Verdict record
hostinger.com
Prices verified September 2026, from Hostinger, SiteGround, and Cloudways WooCommerce and pricing pages, Shopify US pricing via independent trackers (Shopify's page showed regional prices), cross-checked against StackScored, Tooltester, WebsiteBuilderExpert, and HostingStep. US prices.. Hosting prices change often, check the provider's own page before you buy.
"Ecommerce hosting" covers two different purchases, and most comparison pages mix them together.
The first is hosting for WooCommerce: a server where you install WordPress and a free store plugin. You own every file, and you handle updates. The second is a hosted platform like Shopify, where the store software, hosting, and security come bundled for one monthly fee.
This guide compares three WooCommerce hosts (Hostinger, SiteGround, Cloudways) against Shopify, the platform most small stores weigh them against.
I run other sites on Hostinger's hosting, and I say so where that applies. I have not run a paid store on SiteGround, Cloudways, or Shopify, so those sections come from each company's own pricing and help pages plus independent test data, named in each section.
This site earns a commission on the Hostinger link, disclosed at the bottom of every page. Trust the tables here more than any star rating, including ours.
If you have not decided whether you need a store at all, our website hosting for small business guide covers builders, shared hosting, and cloud for brochure sites first.
WooCommerce hosting or Shopify, in two sentences
WooCommerce on a host: lowest cost, full ownership, and you (or a plugin) handle updates, backups, and security patches.
Shopify: higher monthly cost and platform rules, but no server, no plugin updates, and checkout security handled for you.
Plan limits, two tiers per provider
| Provider | Plan | Stores or sites | Storage | Backups | Staging | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hostinger | Unlimited (formerly Business) | Unlimited | 50 GB NVMe | Mailboxes free 1st year | Daily | Yes |
| Hostinger | Cloud Startup | Unlimited | 100 GB NVMe | Mailboxes free 1st year | Daily plus on-demand | Yes |
| SiteGround | StartUp | 1 | 10 GB | Included | Daily | No |
| SiteGround | GrowBig | Unlimited | 50 GB | Included | Daily plus on-demand | Yes |
| Cloudways | Entry DigitalOcean (2 GB RAM) | Unlimited | 50 GB, 2 TB bandwidth | None ($1.50/mailbox) | Hourly to weekly, you choose | Yes |
| Cloudways | 8 GB DigitalOcean | Unlimited | 160 GB, 5 TB bandwidth | None ($1.50/mailbox) | Hourly to weekly, you choose | Yes |
| Shopify | Basic | 1 store | Unlimited hosting and bandwidth | None | No one-click store restore | Theme preview only |
| Shopify | Grow | 1 store | Unlimited hosting and bandwidth | None | No one-click store restore | Theme preview only |
Three rows need a closer look before price enters the picture.
SiteGround StartUp allows exactly one site and has no staging. For a store, staging matters: it lets you test a plugin update before it touches your live checkout.
SiteGround's WooCommerce page now lists "unlimited traffic" on every plan. Older plan pages and trackers list caps of 10,000 monthly visits on StartUp and 100,000 on GrowBig, so confirm the current terms before you sign up.
Cloudways gives Object Cache Pro free on servers with 4 GB of RAM or more, per its pricing page. That caching layer speeds up cart and checkout pages, which ordinary page caching skips.
Signup price versus renewal price
| Provider | Plan | Signup price | Renewal price | Term for lowest price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hostinger | Unlimited | $3.99/mo | $16.99/mo | 48 months ($191.52 upfront) |
| Hostinger | Cloud Startup | $7.99/mo | $25.99/mo | 48 months ($383.52 upfront) |
| SiteGround | StartUp | $2.99/mo | $17.99/mo | 12 months |
| SiteGround | GrowBig | $4.99/mo | $29.99/mo | 12 months |
| Cloudways | Entry server | $11/mo | $11/mo | None, billed monthly |
| Shopify | Basic | $29/mo annual, $39 monthly | Same | 12 months |
| Shopify | Grow | $79/mo annual, $105 monthly | Same | 12 months |
Hostinger and SiteGround both use the classic hosting model: a deep discount up front, then a renewal several times higher.
