The right hosting service should be secure. Your hosting service should be able to help you solve hosting-related problems and quick. Your hosting service should be fast because quick page loads are critical in retaining site visitors. So what is the best WooCommerce hosting service?
Here is our review of some of the more popular hosting services around.
GoDaddy
Our rating: 7/10
GoDaddy has one of the cheapest plans available for website owners. They have a basic plan for those on a tight budget. Their basic plan has limited features and may not be a good choice. Make sure to check if these features will fit your needs as you might end up spending more with add-ons. Choose their higher priced packages if you need better functionalities such as a staging site to aid in development work.
Its performance and speed are acceptable but not that outstanding. As for support, it is not as good as other hosting services. All in all, it’s a decent hosting service. There is not much to worry about if you decide to go with them.
Bluehost
Our rating: 8/10
Bluehost is one of the most popular hosting services. For us, this popularity is reasonable. We haven’t had much trouble with the sites hosted in Bluehost that we’ve handled. Its server response time or speed can range from average to fast. It is still better than other shared hosting providers.
Their basic plan has less storage compared to GoDaddy’s but they offer more features. Features include a Global CDN, domain privacy, and SiteBackup. Your online store can benefit from better speed and security. In a hostbenchmarker study, Bluehost support takes some time to respond compared to other hosting services. We haven’t had much opportunity to work with their support though. To us, this gives them more value in that we or our clients haven’t had much to complain about.
Web Synthesis
Our rating: 7/10
Synthesis is another good hosting service for online stores. It is a managed hosting service so it’s a bit pricier than others. They offer features that optimize site performance and security. Their speed is one of the fastest around. They also have an efficient support team.
The downside is that they don’t provide a staging site feature. This might complicate the development of your site. The usage of a staging/development site is best practice for website development. With a staging site, you’re able test your website updates before applying them to your live site.
Their processing power is also great but they have metered bandwidths. It’s not much to worry about as they provide 2TB-6TB plans. Unless you get huge bursts of traffic from content going viral, you’ll be okay. Overall, it provides a reliable hosting service.
Siteground
Our rating: 9/10
We consider Siteground as one of the best hosting services for online stores and websites in general. Other review sites have pegged it as their top hosting service. Our experience with it has also been great.
The prices for its plans are reasonable. It has a metered bandwidth but the speed is top-notch with their super-caching feature. At the time of writing, they have servers in 3 continents and offer free CDN to each account.
All plans provide a decent backup service. Based on our experience, their customer service is good. You won’t find many hosting services giving the same value for money as Siteground.
WP Engine
Our rating: 9/10
WP Engine is a managed WordPress hosting service. This makes it work well for WooCommerce sites. It’s our hosting of choice for Wooassist.com. We chose this as it works great and comes with a host of other features.
In our experience, speed has not been a problem. They use EverCache for speed and massive scalability. They are also CDN-ready and this helps in delivering global content. They also offer good security and backup features to boot.
In addition, they also have the best support service compared to other hosting sites we have worked with. They don’t have the cheapest plans but they have reasonable and flexible value-for-money plans. We consider it the best hosting for low to medium volume online stores.
VPS Hosting Services
Our rating: 5/10
This isn’t a review on a particular hosting but VPS or Virtual Private Server hosting in general. This type of hosting service is well suited for large websites. It is also a type of shared hosting that benefits most advanced users. Its pricing is not as cheap as the hosting services we reviewed in this post, but it’s not as expensive as dedicated servers.
The downside is its standard interface requires a lot of digging. Some services may be inflexible or frustrating because of its steep learning curve. Most VPSs do not come with a myriad of features, unlike the hosting services we reviewed in this post.
Not exclusive to VPS, but bursts of traffic tend to slow down a VPS-hosted site too much. The entire website could also go down because of this. They have failed in speed and reliability. For your WooCommerce store, we’d recommend to stay away from VPS hosting services in general.
Conclusion
Choosing a hosting service is something that you should do after thorough consideration. Read the fine print and the features before you pay for the service. This will keep you from wasting your time and money for hosting that is not a good fit for your WooCommerce store. Please note that even if we are affiliates with Siteground and WP Engine, we chose them based on years of experience. We have dealt with these hosting services for our clients’ and our own sites. We can attest that these two are among the best. If you were to sign up to either of them, we’d be grateful if you did so by clicking either of the links above.
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