Managed PrestaShop hosting or a VPS you run yourself: how to decide

A VPS you run yourself is good enough for a PrestaShop store only if someone on your team can already keep a Linux server patched, backed up and watched, and has restored the store from a backup at least once. If nobody like that works for you, managed PrestaShop hosting usually costs less overall once you count your own hours and what a day without orders would cost, even though its monthly bill is higher. A small store with modest sales and a technical person on hand can still come out ahead on a self-run VPS. The calculation further down shows where your store falls.

Is PrestaShop free, and where does hosting fit in?

PrestaShop is free, open-source software. Anyone can download it and install it on a server without paying a license fee. The money goes elsewhere: the server it runs on, a theme, paid modules (add-ons that bring in features like payment methods, shipping rules or product filters), and the time somebody spends keeping all of it updated and safe.

Checking your own store? Run it through our free store check, it takes a few minutes. If you would rather have the hosting handled for you, see Managed PrestaShop hosting.

With Shopify the platform runs the servers for you. With PrestaShop you pick who does that work. You can do it yourself, a hosting company can do part of it, or a team that knows PrestaShop can do most of it.

A cheap plan sold as "PrestaShop hosting"

Most low-cost plans with PrestaShop in the name are shared hosting. Your store sits on one server next to many other websites, and the host decides the memory limits, the PHP version (PHP is the programming language PrestaShop is written in) and how much of the machine you get when a neighbor gets busy. You usually get a one-click installer and some kind of daily backup.

For a small catalog with modest traffic, this can work fine. Problems tend to start with large product imports, heavy filter modules, or a back office that gets slower as order history grows. If you are on such a plan, find out whether backups are stored on a different machine and how many days back they go. If they sit on the same server as the store, a disk failure or a hack can take the store and its backups at the same time.

A VPS you run yourself

A VPS (virtual private server) is a slice of a physical machine reserved for you alone. "Unmanaged" means the provider keeps the hardware and the network running, and everything above that is your job: the operating system, the web server, PHP, the database, security, backups.

You can set PHP, the database and caching exactly the way the store needs them, and a VPS usually gives you more memory and processing power for the money than shared hosting does. Every outage, failed update and full disk is also yours to find and fix, at whatever hour it happens.

A managed VPS

This is the middle option. The provider, or a control panel service running on top of a cloud server, takes care of operating system updates, usually backups, and some monitoring. What they normally don't do is touch PrestaShop. If a PHP update breaks a payment module, or the checkout slows down after a theme update, that is still yours to work out, often with a freelancer.

Managed PrestaShop hosting

Here the server comes with people who know PrestaShop. In practice that means picking PHP versions that your PrestaShop version and your modules actually support, setting up caching and the scheduled tasks the store relies on, and being the ones who look into it when an update breaks something. "Managed" is a loose word, though. For some providers it means the server only, and for others it includes updating your modules and theme, so compare what each quote covers before comparing the prices. With us, hosting is quoted after the free store review that every new store starts with. Our managed PrestaShop hosting page explains how we set it up.

Better hardware does help a slow back office and a slow checkout. A slow PrestaShop storefront, though, usually comes from modules, the theme and cache settings rather than the server, and those need work whichever host you choose. Our PrestaShop speed optimization guide covers that side.

The work a self-run VPS hands to you

If you are thinking about running your own server, go through this list and mark who on your team would handle each item:

• Operating system and web server security updates, plus a check afterwards that the store and checkout still work.
• Moving to a newer PHP version when yours stops getting security fixes (each PHP version is supported for a limited time, as the PHP supported versions page shows), and first checking that the new version is in the range your PrestaShop version supports (see the PrestaShop system requirements) and that your modules work with it.
• Updating the database server and adjusting it as the catalog and order history grow.
• Renewing the SSL certificate. This is usually automatic, but you need to know when the automatic renewal quietly fails.
• Backing up files and the database to a different location, and running a test restore so you know the backups actually work.
• Monitoring that alerts a real person when the store is down or the disk fills up.
• Making sure order confirmations reach customers' inboxes. On a new VPS this often needs a separate email sending service.
• A firewall, and blocking bots that hammer search and filter pages.
• Someone who picks up the phone when it breaks on a Saturday night.

Changing PHP versions on a live store can break modules, including the payment module. Do it on a staging copy first (a private clone of the store), keep a fresh backup of both files and database, and test checkout with a real payment method before you switch the live site. If you are still on an old PHP version, our article on PHP 7.4 reaching end of life explains what is at stake.

Work out the real price with your own numbers

The monthly hosting bill is the easy number to compare. These steps help you find the rest of the cost:

1. Work out your average sales per hour: monthly sales divided by 720 (the hours in a 30-day month). Every $10,000 in monthly sales comes to about $14 an hour on average. Your busy hours are worth more than that.
2. Estimate the hours you or a freelancer would spend on the server each month, including time spent reading up on how to do things. Multiply by what an hour of your time is worth, or by the freelancer's rate.
3. Think about one bad outage: how long until you notice, how long to find the cause, how long to restore. Multiply those hours by your sales per hour from step 1. Then multiply by the number of outages like that you expect in a year, and divide by 12 to spread it over the months. If you expect one a year, the monthly figure is simply the cost of that one outage divided by 12. Some customers will come back later, so not every lost hour is fully lost. Others won't, and ad spend keeps running while the store is down.
4. Add the VPS bill and any paid extras: off-server backup storage, an email sending service, monitoring.
5. Compare that total with a managed quote, after confirming what the quote covers.

Steps 2 and 3 are usually where the comparison is decided, because the outage cost grows with your sales while a hosting bill does not. A store doing a few thousand dollars a month, with someone technical who is happy to do the server work, may find that a self-run VPS still comes out ahead. Run the numbers again each time sales grow noticeably, since the figure in step 3 grows with them.

A decision rule we would use

Run your own VPS if all of these are true. Someone you employ or work with regularly has run Linux servers before. That person has restored this store from a backup to a fresh server, start to finish, without help. They have time for it each month. And the store can go down for several hours without serious harm. If any of these is not true, pay for managed hosting. That can be a managed VPS with a freelancer you trust for the PrestaShop side, or managed PrestaShop hosting where one team covers both.

We would not run a store that pays salaries on a server where nobody has tested a restore. A test restore means copying the latest backup to a separate server or staging copy, bringing the store up there, and placing a test order, without touching the live store. The story in how a company lost 10 years of work in a few days shows what happens when backups are missing at the moment they are needed.

Questions to ask a managed host before you sign

Since "managed" means different things at different companies, get answers to these in writing:

• Who decides when PHP is upgraded, and do they check your PrestaShop version and modules before doing it?
• Where are backups stored, how many days back do they go, and is a restore included in the price?
• Can you get a staging copy for testing updates?
• Will they touch PrestaShop itself, the modules and the theme, or only the server?
• What happens to speed and cost when traffic jumps during a sale?
• If you leave, will they hand over a full copy of your files and database?

If you are planning a major PrestaShop upgrade, ask the host to take part in it, because the server and the store usually have to change together. Our guide on upgrading PrestaShop 1.7 to 9 walks through that order step by step.

Want us to handle it for you? See Managed PrestaShop hosting, or book a call.