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By Jason Feng, Founder & Researcher. See how this review was researched.
Quick answer
Ecommerce hosting is not one number. It is three: the sticker plan, the renewal price, and the add-ons a store actually needs. Shared entry plans start near $3 a month and managed plans start near $28, but the advertised rate is usually a prepaid term. SiteGround’s StartUp plan shows $2.99 a month and renews at $17.99. Hostinger’s entry WordPress plan shows $2.99 and renews at $10.99.
The second number is the one that decides your budget, and it is not always on the same screen.
Table of contents
- What an ecommerce host actually sells you
- Three tiers, three price bands
- The renewal price and the missing features
- The same store at three traffic levels
- Where the cost jumps as traffic grows
- Our verdict
- How we researched this
- Sources
What an ecommerce host actually sells you
A store on Shopify or BigCommerce never sees a hosting line. The platform bundles it, and Shopify states "unlimited web hosting" and "unlimited bandwidth (no bandwidth fees)" on its pricing page. A WooCommerce store is different. The software is free, but you buy the server, and the server is where the money goes.
WordPress hosting vendors price three things: compute, traffic and operations. Compute is CPU and memory. Traffic is bandwidth and the CDN that serves images. Operations is the part nobody advertises clearly, and it covers backups, staging, security patching and support.
That last group is what separates a $3 plan from a $30 plan. Both will run a WordPress install. Only one will restore a broken store after a bad plugin update without a rebuild.
If you want the software side of this comparison, our ecommerce platform fees breakdown covers subscriptions and card rates. This article stays on the infrastructure bill.
Three tiers, three price bands
I pulled entry prices from each vendor’s own pricing page on 2026-10-01 through a US exit IP, because several of these vendors serve regional currency.
| Tier | Example plan | Monthly price (US) | Renewal or annual note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shared | Hostinger WordPress entry | $2.99/mo | Renews at $10.99/mo; 48-month prepay quoted at $143.52 |
| Shared | SiteGround StartUp | $2.99/mo | Renews at $17.99/mo; prepaid for 12 months |
| Managed entry | WP Engine managed hosting | Starting at $28.00/mo | Billed annually; $336.00 today |
| Managed entry | Kinsta Business entry | $35/mo | $30/mo billed annually, first month free |
| Managed entry | Flywheel Starter | $25/mo | Billed at $300/year, which includes 2 months |
| Managed mid | Flywheel Growth | $96/mo | Billed at $1,150/year |
| Managed high | Flywheel Scale | $242/mo | Billed at $2,900/year |
| Unmanaged VPS | DigitalOcean droplet | $6/mo (1 GiB, 1 vCPU) | $12/mo for 2 GiB and 1 vCPU; $24/mo for 4 GiB and 2 vCPU |
Two of these rows belong to different worlds. A $6 droplet and a $28 managed plan can run the same store with the same traffic, and the difference is who handles the operating system, the PHP updates and the 3 a.m. restore.
DigitalOcean’s own price list makes the compute side concrete. The 1 GiB droplet with one vCPU and 1,000 GiB of transfer lists at $6 a month. Doubling memory to 2 GiB with the same single vCPU is $12, and moving to 4 GiB and 2 vCPUs is $24. That is the arithmetic you are paying a host to manage.
The renewal price and the missing features
This is the section most hosting comparisons skip, because the interesting numbers are in the terms rather than the headline.
| Cost line | Who publishes it | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Renewal after intro term | Hostinger | Entry plan renews at $10.99/mo, a 3.7x jump |
| Renewal after intro term | SiteGround | StartUp renews at $17.99/mo, a 6x jump |
| Additional site | Kinsta | $30 per additional site per month |
| Additional disk | Kinsta | $20 per month per 20 GB increment |
| Additional site | WP Engine | $20 per additional site per month |
| Additional site | Flywheel | $20 per month, or $200 per year |
| Visitor overage | Flywheel | $1 per 1,000 extra monthly visits; storage overage $1 per GB |
| CDN | Cloudflare Pro | $20/mo billed annually, or $25/mo billed monthly |
| Business email | Google Workspace Starter | $7 per user per month |
| One-time migration tool | WP Migrate | $199 to $399 one-time, depending on tier |
The pattern here is that shared hosting is cheap on the first invoice and expensive on the third year, while managed hosting is expensive from day one and predictable after that. Flywheel publishes both overage rates, the visit overage and the storage overage, which is more than I can say for the shared hosts in the table above.
One line I would not skip: business email. Most store owners end up on Google Workspace, and Starter lists at $7 per user per month. A three-person store pays $21 a month for email alone, which is more than the shared hosting plan that started this whole exercise.
The same store at three traffic levels
Here is the part a plan card cannot answer. The same WooCommerce store costs different amounts depending on how many people visit it. The figures below are arithmetic on published prices, not quotes, and they exclude extensions and payment processing.
| Traffic level | Shared route | VPS route | Managed route |
|---|---|---|---|
| Under 10,000 visits/mo | SiteGround StartUp at $2.99 intro, $17.99 after | DigitalOcean 1 GiB droplet at $6 plus your own backups at 30% of droplet cost | Flywheel Starter at $25/mo |
| 30,000 to 75,000 visits/mo | GoGeek at $7.99 intro, $44.99 after | DigitalOcean 2 GiB droplet at $12 plus snapshots at $0.06 per GB | Kinsta entry at $30/mo billed annually, 125 GB CDN |
| 150,000+ visits/mo | Not published as a shared tier | DigitalOcean 4 GiB droplet at $24 plus managed database | Flywheel Scale at $242/mo, then $1 per 1,000 extra visits |
The middle row is where most growing stores sit, and it is where the shared tier stops being published at all. SiteGround’s GoGeek plan is the top shared tier it lists, and its page does not quote a number for the traffic beyond it.
