E-Commerce Hosting Plans

E-commerce hosting is a hosting service that keeps your online store's product, order and customer data on resources sized for store software such as OpenCart, WooCommerce or PrestaShop. You can install your store software with one click in cPanel and serve your checkout pages securely with a free SSL certificate.

What to Look for When Choosing Hosting for Your Store

An online store uses far more resources than a brochure site of the same size: every product search and filter queries the database, every order is written to several tables, and every product image is copied in multiple sizes. That is why, when choosing e-commerce hosting, you should look at CPU, RAM, I/O limit and inode count together rather than disk space alone.

Resource Needs by Store Software

If you are looking for WooCommerce hosting, remember that WooCommerce is a plugin running on WordPress; the number of installed plugins and the PHP memory limit directly affect performance. OpenCart and PrestaShop are standalone PHP applications that run efficiently on shared resources for small and mid-sized catalogs. Magento 2, on the other hand, needs extra services such as OpenSearch and plenty of memory, so for large stores a virtual server with dedicated resources for Magento is a more realistic starting point.

Disk, Inodes and Product Images

Every file on the server uses one inode. WooCommerce generates several smaller sizes for each uploaded image, and OpenCart keeps resized images in its cache folder, so in a catalog of a few thousand products the inode count can run out before disk space does. Resizing images and converting them to WebP before upload, and regularly clearing unused cache files, saves both disk space and inodes. In our OpenCart hosting plans the inode limit is shown clearly in the plan table.

Payment Security, Backups and Location

Instead of processing and storing card details on your own server, using your bank's or payment provider's hosted payment page or iframe solution greatly reduces your PCI DSS obligations. Because orders change every day, take your own backup before major updates and campaigns in addition to the weekly automatic backup. When choosing a location, look at where your customers are: the Turkey location gives domestic visitors low latency and simplifies KVKK (Turkish data protection law) procedures for transferring personal data abroad, while the Germany location may suit you better if you sell to Europe.

Delivering Order Emails

To keep transactional emails such as order confirmations and shipping notices out of the spam folder, set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC records on your domain and configure your store software to send through authenticated SMTP. If the number of email accounts in the plans is not enough for your team, or you send a high volume of email, you can also consider our corporate email service.

E-Commerce Plan, WordPress Hosting or VDS?

For a WordPress site that only publishes content, WordPress hosting is the right fit. Once WooCommerce adds a cart, stock and payments, database load and concurrent sessions increase, and you should choose an e-commerce plan whose CPU, RAM and I/O limits match your product and traffic volume. For stores that process many orders a day, need extra services such as Redis or OpenSearch, or require root access, a VDS with resources dedicated to you is the right choice.

Steps to Migrate Your Existing Store

When moving your store from another provider, follow this order to avoid losing orders:

1. Take a full backup of your files and database at your current provider; if you use cPanel, a full cPanel backup is the easiest route.
2. Request the migration through a support ticket: our team moves stores from the same panel (cPanel to cPanel) free of charge and migrates those from other panels manually.
3. Lower your domain's TTL value a few hours before changing DNS.
4. When the migration is finished, open the site on the new server through your computer's hosts file and test products, cart, checkout and email notifications.
5. Put the store into maintenance mode briefly while you switch DNS, so orders landing on the old server do not cause data inconsistencies.
6. Finally, check that SSL is active, the HTTP-to-HTTPS redirect, scheduled tasks (cron) and your payment provider's notification (callback) URLs.

Common Hosting Mistakes in Online Stores

• Caching cart, checkout and account pages: customers may see the wrong cart contents or the payment may fail halfway.
• Leaving the payment module in test mode, or using live keys in a test environment.
• Uploading images at their original size, which wastes disk space and inodes and slows pages down.
• Updating without a backup, or switching to a PHP version your software does not support.
• Installing more plugins than you need; every plugin means extra database queries and a potential security hole.