The difference is the length of the discount. Hostinger's lasts up to 48 months. SiteGround's lasts 12, so the jump arrives in year two.
Cloudways has no intro rate. You pay the same server price every month and can cancel any month. A 4 GB server, the size most WooCommerce guides point stores toward, costs roughly $46 to $54 a month depending on the DigitalOcean tier, per current trackers.
Shopify runs a US promotion of $1 a month for the first three months, but only on monthly billing, per several 2026 trackers. Switching to annual billing during the promo forfeits it.
What three years actually costs
This is the table to decide on. Each row uses that provider's lowest-rate term and counts only the hosting or platform fee.
| Provider | Plan | Year 1 | Year 2 | Year 3 | 3-year total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hostinger | Unlimited (48-mo) | $47.88 | $47.88 | $47.88 | $143.64 |
| Hostinger | Cloud Startup (48-mo) | $95.88 | $95.88 | $95.88 | $287.64 |
| Cloudways | Entry server | $132.00 | $132.00 | $132.00 | $396.00 |
| SiteGround | StartUp (12-mo) | $35.88 | $215.88 | $215.88 | $467.64 |
| SiteGround | GrowBig (12-mo) | $59.88 | $359.88 | $359.88 | $779.64 |
| Shopify | Basic (annual) | $348.00 | $348.00 | $348.00 | $1,044.00 |
| Shopify | Grow (annual) | $948.00 | $948.00 | $948.00 | $2,844.00 |
SiteGround looks cheapest on day one and ends up costing over three times Hostinger's Unlimited plan by year three.
Shopify Basic costs about seven times Hostinger's Unlimited plan over the same period. That premium buys you a store with no server, no plugin updates, and no backup routine to manage.
The costs that are not on the pricing page
Hosting is only one line of a store's budget. Two other lines often matter more.
Payment processing. WooCommerce adds no fee of its own. Stripe and WooPayments both charge 2.9% plus 30 cents per domestic card sale, with extra fees on international cards.
Shopify Payments charges the same 2.9% plus 30 cents on Basic and 2.7% plus 30 cents on Grow. Use a different gateway, and Shopify adds 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, and 0.6% on Advanced.
Here is what that means for a store selling $60,000 a year in $50 orders, or 1,200 orders:
| Setup | Processing cost per year |
|---|---|
| WooCommerce with Stripe or WooPayments | $2,100 |
| Shopify Basic with Shopify Payments | $2,100 |
| Shopify Grow with Shopify Payments | $1,980 |
| Shopify Basic with a third-party gateway | $2,100 plus $1,200 Shopify fee |
On Shopify, use Shopify Payments unless you have a hard reason not to. In this example, the 2% fee alone costs more each year than three years of Hostinger hosting.
Extensions and apps. WooCommerce is free, but many store features are paid add-ons. Swell's 2026 cost breakdown lists WooCommerce Subscriptions at $279 a year, Bookings at $249, and advanced shipping at $119.
Shopify has the same pattern through its app store. Budget for a few paid apps or extensions on either platform before you compare only the hosting line.
Performance and uptime
Stores feel slow pages more than blogs do, because every extra second sits between a shopper and the checkout button.
HostingStep ran the longest public test I found: 304 days, from October 2025 to July 2026, with 437,760 checks per host. Cloudways' standard DigitalOcean server measured 99.99% uptime, with 7 minutes of downtime across 7 outages and a 442 ms average response time.
SiteGround StartUp measured 99.97% in the same test, with 1 hour 59 minutes of downtime across 35 outages and a 751 ms average response time.
Under load, the order flipped. In HostingStep's 100-concurrent-user test, SiteGround StartUp responded in 170 ms with zero errors, against 443 ms and zero errors for Cloudways' standard server.
For Hostinger, independent monitoring reports I cited in our Hostinger review put uptime near 99.98% with a 43 ms average response time. Hostinger states a 99.9% guarantee.
Shopify handles traffic spikes at a scale no shared host matches. Its engineering team reported serving 75.98 million requests per minute at a Black Friday peak.
Shopify is not immune to outages, though. On December 1, 2025, Cyber Monday, a Shopify incident temporarily blocked merchants from their admin dashboards, per Retail Brew. Merchants still sold $14.6 billion over that Black Friday weekend, up 27% from 2024.
