What I’d tell every ecommerce merchant about hosting before they launch

I’ve spent over a decade as a partner and consultant to some of the largest hosting companies. I know which hosts keep showing up in the repair yard. So when I tell you I’d host my own store on WP Cloud, that’s not a company line. It’s the same answer I’d give a friend.

I’m Jesse Friedman, Head of WP Cloud at Automattic, author, speaker, and host of the Impressive Hosting podcast. Here’s my take on how to choose great hosting for your ecommerce site. 

If you’re on Shopify, Wix, or another “closed platform,” the trade-off is worth naming plainly: you get a slick interface in exchange for following their rules. Your store data, customers, and ability to leave are subject to terms that may change. On the open web, none of that is true. You own what you build. That’s why WooCommerce exists, and why hosting decisions actually matter.

There are hundreds of hosting companies out there offering solutions for WordPress and the open web. So how do you actually choose?

Last year, I was looking to buy a boat. Every brand insisted it was the best, every forum contradicted every other forum, and every review was clearly written by someone trying to sell me something. I could have spent the entire season building spreadsheets and reading Reddit threads and still ended up guessing.

So I found a boat inspector. A guy who spends his days looking at what’s broken, who knows which boats show up in the repair yard over and over, and which ones he almost never sees. I asked him one question: “What boat would you buy?” He didn’t hesitate with his answer, and that was my decision, made.

That’s what you actually need. Not another ranking article favoring the highest affiliate payouts. Not another comparison chart. You need the expert to tell you what they would buy. So that’s what I’m going to do. I run WP Cloud, and I’m an expert whose reputation I care about protecting. When I tell you the answer is WP Cloud, I mean it.

If there’s one thing you can take home from this section, it’s that WP Cloud was purpose-built to host WooCommerce stores. Here are six under-the-hood reasons why I recommend it, and why it matters for your store.

1. Vertical scaling in real time

Black Friday is the one day you can’t afford for your store to go down. Most cloud hosts handle traffic spikes by spinning up additional servers and replicating your content across them, which takes time and leaves customers waiting for pages to load.

WP Cloud scales vertically. Meaning, when you need resources, it can provide them to you instantly from a single machine. In fact, it can burst a single site to over a hundred CPU cores and PHP workers without provisioning a new machine. The Black Friday rush doesn’t have to become the Black Friday outage.

2. Automated real-time failover

When a pipe fails or a data center goes down, your customers see a broken website. WP Cloud mirrors your site across multiple data centers, so traffic reroutes automatically. Your customers won’t notice a disruption. 

This is how our hosting partners can offer 100% uptime with a money-back guarantee. Bluehost Cloud and Pressable both run on WP Cloud, and both make that promise. They can because the infrastructure supports it.

3. Backups that respect ecommerce

Most hosts do a nightly backup of your entire website. That sounds fine until you actually need it, and realize you have to overwrite everything to restore anything, and every order placed since the last backup is gone. 

WP Cloud and Jetpack’s VaultPress real-time backups give you granular restore points: a single page, a database table, a broken plugin update. Your orders are preserved through any restore. You’re not choosing between fixing a problem and keeping your sales history.

4. Security is built into the infrastructure layer

When margins get tight, many hosting companies treat security as an upsell. It’s often the first thing that gets stripped out and sold back to you as an add-on. For a store handling customer payment data, that’s real exposure. 

Security runs at the platform level with WP Cloud: DDoS mitigation, WAF rules, brute-force protection, SSL/TLS encryption, and malware scanning, with little to no setup required. 

WP Cloud-powered hosts also layer in Jetpack for an additional line of defense at the application level: anti-spam for your comments and forms (Akismet), real-time malware scanning of your site’s files, and real-time backups that capture every change as it happens. Infrastructure security keeps bad actors off the platform. Application security keeps them out of your store.

5. WordPress-first, not WordPress-compatible

If your store slows down and you call your hosting company, ask: Does anyone there know exactly how your store talks to the database? Generic cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) are provisioning the same server your site is on to an AI lab, a game studio, a logistics company, and more. Your store’s checkout behavior under load is not a problem they’ve likely spent time on.

WP Cloud is tuned specifically for how WordPress runs. PHP versions, caching layers, database configurations, object storage. All of it built around WordPress workloads, including the database-heavy ones WooCommerce generates at checkout, in inventory, and in customer accounts. When something’s slow, the people looking at it know exactly what they’re looking at.

6. Built by the people who build WordPress

Say WordPress ships a major release. Most hosts will find out when you do, and a wait begins. You’ll wait for compatibility confirmation, for responses to support tickets, and for an update that may or may not arrive before something in your store breaks.

Automattic runs on WP Cloud. It also runs WordPress.com, WooCommerce, and Jetpack, and contributes more to WordPress core than any other company. When a release is coming, we know what’s in it because we wrote it. That shows up as fewer surprises after an update and faster resolution when something does go wrong.

It probably does. Entry-level plans on WordPress.com, Pressable, Bluehost Cloud, and Convesio are priced competitively with shared hosts you’ve heard of. You’re not paying enterprise rates for enterprise infrastructure you don’t need. That’s the point of what we built.

If you start somewhere cheaper and outgrow it, moving up to a WP Cloud-powered host is a clean migration. The open web doesn’t punish you for starting small. A closed platform would. 

If you’re running an enterprise store and you need hands-on, top-of-the-line managed hosting with a dedicated team, you want WordPress VIP. That’s Automattic’s enterprise platform, and it’s what runs some of the biggest sites on the web. Global news publishers, Fortune 500 brands, and high-traffic retailers. It’s not for everyone, and it’s not meant to be. But when you need it, you can contact the VIP team directly.

Before you commit — WP Cloud-powered or not — run through these practical steps:

• Use the trial. Most hosts offer a free trial or a money-back guarantee. Set a calendar reminder before it expires. 
• Test support before you need it. Support is where hosts differ. WordPress.com and Pressable have Happiness Engineers who know WordPress cold. Bluehost Cloud offers free tier-three phone support — I call it the Bat Phone. Convesio delivers support in Slack. Figure out which model fits how you work before your trial ends. 
• Check security isn’t an add-on. Cheaper hosting often means generic security tools bolted on after the fact. At a minimum, you need SSL, strong passwords, vulnerability scanning, and malware scanning. And they should come standard, not upsold
• Look them up on Review Signal. Kevin Ohashi runs the most unbiased performance and uptime testing I know of.
• Log in to the control panel. Make sure you can navigate it and perform the actions you need.
• Look at what’s included. Some hosts bundle SEO tools, security features, and site-building tools at no extra cost. Worth knowing before you start paying for them separately.

Pick any of the WP Cloud-powered hosts I mentioned above, and you’re going to be fine. The hard part was choosing the open web over a closed platform. 

If you have questions about this article, about hosting, about whether you’re making the right call for your store, I want to hear them. Leave a comment below, and I’ll answer it myself. You can also reach me directly at Jesse at wp dot cloud. I read every message, and I’ll get back to you. And if you want more thinking like this, listen to my podcast, Impressive Hosting, where I dig into what great WordPress hosting actually looks like with the people building it.

About

Jesse Friedman

Jesse Friedman brings nearly two decades of experience in working with and contributing to WordPress. He is the host of the Impressive Hosting podcast, a local WordPress community leader, and an experienced WordCamp organizer. As an author of several books, including the 'Web Designer's Guide to WordPress' and a decade of experience as an adjunct professor, Jesse has had the privilege to educate thousands of students in and outside the classroom. Currently, as the Head of WP Cloud at Automattic, Jesse focuses on innovating and elevating the standards of WordPress cloud hosting.