7 Fast and Affordable WooCommerce Hosting Services

If you are looking for the right WooCommerce hosting provider, look no further! This article will discuss seven of the best providers out there. We will examine the granular details required to provide good hosting and explore the companies meeting these requirements.  So, if you are ready to learn more about WordPress and woocommerce cloud hosting and effective providers, keep reading!

Content:

• Hosting Provider Packages at a Glance
• Elements of Website Hosting Explained
• What to Consider When Selecting Your Hosting Provider
• WPEngine
• Krystal
• Kinsta
• Digital Ocean
• Cloudways
• NameCheap
• Siteground
• Conclusion

Hosting Provider Packages at a Glance

Provider	WPEngine	Krystal	Kinsta	Digital Ocean	Cloudways	NameCheap	Siteground
Cost (monthly)	£16 – £468+	£4.99 – £99.99	$30 – $1,500+	$6 – $2,480	$10 – $1,035	£3.72 – £7.52	£2.99 – £29.99
Sites	1 – 30+	1 – Unlimited	1 – 150+	1+	1+	3+	1 – Unlimited
Storage	10GB – 50GB	10GB – Unlimited	10GB – 250GB+	25GB – 7.03TB	25GB – 3,840GB	20GB –	10GB – 40GB
Bandwidth	50GB – 500GB	Unlimited	25,000 monthly visits	Unlimited	1TB – 12TB	Unlimited	10,000 – 400,000 monthly visits

Elements of Website Hosting Explained

When selecting a WooCommerce hosting platform, there are many factors to consider. This includes technical elements (disk space, SLAs, SSL certificate renewal, server size, domain name management) and non-technical aspects (customer support and costs). It is essential to understand these elements to make the best decision for your WooCommerce website hosting needs. While it is possible to transfer to different hosts, doing such will rely heavily on valuable resources such as time and money.
In addition, poor website management can also have larger implications for data security and website downtime. It can also negatively impact SEO performance, such as a loss of organic rankings within Google.

What to Consider When Selecting Your Hosting Provider

Domain Management

A website’s domain name is the key web address used to access the site. WooCommerce websites may have several domains containing redirects to the main website. For example, if a company has a main .com web address, they may purchase additional domains such as close misspellings or the .co.uk and .ie addresses to add redirects.

Domain management includes reviewing the relevant domain name registrations and, if required, terminating unnecessary domains. Some hosting providers may also manage the redirects on various email addresses.

SSL Certificate

SSL stands for the security protocol, Secure Sockets Layer. This technology is required to ensure users have a safe browsing experience with a secure connection and safeguarded sensitive data. This prevents criminals from accessing information found through the browser, such as personal or financial details.

SSL certificates are the authenticating factor for website identity, ensuring the site is secure through an encrypted connection. These certificates are industry standard for all web pages and require annual renewal and management. When the SSL certificate has expired, an error will appear on the website warning users, ‘Your connection is not private.’ This can be very off-putting for customers and could impact their decision to browse your website.

Unmetered Bandwidth

Bandwidth is the amount of data used by websites. This can be measured over different periods and will increase in parallel to website traffic or the number of resources used. When searching for a website provider, it’s essential to pick one capable of hosting the bandwidth requirements of your website.

Customer Support

Effective customer support is a vital element of WooCommerce website hosting. Many hosting providers offer round-the-clock service or extended hours for emergencies such as downtime and interruptions. Having the service provider on hand for a quick response, whether via email, chat, or over the phone, is a crucial element of the hosting package. Ensure that there are effective channels in place to raise any concerns.

Some providers may offer extra reassurance with Service Level Agreements (SLAs), including uptime percentages and guaranteed time frames to resolve problems depending on the issue at hand. Others may offer financial reparations if SLAs aren’t achieved. Similarly, they may offer compensation if hosting disruption results in damages to sales or business income through no fault of your own.

Security

It’s essential to have a secure hosting provider in a world of advanced website security risks such as phishing, spam, viruses, and data fraud. Failing to meet industry standards could result in hefty financial penalties from regulators and implications to your business’s reputation, such as damage to your customers’ trust.

Site Backup Service

Backups can be incredibly helpful with web errors or technical difficulties. For example, backups can restore user data or return the website to the previous version if an unsuitable development has been applied. This is an added safety measure provided by most hosting services and gives peace of mind that if there is disruption on the site. It also ensures that issues can be resolved quickly and efficiently.

File Transfer Protocol (FTP) access

If you decide to change your hosting provider, FTP access ensures that you have the capabilities to access the network files necessary to make this transfer. If you cannot do this yourself, the new hosting provider may be able to use this access to aid them in the transfer process.

A lack of FTP access could cause further complications and prevent you from a smooth transfer over to your new hosting provider. In addition, resolving this issue will likely require additional time and resources. 

Scalability

Scalability is always a factor to be considered when making long-term decisions for your organization. It’s essential to select a hosting provider capable of handling your current requirements and any additional needs as the business grows.

