Every e-commerce store starts with hosting, and PrestaShop is no exception. However, if you are running an e-commerce business locally only, then this guide will not apply because the cheapest and fastest hosting platform most likely already exists in your region.
What would be the best PrestaShop hosting for worldwide e-commerce? We recommend A2Hosting, but BlueHost can be another good alternative. Both hostings have all you need to start: great speed, money back guaranteed, daily backups, one-click install, and more.
In this article, I will be comparing the four most popular hosting platforms:
- What is Cheapest PrestaShop Hosting
- Best PrestaShop Hosting Plans
- Why Not To Host PrestaShop on BlueHost
- Why Not To Host PrestaShop on Ionos
- Differences Between Shared, Dedicated, And VPS Hosting
- Conclusion
What is Cheapest PrestaShop Hosting
Here are the prices for the four most popular hosting platforms:
| Provider | Price |
|---|---|
| Bluehost | 7.77 USD/month |
| A2Hosting | 6.99 USD/month |
| Ionos | 6 USD/month |
| Hostinger | 2.99 USD/month |
It is important to take note that hosting providers tend to “fake” cheap prices and cover themselves under yearly discounts. They show you the price without VAT, but shows up in your cart, so all of these costs are higher once you try to purchase anything from them.
Best PrestaShop Hosting Plans
Cheap hosting means less disk space, control, and lower limits. To find out we compared some cheap web-hosting services based on these factors:
| Provider | Price | Features |
|---|---|---|
| Bluehost | 10.36 USD/month | Unlimited sites, bandwidth, and disk space |
| A2Hosting | 12.99 USD/month | Unlimited sites, bandwidth, and disk space |
| Hostinger | 10.29 USD/month | 100 websites, 100 GB disk space, unlimited bandwidth |
| Ionos | 10 USD/month | Unlimited sites, bandwidth, and disk space |
As you can see, prices would be a bit above 10 USD/month, but Hostinger is very limited. I don’t advise hosting there because it is easy to reach limits in a few years of actively building store content.
Why Not To Host PrestaShop on BlueHost
BlueHost pays high affiliate commissions, and this is the reason why a number of bloggers do recommend them. This article is an honest review, so we don’t do that here.
BlueHost is a great hosting platform, but you will notice that it is the slowest of all four hosting providers. PrestaShop is not a super-optimized platform, so you should care about the speed.
Why Not To Host PrestaShop on Ionos
Ionos is a certified partner of PrestaShop, but its service does not work in many European countries (including countries from outside Europe). You might even end up without the possibility to register there.
Differences Between Shared, Dedicated, And VPS Hosting
You might have read on the Internet that there are differences between shared hosting, dedicated hosting, and VPS hosting.
Before 2020 I would probably recommend only dedicated and VPS hostings, but both of them are pricey. Also, with VPS hosting, you manage more things, which means you spend more of your time doing the setup.
While shared hosting was slower (as server resources are shared between multiple websites), it was way cheaper because of this. Nowadays, hosting providers have shared hosting. They rarely expose this as current hardware makes communicating seamless (it is fast and hard to differentiate from dedicated or VPS speed). So choose shared hosting for your small to the medium-sized e-commerce business.
Conclusion
I compared the four most popular hosting providers and decided that only two are worth your time – A2Hosting and Bluehost. Costs and features are very similar.
You can find more great tips in our PrestaShop blog.