What an online store needs from its server, which hosting models exist and what ecommerce hosting costs for Shopify, Shopware, WooCommerce and Magento.
Ecommerce hosting means running an online store on servers built for shop software, payments and traffic peaks. A store needs more than a website: a fast database, a cache, a search engine, background processes for emails and imports, daily backups and an encrypted connection. Which components exactly depends on the shop system.
With hosted platforms such as Shopify, hosting is part of the subscription; with Shopware, WooCommerce or Magento, you choose it yourself. On Shopify’s pricing page for Germany, plans start at €27 per month billed annually, with servers and an SSL certificate included. For a self-hosted Shopware store, pure hosting costs in our experience run €50 to €100 per month for small stores, €150 to €500 for mid-sized businesses and €500 to €1,500 for B2B and cluster setups.
The server price is rarely the biggest cost. Downtime, slow pages and operations that nobody owns cost more. Always budget for updates, monitoring and emergency support.
This article is for managing directors, ecommerce managers and IT leads who are setting up a new store, changing hosts or reviewing running costs. It explains, across platforms, which hosting models exist, what the server has to handle and how to plan costs realistically. How to run Shopware specifically and which hosts to consider is covered in our article on Shopware hosting.
A company website mostly serves pages that rarely change. An online store calculates on almost every click: prices per customer group, stock levels, cart, shipping costs, vouchers. Each of these requests hits the database, and only part of them can be cached.
In the background, tasks run that have nothing to do with the visitor: sending order confirmations, pulling stock levels from the ERP, importing product data, generating sitemaps, updating search indexes. Shopware handles this with a message queue and scheduled tasks, WooCommerce with the Action Scheduler, Magento with cron jobs and message queues. Basic web hosting packages often lack permanently running processes or a real cron job.
Customer accounts, addresses, order histories and, depending on the payment method, payment data are stored on the server or pass through it. That makes your host a data processor under the GDPR. A security hole then affects not only your website but your customers.
If a brochure website is down for an hour, hardly anyone notices. If a store is down for an hour on Black Friday, that hour’s revenue is gone and some customers buy from a competitor. That is why availability, support response times and a tested emergency plan matter more in ecommerce hosting than the base price.
There are six common ways to run an online store. They differ mainly in who takes care of servers, software and security.
| Model | Who runs what | Typical for | Main risk |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shared hosting | The host runs the server, you share it with many other customers. | Very small WooCommerce stores, test environments | Not enough capacity under load, little control over configuration |
| Managed hosting | The host runs the server and software stack (PHP, database, cache), you or your agency run the shop software. | Shopware, WooCommerce and Magento for mid-sized businesses | Scope varies widely between providers |
| Your own virtual or dedicated server | The host provides the hardware, you are responsible for everything above it. | Teams with in-house system administration | Security updates and outages are entirely on you |
| Cloud infrastructure (IaaS) | The provider supplies flexible computing power, you build the environment yourself. | Large stores with strongly fluctuating traffic | High effort for setup and operations |
| Platform as a Service (PaaS) | The provider runs the platform, scaling and backups, you are responsible for code and updates. | Stores with their own development team and regular deployments | Vendor lock-in, prices often on request only |
| Software as a Service (SaaS) | The provider runs everything, including the shop software. | Shopify, Shopware SaaS | Limits on customization and integrations |
With shared hosting, many websites share one server. It is cheap and good enough for a small WooCommerce installation or a test. It almost never fits Shopware or Magento, because background processes, enough PHP memory, Redis or a search engine such as OpenSearch are missing.
For most mid-sized merchants on Shopware, WooCommerce or Magento, managed hosting is the sensible default. The host keeps the operating system, PHP, database and web server up to date, monitors the server and creates backups. The shop software and its extensions remain your responsibility or your agency’s. Ask exactly where that line is drawn, because “managed” is not a protected term.
With Platform as a Service, the provider runs the infrastructure and scales it automatically, and you deliver the code. According to Shopware, Shopware PaaS Native runs exclusively on AWS in the Frankfurt region (eu-central-1). Shopware takes care of Kubernetes, database, search, cache, CDN, firewall and backups there, while updating Shopware itself stays with the merchant. With Software as a Service such as Shopify, the provider also runs the shop software. You rent a ready-made store and extend it with apps.
Your hosting choice follows your choice of shop system, not the other way round. The details below come from the vendors’ official documentation.
Shopware 6.7 requires PHP 8.2, 8.3 or 8.4, plus MySQL 8.0.17 or later or MariaDB 10.11 or later. Shopware explicitly lists some versions as problematic: MySQL 8.0.20 and 8.0.21 as well as MariaDB 10.11.5 and 11.0.3. Building the storefront requires Node.js 20 or later. Redis 7.0 or later is optional, but almost always useful in production. For the infrastructure, the Shopware documentation lists components such as Elasticsearch-based search, a database cluster, a message queue, a rate limiter and an HTTPS reverse proxy. Shopware can be self-hosted, run on Shopware PaaS Native or used as SaaS. Which version you should run is explained in our article on Shopware updates and versions.