It’s important to acknowledge that some features are linked directly to the cost of the website hosting package. For example, as your ecommerce platform grows or your portfolio increases, so do the requirements from your hosting provider. By paying more and getting a larger package, you may be able to increase the number of sites you host, storage space, and bandwidth. It’s important to look into the packages provided by your provider to ensure that they are scalable, affordable, and in line with anticipated business growth.

WPEngine

Monthly Pricing:

From £16 – £468+

WPengine have three separate packages to cover WordPress sites, larger eCommerce stores, and advanced enterprise solutions. They provide a selection of benefits as standard, including optimizations in SEO, performance, and a speed increase of up to 40% after migration. Their solution offers additional safety for sites, using daily, on-demand backups with threat blocking and extra security.

WPengine offers 24/7 support on their chat service or over the phone via their customer portal. However, it’s worth noting that phone support is not available to those on the cheapest package, Startup. In addition, WPengine only offers a service level agreement of 99.99% uptime to their clients on the highest tier of service. No additional SLAs are provided for the other levels of service.

Elements of the hosting package on offer from WPengine lean towards best serving those with developer knowledge. Their platform contains the tools to quickly and efficiently set up woocommerce stores, access to Genesis Pro and additional themes, and the creation of different testing environments.

Some of the benefits of using WPengine include:

• 24/7 chat and support
• On-demand & daily backups
• Added security with threat blocking
• SSL and SSHY management included as standard
• website caching to improve site speed
• automated plugin maintenance
• Easy WooCommerce store creation
• Access to 10 premium themes
• Different environments accessible to the user for development and testing

Krystal (US and UK)

Monthly Pricing

From £4.99 – £99.99

Krystal pride themselves on offering an honest, reliable service as the UK’s best website hosting solution. Their affordable packages include award-winning customer service within standard working hours and 24/7 support for those on premium plans. Customers can get in touch with the in-house support staff via live chat, over the phone, or through a ticketing system.

Krystal uses LiteSpeed web servers with integrated caching for WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and more. This guarantees fast website speeds and creates a robust package with their 99.99% uptime guarantee. They offer unlimited resources for bandwidth, emails, subdomains, databases, and email aliases. They also include free SSL certificates and daily backups as standard so you can rest easy knowing that your website is secure.

Customers can create sites using the website builder tool with unlimited pages and sites. Developers have access to GIT as standard and SSH with premium packages.

Their team provides start-to-finish managed migration for websites so users can feel assured when making the transition to their hosting platform.

Interestingly, Krystal is committed to reducing the environmental impact of their business, using 100% renewable energy supplied directly by Ecotricity. Sustainability isn’t an area touched on by many providers so it’s positive to hear that this is something they take into consideration. 

Some of the benefits of using Krystal include:

•  Award-winning customer support, via tickets, over the phone, or live chat
•  Free SSL certificates
• Free website builder
•  Offsite, daily backups
• LiteSpeed web server for exceptional site speed
•  99.99% uptime guarantee
• Service operates on 100% renewable energy

Kinsta

Monthly Pricing:

From $30 – $1,650+

Kinsta has taken a different approach to most tiered WordPress hosting providers. Instead of offering incremental benefits with additional costs, they offer all of their customers the same infrastructure and tools. This provides users with reassurance that no matter what plan they select, they gain access to the best quality and service available.

Kinsta uses 29 Google Cloud Platform regional data centers based around the globe for each of its sites. Round-the-clock support is included within this package, with dedicated developers for each site. Their solution is incredibly robust with advanced performance monitoring, frequent backups, and a sturdy emergency protocol to get websites back online if disruption is experienced.

Sites are carefully monitored with feedback on PHP performance and database queries, excluding the need for additional 3rd party plugins. Their software monitors the PHP service every minute, and if the site goes down, the platform will attempt to restart the site automatically.

Kinsta uses a high-performance Content Delivery Network (CDN) powered by Cloudflare to deliver assets such as images, JS, and CSS worldwide.

To help you with the switch from your current provider, Kinsta offers free basic migrations. They will also help with basic SSL requirements such as free certificates, wildcard support, and imported certificates.

Some of the benefits of using Kinsta include:

• Regional Google data centers
• Expert support
• Highly secure network
• Built for speed
• Staging areas for development and testing
• Advanced administration full of valuable features
• Automatic daily backups
• Backup retention (14-30 days)
• SSL management
• Developer environments and automated workflow using SSH access
• Ability to automatically purge cache with website updates

Digital Ocean

Monthly Pricing:

$6 – $2,480

DigitalOcean pride themselves on offering a simplistic hosting service ideally suited for cloud websites. With their affordable, reliable, and easy-to-use solution, developers and businesses can get underway quickly. This is perfect for high-growth start-ups and businesses launching new products.

Digital Ocean is flexible in their approach to hosting, giving users the option to have complete control of their infrastructure. Alternatively, DigitalOcean can manage it on behalf of organisations. They have a convenient app platform which is a Platform-as-a-service (Paas) offering. Perfect for those without in-house developer resources, assuring flexibility and adaptability to meet requirements in the long run.

The platform supports developers with access tokens to the DigitalOcean API. In addition, programmatic resource management can be integrated with Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and Command-Line interfaces (CLIs), creating the perfect reference system for developer use.