Flywheel’s overage terms are worth reading before you pick that column. The vendor states the overage is $1 for each 1,000 visitors above your limit, and gives an example: a plan with 25,000 monthly visits that receives 30,000 gets a $5 overage. The same page charges $1 per GB over your storage limit. At 150,000 visits, a store on Flywheel Starter would be over its visitor limit by a wide margin, so the plan you buy matters more than the plan you start on.
Where the cost jumps as traffic grows
Three things change as a store grows, and only one of them is obvious.
The first is bandwidth. A catalog with large product images can serve several gigabytes to a few thousand visitors. That is why every managed host bundles a CDN, and why the CDN has its own ceiling. Kinsta’s entry plan includes 125 GB of CDN bandwidth a month. Above that, you buy more.
The second is the database. WooCommerce writes to MySQL on every order, every cart update and every session. A busy store that fits comfortably in 1 GiB of RAM at 10,000 visits will not fit at 100,000, and the fix is a bigger droplet or a bigger managed plan.
The third is backup storage and restore time. DigitalOcean charges 30% of the droplet cost for daily backups with 7-day retention, or 20% for weekly backups with 4-week retention. Flywheel includes nightly backups with 30 days of retention in the plan. If a plugin update breaks checkout, the difference between those two arrangements is measured in hours of your own time.
Cloudflare sits under all three of these as an optional layer. Its Pro plan lists at $20 a month billed annually or $25 month to month, and the free tier already covers caching and a basic WAF. For a store that is already on managed hosting, paying twice for protection is a real question.
Our verdict
Pick by how you want to spend your weekends, not by the sticker.
- Under $20,000 a year in sales and comfortable with the command line: a DigitalOcean droplet at $6 to $12 a month plus backups is the cheapest route that still performs. You own the patching.
- Growing WooCommerce store without an in-house developer: managed hosting at $25 to $35 a month. Flywheel Starter at $25 and Kinsta’s entry at $30 billed annually are the two numbers to compare, and both include the CDN and backups that you would otherwise buy separately.
- Past 100,000 visits a month: budget for the $242 tier rather than the $25 tier and expect an overage line. Flywheel publishes both of its overage rates, which makes the forecast easier.
- Already on Shopify or BigCommerce: your hosting is inside the subscription. Compare platform pricing instead, and read our hosting and platform cost overview for small stores if you are still choosing.
If you run WooCommerce and want the full cost picture including extensions and gateway fees, our WooCommerce vs Shopify fee comparison models the same order volume on both sides, and open-source alternatives to Shopify covers what self-hosting actually costs once you add developers.
How we researched this
- Every price came from a vendor pricing page fetched on 2026-10-01 through a US exit IP with an
en-USlocale. Several hosts serve different currencies by region, so the region check matters. - Renewal prices were taken from the vendor’s own renewal note on the plan card, not from promotional email copy.
- The traffic table is arithmetic on published plan prices, CDN allowances and overage rates. It is not a quote and it does not include your extensions or payment processing.
- Where a vendor does not publish a rate, I marked it rather than estimating. SiteGround does not publish a shared plan above GoGeek, so the high-traffic shared column reads as a gap.
- The full method is on our how we research page.
Sources
All URLs fetched 2026-10-01 via a US exit IP with Accept-Language: en-US.
- Kinsta pricing (https://kinsta.com/pricing/): entry Business price, annual price, CDN bandwidth, backup retention, additional site and disk pricing
- WP Engine plans (https://wpengine.com/plans/): entry price, annual billing total, additional site price
- Flywheel pricing (https://getflywheel.com/pricing/): Starter, Growth and Scale prices, visitor and storage overage rates, backup retention
- Hostinger WordPress hosting (https://www.hostinger.com/wordpress-hosting): intro prices, renewal prices, 48-month totals
- SiteGround web hosting (https://www.siteground.com/web-hosting.htm): StartUp, GrowBig and GoGeek intro and renewal prices
- DigitalOcean Droplets pricing (https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/droplets): droplet sizes, memory, vCPU and transfer, backup pricing
- DigitalOcean backups (https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/backups): daily and weekly backup pricing as a percentage of droplet cost
- Cloudflare plans (https://www.cloudflare.com/plans/): Pro and Business prices, free tier features
- Google Workspace pricing (https://workspace.google.com/pricing.html): Starter per-user price
- WP Migrate pricing (https://deliciousbrains.com/wp-migrate-db-pro/pricing/): one-time license prices
- WooCommerce pricing (https://woocommerce.com/pricing/): published hosting band of $25 to $350 per month for most stores
- Shopify pricing (https://www.shopify.com/pricing): unlimited web hosting and unlimited bandwidth statements
Related comparisons
Directly comparable breakdowns on this site: