These reviews of the best ecommerce hosting companies in 2024 should prove helpful if you’re looking to sell products online via your website. This is our list of the top 10 ecommerce web hosts for an online store – to shortlist if you’re planning a new site or you want to move an existing e-shop.
Good website hosting providers are the often first place to start for creating online stores, as most come with top ecommerce website builders ready to install at the click of a button.
We also describe and signpost a great all-in-one solution in Shopify, which is perhaps the most complete, quick to set up, SEO-friendly, and easy to use ecommerce platform with hosting included.
A secure and reliable website is an important consideration to prevent headaches down the line, while speed is an increasingly important detail for both trust and customer experience. The providers here are some of the best web hosting companies based on my experience and research.
While saving money is important, and although for a personal or information site you can get away with a cheap hosting provider, choosing one of the best becomes more important when you are conducting online business and selling products and services through an online store.
What Makes a Good eCommerce Host?
There are certain components of a good ecommerce host that are important considerations if you want to sell products or services online:
- Security – look for secure web hosting advice and solutions – SSL certificates are a must if you are going to accept online card payments. SSL enables your web address to start with the padlock as a security signal in the visitor’s address bar
- Speed – a fast website will be rewarded with better Google rankings and will further build trust with your visitors – nobody wants to wait for your pages to load
- Reliability – consistent uptime is important for maintaining your Google rankings and trust with your new ad repeat visitors
- Great customer service – there are cheap web hosting services out there, but make sure you don’t compromise on support. eCommerce website hosting requirements can be more complex than for say, a personal blog, so fast, reliable and knowledgable customer support staff will be something you greatly appreciate if you need it at any point.
This list of website hosting companies for ecommerce takes into account experiences with providers over the last 3 years in particular. We have removed two hosts from the list following issues with their uptime and customer service, and are only including providers if we have had positive experiences or heard good reviews about them from multiple trusted sources.
Siteground
Siteground offer free SSL certificates via Let’s Encrypt
One of the most popular web hosting providers in the world, Siteground e-commerce solutions range from low-cost, shared servers to powerful cloud or dedicated server packages. If you’re looking for the best ecommerce hosting in the UK, USA, Europe or Asia-Pacific region then you are well catered for.
The company has data centres in London UK, Paris France, Madrid Spain, Eemshaven Netherlands, Frankfurt Germany, Sydney Australia and Singapore, as well as 4 locations across the US. The company allows you to choose the closest for you and / or your customers.
This will help deliver the best website speed, and fast web page load times can make a real difference when it comes to selling online.
Siteground’s website offers a great deal of advice about the various platforms you might want to use to set up an online shop. At the time of writing, there are 18 e-commerce apps available 1-click install in CPanel and WordPress and Magento are recommended by these web hosts, with both given particular prominence on their site.
Siteground offers PCI Compliant hosting solutions, 24/7 support, and guarantees 99.9% uptime.
Since our earlier review, the addition of free SSL certificates with all their hosting packages means that you can have the green address bar and HTTPS – an important trust signal for an online shop to show that customers’ payment details are safe and secure – without any extra expense. This is great as an SSL certificate usually starts at around £40 / $50.
Getting the padlock symbol and HTTPS at the start of your web address has now become a must-have, rather than a nice-to-have for ecommerce website owners.
Google has publicly stated that websites with valid HTTPS get a small ranking boost, and now all non-HTTPS pages show a ‘Not Secure’ warning in the Chrome web browser, so most of the web will move to it over the coming months. A stronger red warning is already in place in Chrome for any web pages that collect personal information via forms, such as payment details. Therefore, if you are setting up an ecommerce website, ensuring that it has a valid SSL certificate is now a must.
This addition of free SSL makes Siteground one of the best choices for secure and SEO friendly website hosting, as well as being fast and reliable, with excellent customer service.
Many hosts are likely to follow Siteground’s lead in making SSL available for free by default.
Siteground use Google cloud hosting infrastructure for all new clients, and are finalising the migration of existing users to these servers. As well as further improving the speed and reliability of their solutions, this move also makes Siteground one of the best green hosting companies around.
Learn more about their hosting packages and features on the Siteground website. We have found this to be the best ecommerce hosting companies in the world is you want a good value host for WordPress websites with WooCommerce or other popular CMS / shopping cart platforms, such as Magento, OpenCart or PrestaShop.
Visit the Siteground eCommerce hosting section to learn more.
WordPress and WooCommerce Hosting – Kinsta
We have moved some websites to specialist WordPress hosting provider – Kinsta.
Despite being one of the world’s top web hosting companies, with clients that include Fortune500 companies and major global brands like Ricoh and Intuit, their users are not limited to those with big budgets. Their prices combine low cost with extremely good, fast levels of support.
Their hosting is based on the Google Cloud Platform (and how often do you see the Google website go down?) with a choice of over 20 data centres across the globe, so you can choose a location closest to your most frequent / important visitors to maximise pageload speed.
They also have a range of security measures in place, with the assurance of regular back-ups and uptime checks every 2 minutes.
Their customer support is excellent, with managed migration to their hosting a very helpful option if you have an existing website hosted elsewhere.
Learn more about the Kinsta hosting features on their website.
