimited solid-state drive (SSD) storage, low-priced hosting plans typically cap storage between 30 GB and 150 GB. Most midrange and higher hosting packages feature unlimited bandwidth, but even these plans can cap bandwidth or suspend sites for using too much.
- Security: Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates are the first line of defense for your online store and are usually provided by e-commerce hosts for free. Other security considerations are spam and malware protection, prevention of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks and automatic site backups.
- Performance: How quickly your site responds to server requests affects customers’ shopping experience, but it also impacts your store’s rating with Google and other search engines. Server response times should be under 600 ms, and pages should load within a second.
- Management tools: For WooCommerce sites, WordPress provides management tools for creating and operating stores, and marketing your products. Most e-commerce hosting services offer their own management console or supply a version of the cPanel control panel.
- Hosting type: The least expensive e-commerce hosting plans use shared hosting to keep prices down without hampering performance or security. Dedicated hosting is typically faster, safer and more expensive. Most services rely on the scalability of cloud hosting to meet their customers’ ever-changing needs.
Add-ons and extras
The most common add-ons and plugins for e-commerce hosting boost the security, performance and functionality of the services. For example, SiteLock security software can be added to HostGator’s hosting packages for prices starting at $7.99 a month.
The company also sells CodeGuard Backup service for $1.99 a month and up. DreamHost is one of several e-commerce hosting services that offer website building tools and services, domain name registration, business email hosting and marketing services all in one plan.
Customer service
All the e-commerce hosting services we evaluated provide 24/7 live chat support and a handful offer telephone support during extended business hours. The services let customers contact them by submitting a support ticket or by emailing the support staff.
All but one of the vendors in our review give customers access to a knowledge base, and most offer getting started guides, a community forum and/or video tutorials.
How much does e-commerce hosting cost?
The least expensive e-commerce hosting plans in our evaluation cost less than $7 a month, while the highest-priced packages for SMBs are priced from $50 a month to $80 a month, and enterprise plans can exceed $1,000 a month.
Most e-commerce hosting vendors discount their products when they’re purchased by the year (or multiple years) rather than paying month to month. In some cases, the renewal rates are two or three times the initial discounted rate.
While some e-commerce hosts include business email with their plans, others sell email, web builders and website design services separately. Also available for an added fee are website migration services (which are sometimes offered for free), site security and various e-commerce plugins for WordPerfect.
Featured web hosting offers
Price
Plans starting at $1.99 per month
Price
Plans starting at $2.56 per month
Price
Plans starting at $2.75 per month
Frequently asked questions (FAQs)
How much does it cost to start and run an e-commerce website?
Very small businesses can create and operate a simple online store for as little as $30 a month, but the average total cost of an e-commerce operation for SMBs is between $1,000 and $10,000 a month.
This includes marketing and branding expenses as well as site creation and maintenance, hosting, domain registration (if not included with your hosting plan) and fees paid to payment gateways for credit card charges.
Is shared hosting good for e-commerce?
For many small businesses, shared hosting is the best choice for an e-commerce site because it is the least expensive option and tends to be simpler to initiate and maintain. However, shared hosting is inherently less secure because the server your online store is hosted on is used by other clients of the service.
Performance can be an issue for the same reason, although e-commerce hosting services take measures to safeguard your site and deliver sufficient page-load speeds and scaling for changes in traffic levels. Shared hosting is most popular for very small businesses with little or no technical expertise.
What’s the difference between hosted and self-hosted e-commerce platforms?
Hosted e-commerce services take responsibility for all aspects of setting up and maintaining a business’s online store. Conversely, self-hosted e-commerce puts control over the creation and operation of your store in your hands.
Hosted e-commerce lets businesses focus on their products, marketing and other business activities, but the company has less control over how the site looks and operates. Self-hosted e-commerce gives businesses many more options for their online stores, but they must take responsibility for securing and maintaining the site and scaling it as their needs change.
How do I make an e-commerce website?
A simple e-commerce website can be created in just minutes using the template-based site-creation tools included with many hosting plans and available as free services. However, building an online store that will be successful in the short term and long term requires a more deliberate approach.
Considerations include identifying the best form of hosting, choosing a hosting vendor that has the features you need at a price within your budget, designing and implementing the site itself and integrating payment, shipping and other business processes.