Only Shopify Plus carries a written 99.99% uptime commitment, per several 2026 guides. Basic, Grow, and Advanced carry no contractual SLA.
None of these numbers are my own measurements. All four stay up; Cloudways leads on steady response time, and Shopify leads on surviving a traffic spike.
Security and backups
Every option here includes free SSL. The differences are in who patches what, and how fast you can undo a bad day.
Hostinger lists a malware scanner, a vulnerability scanner, DDoS protection, and automatic updates on its WooCommerce plans. Backups run daily on Unlimited, and Cloud Startup adds on-demand backups.
In my own use, restoring a backup in hPanel has not needed a support ticket. You pick a date and restore.
SiteGround includes daily backups on every plan, on-demand backups from GrowBig up, and managed auto-updates for WordPress and WooCommerce.
Cloudways includes the Imunify360 server firewall on every server. You set backups anywhere from hourly to weekly, which matters for a store: an hourly backup loses at most an hour of orders.
Malware protection on Cloudways is a paid add-on at $4 per app per month.
Shopify handles platform security for you and states PCI DSS Level 1 compliance for checkout. There are no plugins to forget.
The gap is backups. Shopify has no built-in way to roll a whole store back to yesterday, so stores that want that protection add a third-party backup app.
On any WooCommerce host, plugin and theme updates are your job. That is the real security cost of owning your files.
Migration: moving in, and moving out
Moving a store in is free on all three WooCommerce hosts. Hostinger promises free migration with a 24-hour turnaround on its WooCommerce plans, SiteGround lists free site migrations, and Cloudways lists free migrations handled by its engineers.
Moving out is where the choice really matters.
A WooCommerce store is files plus a database. Any WordPress host can import it, and your products, orders, customers, and design all move together.
Shopify is harder to leave. Its help center shows that product exports come out as CSV files without the images inside. Images only carry over if they stay publicly viewable during the import.
Customer passwords cannot be migrated off Shopify because they are encrypted. Every returning customer has to reset their password on the new store.
When I moved a static site onto Hostinger, it was a file upload with no database and no downtime I noticed. A WooCommerce move has one extra rule: pause orders or keep the old store live until DNS finishes switching, so no order lands on the wrong server.
Support channels
| Provider | Live chat | Phone | Tickets or email |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hostinger | 24/7, priority on WooCommerce plans | No | Yes |
| SiteGround | 24/7 | Yes, every plan | Yes, first reply in about 15 minutes on average |
| Cloudways | 24/7 | No | 24/7, Advanced support from $100/mo |
| Shopify | 24/7, plus Sidekick AI | No, on Basic, Grow, or Advanced | No email on Basic |
SiteGround is the only option here with a phone line on its cheapest plan. If calling someone during a checkout outage matters to you, that alone can decide it.
Shopify's phone support is mainly for Plus and retail merchants, per 2026 support guides. Basic stores get chat and an AI assistant.
Hostinger's chat has solved account-level problems for me within minutes. Independent trackers report waits of up to an hour at busy times. Cloudways support covers the server stack; deep plugin debugging moves to its paid tier.
Who each one is actually for
Pick Hostinger Unlimited if you want the lowest 3-year cost, you are fine running WooCommerce, and your store sees under roughly 25,000 visits a month. It is also the only host here I can vouch for from ongoing use.
Pick Hostinger Cloud Startup if you want to stay on Hostinger but need more room: 100 GB of storage and on-demand backups for about $287.64 over three years.
Pick SiteGround GrowBig if phone support and daily backups matter more than price, and you accept a $29.99/mo renewal from year two.
Pick Cloudways if your store runs sales that spike traffic, or you want hourly backups and monthly billing with no renewal cliff. Start at the entry server and move to 4 GB once Object Cache Pro would help your checkout.
Pick Shopify Basic if nobody on your team will maintain WordPress, and you would rather pay about $1,044 over three years than learn plugin updates. Use Shopify Payments to avoid the 2% fee.