Shopify is a pure SaaS system. According to its pricing page, web hosting and an SSL certificate are included in every plan. You do not choose a server or a host but a plan: Basic, Grow, Advanced or Plus. The limits are not in the server but in customization. Shopify only lets you fully customize checkout on the Plus plan, for example. For a fair comparison of both systems, see Shopify or Shopware.
WooCommerce is an extension for WordPress. For current versions, WooCommerce recommends PHP 8.3 or later, MySQL 8.0 or later or MariaDB 10.6 or later, a WordPress memory limit of at least 256 MB and HTTPS. A small WooCommerce store runs fine on good shared hosting. In our experience, a managed offering with an object cache pays off once you reach a few thousand orders per month or use many plugins.
Magento Open Source and Adobe Commerce have the highest requirements on this list. As tested versions for release 2.4.9, Adobe lists PHP 8.5, MySQL 8.4 or MariaDB 12.3, OpenSearch 3, Valkey 9, RabbitMQ 4.3 and Varnish 8, among others. A host has to offer this stack specifically. What that means for providers and costs will be covered in a separate article on Magento hosting. For a system comparison, read Shopware vs. Magento vs. WooCommerce.
Regardless of the system, a self-hosted store needs the same building blocks. Use this list to check any hosting offer.
If one of these is missing, the store often runs anyway. The problems only show up under load, at the next update or in an emergency, which is exactly when it gets expensive.
A valid TLS certificate is mandatory, and most hosts issue one for free via Let’s Encrypt. The more important question is whether card data reaches your server at all. PCI DSS is the global security standard for everyone who stores, processes or transmits cardholder data. If you integrate payment services so that the card input fields come from the payment provider, card data stays off your server. For Checkout and Elements, Stripe names the simplified questionnaire SAQ A. That significantly reduces the compliance effort, but it does not replace care for the rest of the server.
Your host processes personal data on your behalf. Under Art. 28 GDPR, you may only use processors that provide sufficient guarantees for appropriate technical and organizational measures. You also need a data processing agreement. Among other things, it covers the subject, duration and purpose of processing, the host’s obligation to follow your instructions and the deletion or return of data when the contract ends. Reputable hosts provide this agreement as standard. More on legal obligations in our article on data protection in online stores.
The GDPR does not require a server in your own country. A location in the EU does simplify data protection, because there is no transfer to third countries to assess. For speed, proximity to your customers counts. If you sell mainly in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, a data center in Central Europe serves you well. For customers on other continents, a content delivery network (CDN) helps by caching images and static files worldwide.
For merchants in the United States: Most Shopware partners and specialized Shopware hosts are based in Europe. If your customers are mainly in North America, ask for a data center in the US or a CDN with US locations, because Shopware PaaS Native runs only in the AWS Frankfurt region. Sales tax is calculated by the shop system, not the server, and for sales across several states most merchants connect a tax service through an integration. Shopify lists its US prices in dollars on its US pricing page, so the euro figures in this article are for orientation only. If you work with a European agency or host, agree on support hours: business hours in Central Europe overlap with the US East Coast for about two hours in the morning and hardly at all with the West Coast.
A backup on the same server protects you against an accidentally deleted product, not against a hardware failure or an attack. The 3-2-1 rule has proven itself: three copies of the data, on two different storage types, one of them in another location. Decide how many hours of order data you can afford to lose in the worst case and how long a restore may take. Shopware PaaS Native, for example, keeps backups for seven days and offers point-in-time recovery for the database. Every host should be able to give you figures like these.
Hosts advertise availability of 99.9% or 99.99%. The difference sounds small, but it is not. The table converts the percentages into permitted downtime.
| Guaranteed availability | Permitted downtime per year | Permitted downtime per month |
|---|---|---|
| 99.5% | 43.8 hours | 3.7 hours |
| 99.9% | 8.8 hours | 44 minutes |
| 99.95% | 4.4 hours | 22 minutes |
| 99.99% | 53 minutes | 4.4 minutes |
Check the contract for what counts as downtime. Planned maintenance windows are often excluded, and compensation is usually limited to part of the monthly fee. The host is generally not liable for your lost revenue.
A hypothetical store with €1.2 million in annual revenue makes roughly €137 per hour on average. At 99.9% availability, up to 8.8 hours of downtime per year would be within contract, which equals about €1,200 in revenue on average. If the outage falls on an evening in November, it is many times that, because far more people order then. This calculation helps you decide whether a more expensive setup with two servers pays off.
Most stores have a few days a year when traffic is a multiple of normal: Black Friday, newsletter campaigns, a TV appearance, a collection launch. A cache absorbs visitors browsing category and product pages. Cart, login, search and checkout can only be cached to a limited extent and put direct load on the database and PHP. Before a campaign, clarify with your host whether and how quickly resources can be added, and test it. According to Shopware, Shopware PaaS Native scales automatically, but only within the capacity configured in your plan. Load testing before go-live is explicitly the customer’s job there.
