Guide details
Why look beyond Shopify
Shopify is fast to launch but charges monthly fees plus per-transaction cuts, and you rent the platform rather than own it. Self-hosting WooCommerce on your own hosting removes per-sale fees and gives you full control of data, theme and checkout.
The trade-off: control vs convenience
With a self-hosted store you own updates, backups and scaling decisions. That is more responsibility, but it is cheaper at scale and you are never locked into one vendor or surprise pricing change.
Right-size the infrastructure
Begin on cloud hosting for elastic sale-day headroom and graduate to a KVM VPS for sustained traffic — the scale cloud before VPS guide shows when to move.
Payments and PCI in India
Use Razorpay, PayU or similar Indian gateways to keep PCI scope minimal while billing customers in INR. Your hosting just needs reliable uptime, free SSL and fast checkout pages.
HostStack checklist: renewals, GST & INR invoices
Indian entities usually need GST-aligned invoices and predictable renewal ladders — not launch-week promos alone. Model year-two rupees before migrating; read our renewal pricing guide and confirm GST lines in the HostStack store match how your CA books expenses.
If procurement compares vendors, bring finance into the same spreadsheet — headline discounts rarely equal sustainable run rates.
HostStack checklist: fit-first upgrades (shared → cloud → KVM VPS)
Brochure sites often stay on tuned shared hosting; traffic spikes and WooCommerce carts may need cloud elasticity before raw KVM VPS. Measure URLs that convert — not vanity benchmarks.
Anchor decisions with our India hosting hub, how to choose hosting in India and comparison hub.
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