Who should look elsewhere
A store with tens of thousands of products and inventory synced across marketplaces is outgrowing shared hosting and Shopify Basic alike. That is Shopify Grow or Advanced territory, or a larger Cloudways server with a developer on call.
A business selling one or two products, with no plans to grow a catalog, may not need ecommerce hosting at all. A builder plan with a store feature, covered in our builder vs shared vs cloud guide, takes less effort. If you have already settled on shared hosting, our small business hosting comparison covers Hostinger, Bluehost, and SiteGround head to head.
And if the words "update your plugins" make you nervous, skip every WooCommerce option here. A hacked store costs more than Shopify's higher monthly fee.
Where to start
For most small stores reading this, the decision comes down to one question: will someone maintain WordPress?
If yes, Hostinger's Unlimited plan costs a fraction of any alternative over three years, and your store stays portable. Register your domain separately using our best domain registrar guide, so your store's name never depends on your host.
If no, Shopify Basic with Shopify Payments is the safer bet, even at seven times the cost.
Either way, run the 3-year math and the payment-fee math before you pay. The signup price only covers year one, and the processing fee follows you every sale.
What held up
- Hostinger's Unlimited plan runs about $143.64 for 3 years on a 48-month term, with 50 GB NVMe storage and daily backups
- Cloudways measured 99.99% uptime and 7 minutes of total downtime across a 304-day HostingStep test
- SiteGround includes daily backups and phone support even on its $2.99 StartUp plan
- Shopify Basic includes hosting, SSL, and unlimited bandwidth for $29/mo on annual billing, with nothing to patch
What to watch
- Hostinger's Unlimited plan renews at $16.99/mo, over 4x its $3.99 signup rate
- SiteGround's discount covers 12 months only, then StartUp jumps from $2.99 to $17.99/mo
- Cloudways includes no email; Rackspace mailboxes cost $1.50 each per month, and malware protection is a $4/app add-on
- Shopify adds a 2% fee on Basic if you use a payment gateway other than Shopify Payments
Frequently asked
What is the cheapest ecommerce hosting for a small store over three years?
Hostinger's Unlimited WooCommerce plan on a 48-month term, at about $143.64 for three years, because the whole period stays inside the discounted term. Cloudways' entry server costs about $396 over the same period, SiteGround StartUp about $467.64, and Shopify Basic about $1,044 on annual billing.
Is WooCommerce hosting or Shopify better for a small business?
WooCommerce hosting is cheaper and fully portable, but you maintain WordPress, plugins, and backups. Shopify costs several times more per year and limits what you can export, but it handles hosting, security, and updates for you. The deciding question is whether anyone on your team will keep WordPress updated.
Does Shopify charge transaction fees?
Not if you use Shopify Payments, which charges card rates of 2.9% plus 30 cents on Basic and 2.7% plus 30 cents on Grow. If you use a third-party gateway instead, Shopify adds its own fee on top: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, and 0.6% on Advanced.
Does WooCommerce charge transaction fees?
No. WooCommerce itself adds no platform fee. Your payment processor still charges its rate, which is 2.9% plus 30 cents per domestic card transaction on both Stripe and WooPayments, with extra fees on international cards.
How much traffic can a shared hosting plan handle for a store?
Independent pricing guides place Hostinger's Business/Unlimited plan at roughly 10,000 to 50,000 monthly visits, and StackScored puts its practical WooCommerce ceiling near 25,000. Past that, Hostinger's Cloud Startup or a Cloudways server is the usual next step. The real limit depends on catalog size and caching, not just visit count.
Can I move my store off Shopify later?
Partly. Shopify exports products, customers, and orders as CSV files. Product images are not inside the export and only carry over if they stay publicly viewable, and customer passwords cannot be migrated, so every customer has to reset their password on the new store.
Do I need a separate domain for my online store?
Every option here either includes a free domain for the first year or lets you connect one you already own. Registering the domain separately keeps it independent of your host. Our best domain registrar guide compares where registration and renewal cost less.
Does any of these include email for my store?
Hostinger includes mailboxes free for the first year on its WooCommerce plans, and SiteGround includes email on every plan. Cloudways and Shopify include none, so budget for Google Workspace or Rackspace ($1.50 per mailbox per month through Cloudways).