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Shared Hosting Pitfalls for Growing Ecommerce Sites

While more than a third (34%) of WordPress users opt for shared hosting due to cost-effectiveness, resources like CPU, RAM, and bandwidth are split among multiple websites, and traffic surges on one site can slow down others on the same server. If a neighboring site gets a sudden spike in traffic from a viral campaign, your ecommerce site could get sluggish or even experience a temporary outage. According to a recent report, 41% of online shoppers leave a site that takes more than three seconds to load, making slow speeds a direct threat to sales.

Security is a major concern

In shared hosting environments, one compromised site can expose others on the same server to risk. If another site on the server falls victim to malware, a brute-force attack, etc., the damage can spread to your ecommerce site. This is especially problematic as these platforms handle sensitive customer data like payment information.

According to a survey by Astra Security, websites on shared hosting are 2.5 times likelier to suffer cross-site contamination than those using dedicated or VPS hosting. For growing ecommerce sites, these vulnerabilities can lead to lost trust, lower conversion rates, and even legal or compliance issues in more serious cases.

Potential scaling issues

When your ecommerce business stays small, shared web hosting will work well. It’s when you scale up that you can start running into issues. These might include restrictions on software installations and server configurations, which will limit platforms that require custom payment processing, advanced caching, or other specific features. Even high-quality shared hosting services might struggle to accommodate a higher volume of transactions, and the user is compelled to upgrade to a pricier hosting plan sooner than expected.

Making the switch to WordPress

Growing ecommerce sites will find WordPress hosting preferable to shared hosting for a number of reasons. It lets you own your ecommerce store, and you join a large community of business owners who offer support, resources, and tools. In addition, WordPress supports the most payment gateways out of all content management systems and allows you to handle multiple currencies and create multilingual stores.

Generally, the process of transitioning to WordPress involves moving your site from your shared hosting account and importing it into WordPress. In some cases, adjusting DNS settings is necessary to point the domain to the new WordPress account.

WordPress plans are set up on cPanel, while Windows shared hosting plans run on an IIS web server. This is why switching directly between the two plans (WordPress and shared hosting) is not viable. You can launch a new Managed WordPress hosting order and move your WordPress site.

Testing your WordPress site with a temporary URL is recommended after completing the migration. If everything seems to be working fine, change the nameservers to the WordPress server. You can use cPanel to switch between the PHP versions.

It’s very easy to move to WordPress if you’re on Linux – just send a ticket from your client area.

Hosting for WordPress in 2025

The WordPress market for hosting services is anticipated to reach $10.9 billion worldwide by 2026, and optimized themes and managed hosting improve core web vitals for 63% of sites. 63% of managed WordPress plans include free site migrations, and managed hosting makes up 29% of all hosting services within the world’s most popular content management system. Reliability is the top priority for 70% of WordPress users. Compared to shared hosting, managed hosting reduces downtime by 99.9%.

Better support is the main benefit for 41% of managed WordPress users, and websites on managed hosting load 37% faster. 88% of managed hosting users value automatic updates, more than half of all small businesses use managed hosting for WordPress, and the system’s managed hosting plans achieve a 79% reduction of server-related security risks.

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