A start-up online shop will do just fine on shared hosting. However, as the number of products, visitors and orders grows, the online shop demands more and more resources: every item added to the basket, every search and every payment involves database operations that cannot be served from a cache. At a certain point, the limits of the hosting plan become a bottleneck, and the online shop slows down just when the most customers are visiting: during a campaign, a newsletter send-out or on Black Friday.

In this guide, we’ll outline the signs that indicate your online shop has outgrown its hosting, why a VPS is a good choice in such cases, what size server you’ll need, how to optimise it for fast performance, how to secure it, and how to prepare for peak traffic.

When does an online shop outgrow shared hosting?

• Slow shopping basket and checkout. The product pages load quickly from the cache, but the shopping basket, checkout and account pages are slow because they have to be recalculated each time.
• Slow administration. WooCommerce order management, product editing and reports take a long time to load.
• Errors at peak times. 503 or 508 error pages and failed payments following a campaign or newsletter.
• Resource limits. The hosting control panel regularly displays when CPU, memory or process limits have been reached.
• Software requirements. A Redis cache, an Elasticsearch or OpenSearch search engine, the background queue manager and custom PHP settings are required, which shared hosting does not allow.

If several of these apply to you, and you’re already using the largest hosting plan, it’s time to switch to a VPS (or a dedicated cPanel server). We’ve written a separate article on when to switch to a VPS.

Why is a VPS a good choice for an online shop?

Guaranteed resources. On KVM VPS, the allocated processor cores and memory are dedicated solely to your online shop. Traffic from other customers won’t slow you down, and there are no per-account limits that you’ll hit during a campaign.

A customisable environment. You can configure the web server, PHP and the database to suit the load of your own online shop: PHP-FPM process count, OPcache, MariaDB buffer size, and you can enable caching solutions such as the Redis object cache.

Fast storage. An online shop performs a huge number of small database operations. NVMe SSDs are many times faster than SATA SSDs in these operations, which is immediately noticeable in the shopping basket and at the checkout.

Your own IP address and environment. Emails from your online shop (order confirmations) won’t be disrupted by emails sent by other customers, and you can tailor the server’s security settings to suit your online shop.

Scalability. If your traffic increases, you can upgrade to a larger plan without having to reinstall your online shop.

How much VPS capacity do you need?

A few starting points for a WooCommerce shop (Linux, on a single server with a web server and database):

Online shop	vCPU	RAM	NVMe
A few hundred products, a few dozen orders a day	2	4 GB	40 GB
Several thousand products, 50–200 orders a day, regular promotions	4	8 GB	80 GB
Tens of thousands of products, hundreds of orders a day, major campaigns	6–8	12–16 GB	120–160 GB

If you’re also installing a control panel (such as cPanel), allow for 1–2 GB of memory. Magento and other larger systems require more resources; we have a separate guide on Magento hosting and VPS for online shops. It’s best to start small, monitor the load, and upgrade if necessary.

aWh’s KVM VPS plans range from 1 vCPU / 1 GB RAM to 16 vCPU / 32 GB RAM, featuring AMD Epyc processors, NVMe SSDs and a 2 Gbps connection, from €4.62 (excluding VAT).

Who runs it?

A VPS needs to be managed like a server: updates, firewall, backups, and optimising the web server and database. This is particularly important for an online shop, as you are handling customer data. There are three ways to do this:

• Self-managed KVM VPS, if you have the necessary system administration skills or a developer who is willing to take this on.
• Dedicated cPanel: a server with a cPanel interface that’s all yours, operated by us. It’s most convenient if your online shop is based on WordPress/WooCommerce and you’d like to work in the familiar cPanel interface.
• Managed VPS: if you need a customised environment (such as Magento, Elasticsearch or Docker), but would prefer to leave the day-to-day management to an expert.

How to make your online shop fast on a VPS

• Up-to-date PHP and OPcache. Use a supported version of PHP – preferably the latest one – that is compatible with your e-commerce platform and plugins; ensure OPcache is enabled with sufficient memory allocated.
• Page caching, but not everywhere. Serve product and category pages from the cache, but never cache the basket, checkout and account pages.
• Object cache. Redis stores the results of frequent database queries in memory, which significantly speeds up WooCommerce’s dynamic pages.
• Database maintenance. Over time, WooCommerce accumulates a lot of temporary data, session data and old order metadata. Enable High-Performance Order Storage (HPOS) and keep your database tidy; this is what our guide to optimising your WordPress database is all about.
• Images. WebP or AVIF format, appropriate dimensions, lazy loading.
• Real cron. Instead of WordPress’s built-in timer, which runs on every visit, set up a system cron so that scheduled tasks do not slow down customer requests.
• A CDN for images and static files when there are lots of visitors from further afield.

