Hosting package for Woocommerce recommendations please

[Techrat]

I'm looking at setting up one or two ecommerce sites and I like the look of woocommerce, I'd go with shopify but it's a bit costly to start with. I've tested Woocommerce a bit with a local install using bitnami and think it seems like a decent system and not too technically involved. I'm decently knowledgeable with PC's and internet but haven't done any web development or hosting before, and I don't really want a huge amount of stress trying to keep some underperforming website going.

I've been looking at hosting packages and I've seen you can get pretty cheap options from elitehost and domains.co.za for example. I'm just starting these websites from nothing so I won't have a lot of traffic to begin with at least. Siteground.com is another possibility but I think I might prefer local hosting as the websites will be for the SA market mainly.

It's difficult for me to estimate a number of visitors or anything like that as I haven't even started yet. On one of the sites I'm looking at maybe around 100 products to start with, not sure what else I might need to take into account performance wise. I'm wondering if these relatively cheap packages will even be able to handle very small traffic woocommerce websites without being terribly slow? What sort of server resources will I need to get decent performance out of woocommerce?

 

[Jade @ Absolute Hosting]

Typically the size or cost of a package doesn’t limit the speed of a website but rather the amount of storage and other addon services available, such as number of databases, domains and mail accounts.

The above statement is true for most providers including ourselves who provide SSD storage, others may use traditional sata drives and be able to offer you increased/unlimited storage at the cost of slower speeds

Our cPanel Palladium package should serve you well

https://absolutehosting.co.za/web-hosting/

 

[Techrat]

Surely the underlying hardware and the amount of shared memory and cpu resources will make a difference to performance?

 

[charlieharper]

Starting out, any web hosting package that does PHP should work fine as Woocommerce runs on WordPress.

However, in the long run you'd probably be looking at having a VPS. (Virtual Private Server)
I personally use Vultr and their linux (Ubuntu) servers, although there's many South African VPS providers around as well. Most VPS providers allows for easy scaling as well, eg upgrading from a server with 1gb RAM to 32gb RAM in a matter of minutes. They are far superior to any shared hosting service and you will have control over your resources such as memory, cpu and disk drive.

However you would have to setup the VPS for yourself and it requires some linux server knowledge - or get a server guy, like me to do it for you.

 

[Techrat]

Ok thanks for the advice.