Nexcess
Store-tuned stack, auto-scaling and update testing. Flat pricing — no promo→renewal cliff.
$21 → ~$21/mo
Hosting for self-hosted online stores
Host the store you actually own.
StoreForge helps you pick hosting for a self-hosted online store — WooCommerce, Magento, PrestaShop or OpenCart. We rank hosts on the renewal price, the real store capacity, and PCI honesty — not the promo rate on the sales page.
The short list
Full rankings →Cloudways
A real 2 GB cloud server without the sysadmin work. Hourly pay-as-you-go, cancel anytime.
$11/mo · no cliff
SiteGround GoGeek
Solid shared plan for a first store — but watch the renewal: $7.99 becomes $44.99 a month.
$7.99 → $44.99/mo
Advertised prices, read Sep 10 2026 — verify current pricing. “Cliff” = the promo rate jumps at renewal; managed plans stay roughly flat.
Latest guides
All guides →01Oct 26, 2026
WooCommerce Hosting Cost (2026): Year One, Year Two and the Real Bill
What WooCommerce hosting costs in 2026, plan by plan, how renewals change the bill, and why payment fees usually cost more.
Guide02Sep 5, 2026PCI Compliant Hosting (2026): What Your Host Covers and What You Own
PCI compliant hosting explained: which SAQ your checkout puts you in, what a host's attestation covers, and which hosts publish one.
Guide03Sep 2, 2026WooCommerce Hosting Requirements: What Your Store Actually Needs
The official PHP, memory, database and SSL requirements for WooCommerce in 2026 — plus the one that actually decides whether your checkout stays fast.
Guide04Aug 28, 2026Hosting vs Platform for a Store: WooCommerce vs Shopify, Honestly
One decision comes before choosing a host: self-host a store, or rent a platform? An honest look at WooCommerce vs Shopify on cost, control and effort.
Guide05Aug 24, 2026How Much Traffic Can Cheap Hosting Handle for a Store?
Cheap shared hosting can run a small store — until concurrent checkouts pile up. Here's where the wall is, why it's there, and when to move up.
Guide06Aug 20, 2026Store Speed and Conversions: What Hosting Can (and Can't) Do
Faster stores tend to convert better — but the research is often misquoted. What named studies actually found, and where hosting fits in the speed picture.
GuideIf you run — or are about to run — a store on software you host yourself, the hosting decision is different from picking a host for a blog. A store's traffic is mostly uncacheable: carts, sessions, checkouts and payment calls all run live on every request, so the thing that decides whether your shop stays fast on a busy day is server capacity, not "unlimited bandwidth." StoreForge is built around that one fact, and around the two numbers most roundups hide: the renewal price and the true PCI picture.
Buy on the renewal price, not the intro
The intro price is a discount; the renewal price is the price you'll actually run a business on. Shared store plans are the worst offenders: SiteGround's store-tier GoGeek advertises $7.99 a month and renews at $44.99 (advertised, read September 10, 2026) — nearly six times higher. Managed store hosts like Nexcess, Cloudways and Kinsta price higher up front but stay roughly flat, so by year two they are often the cheaper choice. Every host in our best ecommerce hosting ranking shows both prices, side by side.
PCI compliance is your job, not your host's
A host can be PCI-capable — a compliant, patched, segmented environment — but that does not make your store compliant. Under PCI DSS 4.0.1 (in force since March 2025), compliance follows the merchant: your payment integration, your configuration and your completed self-assessment questionnaire decide it. The safest move for most small stores is to keep card data off your server with a hosted or iframe payment page, which keeps you in the lightest SAQ A tier. We spell out exactly what a host covers and what you still own in our guide to PCI compliance and hosting.
Where to start
Most readers are running WooCommerce, so start with our pick of the best WooCommerce hosting, or check your plan against the WooCommerce hosting requirements first — PHP 8.3+, 256 MB memory minimum, MySQL 8 and HTTPS. Running Magento, PrestaShop or OpenCart instead? Those are heavier and belong on a VPS or managed cloud plan, which we cover too.
Independent by design
Some links here are affiliate links; if you buy through one, the host pays us a commission at no cost to you. It never moves a score or a ranking — which is why our recommendation for a developer self-managing Magento is Hetzner, which pays us nothing. The full accounting is in our affiliate disclosure.
Common questions
What is the best hosting for a WooCommerce store in 2026?
For most real stores, a managed WooCommerce host like Nexcess (from $21/mo, advertised, read Sep 2026) is the safest pick because it is tuned for the uncacheable checkout traffic that breaks cheap shared plans, and its price stays roughly flat instead of jumping at renewal. Cloudways ($11/mo managed cloud) suits owners who want a real server without a renewal cliff, and SiteGround's GoGeek is a solid shared starting point — as long as you know it renews from $7.99 to $44.99 a month. There is no single winner; it depends on your order volume and how hands-on you want to be.
Can I run an online store on cheap $3-a-month shared hosting?
You can start one, but a busy store will outgrow it fast. A store's bottleneck is concurrent checkouts — each one ties up a PHP worker across the database and an external payment gateway and cannot be page-cached, which is exactly what bottom-tier shared plans handle worst. "Unlimited bandwidth" does not help here; PHP workers and memory do. Cheap shared hosting is fine for a small catalogue with light traffic, but plan to move to a managed WooCommerce host or a cloud/VPS plan before your first real sales spike.
Does a "PCI-compliant" host make my store PCI compliant?
No. PCI compliance is the merchant's responsibility, not the host's. A host can be PCI-capable — a compliant, patched, segmented environment — and give you a shared-responsibility summary, but your payment integration, site configuration and completed SAQ decide whether you are actually compliant. The simplest path (PCI DSS 4.0.1, in force since March 2025) is to keep card data off your server entirely by using a hosted or iframe payment page (Stripe, PayPal, etc.), which keeps most small stores in the lightest SAQ A tier. Treat a host's "PCI compliant" badge as one ingredient, not the whole meal.
What are the minimum hosting requirements for WooCommerce?
Per WooCommerce's official server requirements (read Sep 2026), you need WordPress 6.9+, PHP 8.3 or greater, MySQL 8.0+ or MariaDB 10.6+, a PHP memory_limit of at least 256 MB, and HTTPS. Those are floors; practitioners recommend 512 MB+ PHP memory and 2–4 GB+ RAM once you add a real catalogue, a page builder and plugins. Magento/Adobe Commerce is much heavier — a 4 GB RAM minimum plus a full search/cache stack — so it belongs on a VPS or managed cloud plan, never a shared one.
Do I need hosting for Shopify?
No — and that is the dividing line this site draws. Shopify (like BigCommerce or Wix eCommerce) is a hosted platform: it runs the servers for you, so there is no hosting to buy or manage, and it is out of scope here. If you want an all-in-one platform, that is a different product. Our lane is the opposite choice: self-hosted store software you control — WooCommerce, Magento, PrestaShop, OpenCart — which you install on a server that you rent. If you have decided to self-host, we help you pick the host.