Shopify review
Hosted ecommerce platform, not traditional hosting
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Quick verdict
The straightforward answer for a serious shop where you would rather sell than administer servers.
A fully hosted ecommerce platform. You do not manage hosting at all — infrastructure, PCI compliance and scaling are handled, in exchange for platform fees and less control.
Who it suits
- · Online shops
- · First-time site owners
Who should look elsewhere
- · Monthly platform fee plus transaction fees unless using Shopify Payments
- · Limited control over the underlying stack
- · Migrating away later is a real project
- · No email hosting for your domain
Hostoholic Score
How this rating is built
Weighted from six dimensions. Affiliate commission is not an input — there is no field for it in the calculation.
What you pay across the full term — including the renewal, not just the headline.
Channels offered, hours covered, and whether the answers are any good.
Control panel, onboarding, migration and how much you need to already know.
Not yet assessed: Performance, Reliability, Features. These are excluded and the remaining weights renormalised, rather than counted as zero.
What is good
- Nothing to patch, scale or secure yourself
- Handles payment compliance and checkout
- Very large app and theme ecosystem
- Scales through traffic spikes without intervention
What is not
- Monthly platform fee plus transaction fees unless using Shopify Payments
- Limited control over the underlying stack
- Migrating away later is a real project
- No email hosting for your domain
The detail
Features and specifications
Anything marked unknown has not been verified by an editor yet. We would rather show a gap than a guess.
Hosting and platform
- Control panel
- Shopify Admin
- UK data centre
- Unknown
- Data centre regions
- Unknown
- Free SSL
- Yes
- Email hosting included
- No
- Free migration
- Unknown
- Money-back period
- Unknown
Performance and tooling
- Staging environment
- Unknown
- CDN included
- Yes
- Object caching
- Unknown
- Redis
- Unknown
- Automatic backups
- Unknown
- Backup retention
- Unknown
Developer access
- SSH access
- Unknown
- Git
- Unknown
- WP-CLI
- Unknown
- Cron jobs
- Unknown
- PHP versions
- Unknown
- Node.js support
- Unknown
Ecommerce and security
- WooCommerce support
- Unknown
- Malware protection
- Unknown
- Web application firewall
- Unknown
- DDoS protection
- Unknown
- Support channels
- live chat, email, knowledge base, community
Pricing
What it costs
We publish a price only once an editor has checked it against the provider's own pricing page and recorded the date.
| Plan | Type | Sites | Latest checked price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Basic | ecommerce | — | GBP 19 |
Alternatives
Compare Shopify with
Sources
Where this information came from
- Shopify hosting overview· Capabilities and plan structure · checked 17/08/2026
- Shopify pricing page· Entry pricing · checked 17/08/2026
Spotted something wrong?
Facts drift. If something here is out of date, tell us and we will check it.