Self-Hosted vs. Hosted eCommerce: How Do You Choose?

Key Takeaways

• Hosted vs. self-hosted is a lot like renting vs. buying. On the one hand, you can have 80% of your problems taken care of - you just need to worry about running your store and your business. But on the other, are the last 20% crucial to running your store or your business?
• The common self-hosted solutions are Shopify, Volusion, and Big Commerce. There is also Etsy, and the Amazon Marketplace, which are a lot closer to hosted than self-hosted solutions.
• The oldest self-hosted solution is Magento, but WooCommerce has gained considerable popularity in the last few years.
• To get a better understand of what you need, it’s a good idea to start on a hosted solution. It lets you get up and running (and making money) as quickly as possible. Then as you outgrow the hosted solution, you can seek a self-hosted solution, like WooCommerce.
• WooCommerce is currently the number 1 self-hosted solution. There are lots of add-ons and resources, making it flexible enough to support just about any type of store you need (with the right amount of work).
• Another option Patrick mentions is a a hybrid approach. You have a self-hosted solution and you offload certain functions to SaaS products. Big Commerce does this with their WordPress plugin. Metorik does this with WooCommerce analytics.
• There are also self-hosted partners that offer managed eCommerce solutions - like Plesk’s eCommerce Toolkit.
• One problem Patrick sees a lot is people wondering why their WooCommerce site is slow. We covered site speed and performance in a previous episode, but Patrick’s advice: don’t cheap out on hosting. Find some good hosting with a company that will make sure your site is up and running, and working well.