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Top 4 WooCommerce Hosting Companies

Top 4 WooCommerce Hosting Companies

When you look for WooCommerce hosting you’re really looking for WordPress hosting. WordPress is the platform which WooCommerce works on top of. In the last few years we’ve seen some tectonic changes in the hosting business. This has been great for WordPress site owners (and great for anyone using WooCommerce too!).

It’s important to say from the outset that you get what you pay for in hosting. If you are choosing a service that’s only $10 a month then you’ll find yourself with a slow and fiddly setup. You might not realise you need security measures, backups or speed until it’s too late and at that point going for a service that was +$50 a month will seem like a very good investment.

As an e-commerce store always consider the cost of downtime. If your site is down in peak traffic over Christmas, say on a Friday till Monday how many sales will you loose? Calculate the loss in revenue so you can anchor the value of good hosting. Not to mention reputational damage from being down (or slow!).

The other thing to note is that every six months brings new changes and new features. It’s fantastic news for site developers and site owners, but can be a bit overwhelming. We’ll outline the features you should look for when choosing your WooCommerce host.

This competition drives a huge amount of innovation; innovation that can save you time and money.

WooCommerce hosting is WordPress hosting but with a few extras. Here are our top 5 things to look out for when picking a WooCommerce host:

1. Integrated SSL Provisioning.

SSL/HTTPS is an essential for any WooCommerce site. SSL is important even if you have a Payment Gateway which doesn’t require SSL for PCI compliance. For example when you use a hosted order page (HOP).

It’s important because:

We’ve written before about how easy it is to setup SSL with WP Engine. We consider this easy provisioning of SSL an essential for WooCommerce sites.

2. Cache and Content Delivery Network options

Speed is a killer feature, and one of the easiest and most effective ways to increase the speed for visitors is to have good caching and a content delivery network.

These two tools reduce the servers processing tasks which mean it can work faster.

3. Staging Site

Downtime is expensive for e-commerce sites. If you are not selling, you are losing money. A staging site can insulate you from downtime. Do all your updates and changes in a separate environment and push the changes to your live site once you are satisfied everything is in working order.

4. Regular Backups

Preventative measures alone are not enough for your WooCommerce site. What happens if you lose a few days worth of data – you could loose a lot of orders. It’s important to take regular backups of your site and database.

5. Support

Things go wrong. Things don’t work. Even with WordPress hosting companies that limit the options of your server configuration things can go awry. Good support is critical and can make or break a hosting company.

Our Top WooCommerce Hosting Companies

It is with these five items in mind we have chosen the recommended hosting platforms for WooCommerce. There are many other hosting companies out there, and this isn’t to dismiss them all, the following companies are the ones we have first-hand experience with and can vouch for.

In no particular order:

34SP

A UK hosting company based in Manchester. They are known for their scalable systems and fantastic support. It’s important to remember that UK clients might need to have a chat with a support agent at 9 am in the morning. You can be sure that 34SP will be awake then.

WP Engine

One of the largest and fastest growing hosting companies in the hosting space. We use them and love all the developer tools they are investing in which help us provide more reliable service to clients. Fantastic support, just wish they would get their live chat technicians to work UK times!

SiteGround

Another company on the rise and a fantastic supporter of the WordPress community. Very developer friendly which means you can rest assured there will be no cowboy coding. Highly recommended.

Pagely

Known for more Enterprise solutions, this company comes highly recommended. They have some seriously scalable tech behind the scenes and have the support to back it up.

What to stay away from

I have heard many people suggest they can do everything these hosts can do at a fraction of the price. They are right. You could setup your own Linode server. Integrate a CDN. Optimise Caching. Setup SSL yourself. Optimise for WordPress. The list goes on…

But soon you are a System Admin, and when things go wrong, you will be stuck alone to fix it. When you buy from the above services you can be confident that everything will be in top condition and any advances will be passed along to you.

If you think of these services in terms of Return on Investment, they are 100% worth the cost. Especially if you consider your own time saved.

What do you use for WooCommerce hosting and do you have any other suggestions for important features? Leave us a note in the comments.