Kualo
This UK and US based eco-friendly hosting company is a new addition to the list, and seems to be a real gem. We found Kualo when looking for the best green web hosting companies around the world, and placing scrutiny on genuine environmentally friendly commitments and practices. Kualo came out joint top alongside only two other providers and our review of their service for the sites we have moved to them is 5 Star without question.
They have a dedicated page on the site explaining how they deliver a green web hosting service that is also extremely quick and reliable, by:
- Powering their data centres with 100% renewable energy, sourced from windfarms (including London Array, the world’s largest off-shore windfarm)
- Running an energy efficient data centre – built to be that way from the ground up
- A range of other policies, including smart cooling sensors for their servers and minimising staff travel.
They offer low cost web hosting for small business sites through to large ecommerce stores running leading platforms such as Magento, OpenCart or PrestaShop, as well as WooCommerce via WordPress. The WordPress websites we have moved their have so far run extremely fast, were easy to set up quickly with the cPanel hosting, and the service has been reliable with no issues so far.
Learn more about Kualo web hosting on their site – we think they are great and highly recommend them.
Bluehost
In terms of customer service and slickness of operation, Bluehost is certainly justified a place in the list of top 10 ecommerce hosting companies we have used to date. When we first joined them, we signed up and paid online, and not long later (within about 24 hours I think), we received a phone call from them, asking if we were getting on OK.
Never experienced this before and we were doubly impressed as they took the care to call me during my working hours even though we’re based in the UK and they are in the US.
Bluehost were extremely professional and helpful when we needed technical support, and we found them quick and easy to deal with. We have only used quite basic web hosting packages with them so far, but they seem great value and often have special offers running.
We would certainly place them on the shortlist when looking at the best ecommerce hosting companies for your online store. Their good reviews seem well justified.
iPage
Highly rated by many website reviews, the ecommerce hosting solutions from iPage are clearly explained on their site. There are specific solutions and advice for the ShopSite online shopping cart system, PayPal for credit card processing, and SSL Certificates for customer security.
Clook
Another website host with UK servers. We have managed a retail client’s ecommerce site at Clook without any problems. Their servers are set up to support a wide range of popular e-store solutions, such as Magento, Zen Cart, OpenCart and XCart systems for online shopping with secure payment processing.
Layershift
Home to many of the world’s leading companies, Layershift offers specific solutions and advice pages for ecommerce web hosting. The Magento open source e-commerce platform is a popular choice for main online retail businesses and Layershift offers easy install, as well as managed hosting services and 24/7 support for this e-shop builder. Among their e-commerce hosting security solutions, there is automated data backup every 6 hours available.
Rackspace
For larger ecommerce businesses, Rackspace online store solutions include a range of managed services and they are specialists in cloud hosting technology. The company offers Linux and Windows cloud servers for sites ranging from fairly low traffic and storage levels requiring 1GB of RAM, right up to intensive requirements of 120GB for massive, high traffic websites.
We have worked with companies using Rackspace to host their own sites, as well as applications for some global, blue-chip retailers, without any issues to our knowledge.
Looking for a green hosting company for your online store? Rackspace are one of only 3 companies given a 5-star review in the Good Tech Guide list of the best green web hosting providers when they analysed the eco credentials of several hosts who promote themselves as being environmentally friendly.
ekmPowershop
This ecommerce website builder offers an easy way to create an eshop and comes with free online store hosting. It allows you to accept debit and credit card payments, as well as using many other popular online payment processing systems, such as PayPal and SagePay. ekmPowershop charges a flat monthly fee for use of the platform and ecommerce hosting, but there are no transaction fees.
At the time of writing there are over 150 website templates for your estore and there are many useful features that make the system easy for both the customer and the business owner, including social media promotional tools, eBay integration, live chat functionality, customer address verification and multi-currency displays. With this provider, you can host unlimited products on your site, as well as adding blogs, promotional stickers and customer loyalty schemes.
Shopify
This all-in-one ecommerce website software and online store hosting solution powered over $4.1 Billion on Black Friday in November 2023. Having a complete web shop solution like this ensures that all aspects of your ecommerce system are compatible and work together seamlessly.
It is simple enough to set up and use for novice website users, meaning that the e-shop owner does not need to engage the services of expert web developers. Even much of the web design is taken care of, so that all you might want to create a slick experience for your visitors is a graphic designer to help you with a company logo.
Online stores with Shopify are mobile friendly out of the box – one of the benefits of using one of the more modern e-commerce platforms.
For most users looking to create a low-cost, turnkey eshop, this would prove to be an effective, cheap and reliable solution, which can be upgraded as your needs grow. It comes with a range of innovative tools specific to the field of online retail, such as gift cards and purchase journey analytics. Security in the online shopping experience is at the core of its functionality and Shopify is certified as PCI Compliant. There is even a dedicated iPad point of sale add-on to make mobile ecommerce even easier for many buyers.
If an easy to use, integrated solution is a high priority when choosing the best ecommerce hosting company for you, then Shopify could be a great choice.
If you have been looking for reviews of the top ecommerce web hosting companies for 2024 and beyond, then we hope the information above has proved useful. Happy selling!
