Buyer's Guide
Weighing up woocommerce vs shopify
A straight answer for shop owners choosing between software they own and a platform they merely rent: how to weigh the options, what to leave on the shelf, and the setup we would order.
Straight answer first
Our verdict, stated first: Shopify when never touching maintenance is worth the toll, and WooCommerce on tuned hosting when margin, control and ownership matter more — most shops that start growing run the numbers and end up here.
The reasoning, the tests and the trap to avoid all sit below — written for shop owners choosing between software they own and a platform they merely rent, with none of the affiliate-table theatre this subject usually attracts.
Written by the Hosting Seller staff · Checked 1 August 2026
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This guide is written for shop owners choosing between software they own and a platform they merely rent. If that describes you, the decision has a right answer — it just is not the one the comparison-table trade is paid to hand out.
One market fact frames the whole thing: a transaction fee is a tax on doing well: the percentage stays the same while the bill climbs with every extra sale, which is why shop owners tend to redo this comparison the moment trade picks up.
The tests that actually decide it
Strip out the feature-table padding and a handful of tests decide this purchase:
What the whole thing costs at your sales volume: subscription plus transaction cuts against hosting plus extensions.
How far you can bend it — open code on one side, platform limits on the other.
How much upkeep you want: some assembly required, or none at all.
The cost of leaving, because moving a live shop is major surgery.
The trap most buyers walk straight into
Weighing up the headline monthly price while ignoring the percentage of every sale that grows as you do.
It survives because it works on first-time buyers — the cost is deferred, disguised or discovered at renewal, long after the comparison was made. Pricing the second year rather than the first is the one habit that defuses most of it.
The recommendation, and the reasoning behind it
Shopify when never touching maintenance is worth the toll, and WooCommerce on tuned hosting when margin, control and ownership matter more — most shops that start growing run the numbers and end up here.
On our shelves that means the Pro Store plan — SSL, migration and mail included, a renewal price matching the order price, and an upgrade path so the choice never has to be made again from scratch.
Backups run every day on every plan, and putting a file or a database back takes one click from the panel.
How to check all this yourself
Run the same checks on us as on anybody else: message support before you pay and see who answers, hold the renewal price against the order price, read the refund terms end to end, and look the company up — ours is Bohzo Ltd, registered in England and Wales, and the record is public.
The refund window covers the rest — move a real site across (the free migration makes that painless), live with it for a fortnight, and let daily use settle what no marketing page can.
Why we can afford to give a straight answer
Most 'best hosting' writing is paid ranking. Ours has a simpler motive: we recommend the setup we would sell you anyway, and we say so — which leaves the rest of the page free to be genuinely useful.
Backups run every day on every plan, and putting a file or a database back takes one click from the panel.
- Tests you can run for yourself
- Renewal prices on the tag, not in a footnote
- The free move in makes trying us painless
- A refund policy with no small print
Why Hosting Seller
On every plan, as standard
One price, plainly printed
The order price is the renewal price — the comparison that matters is the one we win without trying.
Support you can try first
Ask us something hard before you pay — how a host behaves pre-sale is the ceiling of what follows.
A refund without a gauntlet
If it does not suit, leaving is a request rather than a negotiation — which is why we are content to be tested.
NVMe and LiteSpeed as standard
The performance kit other hosts reserve for premium tiers is simply how our plans are built.
Written for the real buyer
The tests here come out of actual conversations with shop owners choosing between software they own and a platform they merely rent, not off a feature spreadsheet.
A company you can look up
Bohzo Ltd, registered in England and Wales — a host with a public record you can read before trusting.
Price Tags Compared
Our figures beside the big names
Sign-up and renewal prices for GoDaddy, Hostinger and Namecheap, set next to ours — the second number most comparison charts leave off.
| Line item | Hosting SellerBest seller | GoDaddy | Hostinger | Namecheap |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Entry price / mo* | $2.09/mo | $5.99 | $2.99 | $1.88 |
| Price at renewal / mo | $2.09/mo | $11.99 | $10.99 | $4.29 |
| Entry plan renews at the same price | ||||
| SSL on every plan | ||||
| Site migration included | ||||
| NVMe storage on the entry plan | ||||
| Daily backups on the entry plan | ||||
| Live human support, 24/7 |
*Our figure is the cheapest plan we sell, on an annual term. The competitor figures are the lowest shared-hosting price each of them published in July 2026 — those introductory rates normally require signing up for 1–4 years and rise once that term ends. Check their own sites for what they charge today.
First Steps
From choosing to live
- 1
Write the requirement in one sentence
Put down what the site has to do and for whom — for shop owners choosing between software they own and a platform they merely rent, that one sentence usually settles half the plan choice by itself.
- 2
Price the second year, not the first
Multiply the renewal price by the term and add every extra you would genuinely need — the cheapest headline rarely survives that sum.
- 3
Try it inside the refund window
Order, move a real site across free, and use it properly for a fortnight — the daily experience is the product, and the window makes trying it cost nothing.
In the Box
Packed with every plan
- WebP image optimisation built in and costing nothing
- PHP versions picked per site from the panel
- Nothing added at setup — no joining fee, ever
- The Softaculous installer for one-click application setup
- A 30-day money-back guarantee on every hosting plan
- The renewal price printed on the tag matches the order price
- DDoS filtering handled out at the network edge
- NVMe SSD storage on every shelf, not just the top one
- LiteSpeed caching running at the server, not bolted on by plugin
- A backup taken daily, with restores you run yourself
Across the Counter
The questions we get asked most
Is WooCommerce really the harder shop to run?
Setting it up asks you to make choices Shopify makes for you. On managed WooCommerce hosting, though, updates, backups, caching and security are already handled, which closes most of that gap while you keep the freedom.
What does it cost to move from one to the other?
Products and customer records export and import well enough. Themes, apps and the search ranking your URLs earned do not travel. Either direction is a proper project, which is a good argument for choosing on five-year figures rather than first-month comfort.
Can I test changes somewhere safe first?
Yes — plans with staging let you clone the live site, work on the copy, then push it across when you are satisfied. It is the difference between hoping an update behaves and knowing that it does before any customer meets it.
Does hosting come with mailboxes?
It does — mailboxes on your own domain ship with every hosting plan, with webmail, IMAP, POP and SMTP access and spam filtering fitted as standard. There is also standalone email hosting for domains whose website lives somewhere else entirely.
Which control panel comes with the account?
cPanel, which the whole trade already knows. That means every tutorial online matches what you see, your backups restore onto any cPanel host anywhere, and what you learn here stays useful for life. Plesk and DirectAdmin are stocked on specific plans for anyone who prefers them.
Can one plan hold more than a single website?
From the Pro tier upward, yes — several sites, each with its own domain, mailboxes and certificate, all under one account. If those extra sites belong to clients rather than to you, reseller hosting is the better fit: it gives each one proper separation.
How do I pay, and does it bill again on its own?
Orders go through a secure checkout by credit or debit card, and the renewal is taken at the same price you first paid. Every invoice sits in the client area for you to read, and switching auto-renewal off is a toggle in your account rather than a phone call.
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