Domain management is included in the support package.

OceanDigital supports users with various resources, including product documents, API documents, community tutorials, community Q&A, status pages, and support helplines.

Some of the benefits of DigitalOcean include:

• Flexible hosting with the choice of common frameworks and languages
• Quick start-up time for businesses
• The transparent pricing model for low-cost options perfect for scalable businesses
• Scalable platform with a 99.9% uptime SLA and global distribution centers
• Cloud firewalls
• Monitoring and alerting
• DNS
• Global data centers
• 40Gbe hypervisor connections
• Enterprise SSDs
• Easy-to-use API

Cloudways

Monthly Pricing:

From $12 – $96

Cloudways have designed their service to provide customers with optimal performance, security, and speed. The hosting suits businesses working on WooCommerce or Magento. Their intuitive platform is capable of supporting a variety of different businesses with an efficient setup. They are fully equipped for optimal performance and reliability using the latest tools and software.

The platform focuses on team input and collaboration with the ability to manage team members and create effective working structures to support innovative, winning strategies. In addition, the transparent, pay-as-you-go plans give you the ability to select the service best suited to your needs.

Their hosting support service is competitively priced and includes a range of features. Unlike traditional providers, Cloudways take a multi-server approach that provides added security. Websites can easily be migrated to alternative servers if a server fails, providing assurance and the 100% uptime guarantee Cloudways provides customers. The use of multiple servers provides added security, as well as improving performance and speed as users will be able to access the server closest to their location.

Cloudways hosting is scalable and capable of handling the site at pressure points when it’s experiencing high volumes of traffic.

Some of the benefits of using Cloudways include:

• Tailored hosting plans
• Pay as you go pricing structure
• Collaborative working tools for teams
• Easy, in-house upgrades
• 100% uptime guarantee
• Round the clock customer support with live chat
• Solid-state drives (SSD) based hosting for optimal performance
• Added security with built-in caches
• Siteground
• Free SSL installation
• OS and patch management to avoid vulnerabilities
• 5 cloud providers and 60+ global data centers
• SSD-based servers for quick load times
• Testing and development environments

NameCheap

Monthly Pricing:

From: £3.72 – £28.88

NameCheap offers a hosting solution perfect for those looking for a more affordable option. While they cannot provide all of the features included within the comprehensive packages supplied by their competitors, they offer a cheap, simple alternative for businesses. Many of the benefits provided by NameCheap would be perfect for smaller websites newly established in the market. The free website builder, domain name protection, and SSL installation are included as standard, excellent to help your business get its feet off the ground.

Understandably, this platform offers the bare bones of website hosting with very few developers’ tools. However, the shared hosting servers feature the latest software versions for CMS, PHP, Python, Node.js, Jailshell SSH, etc. NameCheap are confident in the service they provide with a brilliant 100% uptime, efficient firewalls, regular backups, and consistent server monitoring for any updates.

Some of the benefits of NameCheap include:

• 24/7 live support with a dedicated team of experts
• Personalized email service
• WordPress and cPanel to update and maintain your open-source applications
• Unmetered bandwidth
• Free website builder
• Privacy and domain name protection
• Automatic SSL installation for free
• Free supersonic CDN
• 30-day moneyback guarantee
• Free website migration in less than 24hrs

SiteGround

 Monthly Pricing:

From £2.99 – £29.99

SiteGround offers a fast, secure web hosting service for businesses. Users can quickly build sites using the WordPress tool Weebly, highly recommended for first-time users with a simple drag and drop page editor. This tool also has a range of functionality and design layouts such as contact forms, shops, and other needs required for new sites.

Tools have been created to support collaboration, with the ability to add experts to the team and manage your workflow. If you’re a developer, SiteGroud has the infrastructure to transfer websites to clients easily.

The hosting package uses a premium Google infrastructure which brings the benefits of excellent speed, reliability, and security.

To improve efficiency and guarantee users have an outstanding user experience, SiteGround has built account management software. Creating a client-friendly area and control panel, providing a consistent, unified, and positive experience. Their 24/7 help center is on hand to offer any additional support, and they’ve received a brilliant satisfaction rate of 98%.

SiteGround offers a free site transfer onto their platform to support businesses in the switch.

Some of the Benefits of using SiteGround include:

• 24/7 support from the help center
• Smart patches added to the web application firewall for extra security
• AI anti-bot to defend against brute force attempts and malicious traffic
• 24/7 server monitoring with checks every 0.5 seconds
• Globally distributed backups
• Free WordPress security plugin
• SSL included
• Exclusive tools for WordPress

Conclusion

This article explores just some of the advanced features and comprehensive solutions available for website hosting. Whether your main focus is cost, customer service, SLAs, security, or speed, there are a variety of providers on hand to meet each of these requirements.

It’s important to remember that while this review provides a summary of the key features of these hosting providers, many may have additional features valuable to your business. It’s recommended to conduct research into your chosen provider, or a select few, for a thorough understanding of the full package on offer. 

Click here to learn more about the hosting and maintenance packages available at Sellerdeck.