Google assesses loading speed through Core Web Vitals. Good values are a Largest Contentful Paint of up to 2.5 seconds, an Interaction to Next Paint of up to 200 milliseconds and a Cumulative Layout Shift of up to 0.1, each at the 75th percentile of page views. The server mainly affects the first response time and therefore the start of loading. Even the fastest server cannot make up for slow pages caused by large images, many scripts or a heavy theme. So measure first, before you book a more expensive plan. How to do that with Shopware is shown in our article on optimizing Shopware 6 performance.
Costs depend on the model, the shop system and the scope of operations. The figures below are monthly guide values. List prices come from the providers, all other figures are based on experience from our projects.
| Option | Cost per month | What is included |
|---|---|---|
| Shared hosting for a small WooCommerce store | about €5 to €30 (experience) | Share of a server, SSL, often email, hardly any support |
| Shopify Basic, Grow, Advanced | €27, €79, €289 billed annually, €36, €105, €384 billed monthly (list price, Germany) | Hosting, SSL, shop software; apps and per-sale fees extra |
| Shopify Plus | from €2,100 (list price, Germany) | As above, plus a fully customizable checkout, among other things |
| Managed hosting, small self-hosted store | €50 to €100 (experience) | Server, software stack, backups, basic monitoring |
| Managed hosting for mid-sized businesses | €150 to €500 (experience) | More powerful servers, Redis, dedicated search, staging |
| Cluster for B2B and high load | €500 to €1,500 (experience) | Several servers, load balancing, higher availability |
| PaaS, for example Shopware PaaS Native | on request | Platform operations, scaling, backups, CDN |
With Shopify, fees per sale come on top. According to the German pricing page, an online card payment via Shopify Payments costs 2.1% plus €0.30 on the Basic plan. If you use an external payment provider, you pay an additional transaction fee of 2% on Basic down to 0.2% on Plus. That is not hosting, but it belongs in any comparison with a self-hosted store. Details are in our article on Shopify costs, and the full calculation for Shopware in What does Shopware 6 cost?.
The server is the most visible line on the invoice, but rarely the largest. A self-hosted store regularly incurs:
The following examples are hypothetical. They show how monthly costs add up, not what your project will cost. We assume an hourly rate of €110 for maintenance.
Example 1, getting started with Shopify: Basic plan billed annually at €27, plus three apps for about €40 in total. There are no separate server costs. Total: about €67 per month, plus fees per sale.
Example 2, mid-sized business on Shopware Community Edition: Managed hosting €250, staging environment €50, four hours of updates and monitoring by an agency €440. Total: €740 per month, just under €8,900 per year. Infrastructure accounts for only about 40% of that.
Example 3, B2B store with ERP integration: Cluster with two application servers €900, dedicated search instance €150, monitoring with on-call support €600, eight hours of maintenance and integration upkeep €880. Total: €2,530 per month. Here, support costs more than the infrastructure.
The most common question before a hosting change is: how big does the server need to be? A serious answer is only possible with figures from your own store. Here is how to proceed:
A load test takes one-time effort. But it prevents two expensive mistakes: a server that is too small and fails on campaign day, and one that is too large and that you pay for every month. Concrete sizes for Shopware are given in our article on Shopware hosting, in the section on server sizing.
Price lists are hard to compare because every provider means something different by “managed”. So ask every host the same questions and get the answers in writing.
A tip from practice: ask for references with your shop system. A host that runs many WordPress sites is not automatically a good host for Shopware or Magento. Shopware works with its own hosting partners who know the system. What matters in managed hosting specifically for Shopware is something we will cover in a separate article.
No. For a small store, a hosted platform such as Shopify or a good managed offering is enough. Your own self-managed server only pays off if you have special requirements and staff to run it.
Yes. According to Shopify, web hosting and an SSL certificate are included in all plans. You pay for the plan, apps and per-sale fees, but not for a separate server.
No, the GDPR does not require that. A data center in the EU simplifies data protection, and proximity to your customers improves response times. What matters is a data processing agreement with the host.
Up to 8.8 hours of downtime per year, or about 44 minutes per month, are within contract. Check whether planned maintenance counts.
With a self-hosted store, yes, which is one of its advantages. Plan the move with staging, shortened DNS times and a test run. With SaaS systems, you do not change hosts but, if needed, the shop system, and that is a migration.
Are you planning a new store or want to know whether your hosting fits your store? As a Shopware Platinum Partner from Bremen, Germany, we have been working with merchants and their hosts since 2017. We help you choose the environment, set up staging and deployment and, if you wish, take over ongoing operations. What a maintenance contract with updates, security patches and monitoring includes is described on our Shopware support and maintenance page.
Already running a store? Our free shop analysis shows where your technology and performance stand today. Or talk to us directly. We will also tell you if a hosted platform is the simpler solution for you.
Besnik Bilalli is the founder and CEO of solution25, the Shopware agency from Bremen. Before founding the agency in 2017, he built his own online store and grew it to more than 500 orders a day. Since then he has been helping merchants with Shopware projects, from the first budget to ongoing operations. He’s happy to answer questions about this article personally: get in touch.
Responsible for content and updates: Besnik Bilalli. Last updated: November 2026. Next content review: February 2027.
