What hosting for Prestashop?

So you decided to open an online store and you chose Prestashop. One of the first questions is: “what kind of Prestashop hosting should I choose?”.

There are several possibilities and several hundred hosting companies. It’s not hard to get dizzy. If you’re having trouble finding the best hosting solution for your Presta, you will find answers in this article.

Prestashop is a script that is a bit more demanding in terms of resources than WordPress with WooCommerce. When looking for a hosting, you need to search for good quality and optimization for Prestashop.

Prestashop and shared hosting

Shared hosting was once the most popular service offered by hosting companies. However, the digital world is developing fast and so is the number of internet users – has increased 2.5 times over the decade. Moreover, websites today offer dynamic content and the way of using online stores has changed.

It used to be ordinary to wait several seconds for a page to load, and sometimes even longer. Today, the client can turn off the page when it takes more than five seconds to load. The enormous diversity of possibilities and fierce competition have made customers demand and expect the highest quality service.

All these facts together give one conclusion: classic shared hosting is not enough in the case of a store today.

Most of the time, your website will work flawlessly and such a service will seem sufficient for your store. But when Saturday night comes, other clients’ websites clog the server. They have peak traffic and share the server with you; as a result, your website will be loading for a dozen long seconds and you will quickly regret your savings. At the peak hour, when you expect the bulkiest profits, your customers will abandon their carts.

Why? Shared hosting is primarily about limited hardware resources and dependence on other clients with whom you share these resources.

So what kind of hosting should you choose for PrestaShop?

You already know what to avoid, so what hosting will be the best for Prestashop? There are two types of hosting: VPS and a dedicated server. Let’s take a look at these options. Visualize the differences between a dedicated server, VPS, and shared hosting, in a nutshell, this way:

A dedicated server is like a house

You have your entrance, fence, parking lot, and your garden. Nobody but you uses them. The better the fence you put up, the more you will be separated from the world. However, you must take care of safety, and equipment, maintain the garden and carry out all repairs.

VPS hosting is like an apartment

A gigantic building is divided into several dozen other apartments. The entrance and the garden are shared and public, as are the parking lot, the staircase, and the elevator. But eventually, you arrive at the door of your apartment, which is at your sole disposal. You have your kitchen, your bathroom, and your private rooms. Only you use your apartment.

Shared hosting is like a hostel

Hosting offers everything a house has to offer, but for all residents altogether. The only things you can use exclusively are your bed and a locker. You share all other parts of the hostel with other residents. 

Imagine that one resident can invite up to 4 guests. There are four beds in each room. Now imagine that your three roommates invited four guests each and there will be 16 people. Some of them will have to stand, it will be very crowded and noisy. Imagine the toilet queue! Even two household members could fill the entire room (4 inhabitants + 8 guests, together it will make up 12 people).

A dedicated server for Prestashop

So you would like to have the entire server to yourself for sure. Returning to our example – it would be best to invite the client to a private house and show him a beautiful garden, swimming pool, and a collection of paintings. A tempting option.

Unfortunately, the price of receiving the entire machine and its power only for you will be very high. Moreover, the complexity of such a solution means that it is recommended only to people who will be able to deal with technical issues or hire an appropriate specialist. Self-installation and configuration of the entire system are practically impossible without specialist knowledge.

The cost of such a solution is also high. The cheapest packages cost over one hundred dollars a month.

VPS server for Prestashop

It is, de facto, a dedicated server divided into several (or more) parts. You have specific resources assigned to you: CPU core, RAM, and disk space. Thanks to that you can be sure that your site will not slow down by excess users on the entire server.

In our example – even if the neighbor invites gobs of people to the party, he will do it in his apartment. Yours will still be available only to you and your guests.

This option is also friendlier to non-technical people. You don’t need to administer the entire server. You can manage your virtual machine, but it won’t affect other server users. The cost of the VPS server is also more attractive. For a small Prestashop store, we can find attractive solutions of this type for about ten dollars a month.

Conclusion

Even though you have a broad overview of the possibilities, the best hosting for PrestaShop is VPS. Another thing, VPS servers are very different.

Remember the example with apartments. The apartment is a small studio, 2BR, 4BR, and one or three bathrooms. It can be a kitchenette or a separate kitchen. Different characteristics of sights from a window: sun exposure, landscape. It could be a colossal apartment block of more than ten stories or a two-story house. And even a loft at the top of a tenement house in the historic center of a European city.

Similarly, with the types of VPS – you will find both a cheap option and an option with great possibilities. The cheapest VPS may be the price of medium shared hosting, and the best VPS may be dedicated hosting options.

VPS will be an excellent choice for a technical person who wants to configure PrestaShop on their own, as well as for a person without IT knowledge. Good hosting will provide you with the support of a technical team and automated installation. Take care of its quality and good software, and using Presta will be pleasant.