We also have a WooCommerce speed optimisation guide on how to speed up WooCommerce.

Security

• Payment via a third-party provider. If you process credit card payments via a payment service provider’s website (such as Barion, SimplePay, Stripe or your bank) or via an embedded interface, your card details do not pass through your server, which greatly simplifies PCI DSS compliance.
• HTTPS everywhere, with automatically renewing certificates.
• Updates: the online shop engine, plugins and server software alike. Most hacked online shops are infected via an out-of-date plugin.
• Two-factor authentication for administrator accounts, strong passwords and only the necessary permissions for staff.
• Server-level protection: firewall, Fail2ban, malware scanning and, where possible, a web application firewall (WAF). We’ve covered the details in our VPS security guide.
• DDoS protection: aWh’s KVM VPSs come with DDoS filtering.

Backup

In an online shop, new orders and customer data are generated every day, so the backup strategy must take this into account:

• The provider’s daily backups (included as standard on aWh KVM VPSs) protect against the complete loss of the server,
• Before carrying out a major update, take a snapshot so that you can restore your system in a matter of minutes should an error occur,
• Back up your database more frequently than this (for example, every hour), and store the backups separately from the server,
• And from time to time, try out the restore process in a test environment.

We have a separate guide on how to set up backups for your VPS.

Correspondence

The delivery of order confirmations, invoices and password reset emails is business-critical. Set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC records for your domain, and where possible, send transactional emails via a dedicated SMTP service or a reliable mail server, rather than from your own mail server installed on the VPS, as it is much more difficult to maintain deliverability with the latter. As for newsletters, send them using a dedicated newsletter service.

Preparing for peak traffic

Black Friday, the Christmas season or a major campaign are all stress tests for an online shop.

1. Estimate your load in advance: look at last year’s peak and factor in growth.
2. Test it: use a load test (such as k6 or Loader.io) to see how many simultaneous customers the online shop can handle before this becomes apparent in a live environment.
3. Upgrade in good time: if you’re running low, switch to a larger VPS before the campaign, and switch back once it’s over.
4. Freeze changes: don’t install any new plugins or major updates in the week leading up to the peak.
5. Monitor the server during the campaign: CPU, memory, response time, errors.

We have set out the steps to prepare in detail in our Black Friday guide.

Migration to a VPS

1. Set up and configure the server (or request the dedicated cPanel, where we’ll do this for you).
2. Copy over the files and the database, and test the online shop by modifying the hosts file before the domain is switched over.
3. Choose a time when traffic is low, put the old shop into maintenance mode, copy over the latest database, and update the DNS settings.
4. Check your payments, emails, scheduled tasks and search history.

We will carry out the migration to a dedicated cPanel free of charge upon request.

Summary

An online shop outgrows shared hosting when dynamic pages (shopping basket, checkout, admin) start to slow down and the hosting plan’s limits are exhausted at peak times. A VPS provides guaranteed resources, a customisable environment and fast NVMe storage, but it requires management: if you’re not up to the task, opt for a dedicated cPanel or a managed VPS. For fast and secure operation, in addition to a good server, you’ll need caching, regular updates, multi-level backups and careful preparation for peak traffic.

Check out the KVM VPS plans · Dedicated cPanel

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between a VPS for an online shop and standard web hosting?

With shared hosting, server resources are shared amongst several customers, with limits per account. With a VPS, the processor and memory are dedicated solely to your online shop, and you can tailor the software environment to suit your online shop.

What sort of VPS do you need for a new WooCommerce online shop?

For a start-up online shop, even shared hosting is sufficient. If you switch to a VPS, 2 vCPUs and 4 GB of RAM are a good starting point; if you’re also installing a control panel, you’ll need 4 vCPUs and 8 GB.

Do you need system administration skills?

Yes, for self-managed VPS. If you don’t have one, choose the dedicated cPanel, where we manage the server, or the managed VPS.

Will the VPS cope with the Black Friday traffic?

If you assess and test the load in advance, and upgrade to a larger plan in good time if necessary, then yes. Caching and keeping the database in good order are at least as important as the size of the server.

Does a VPS improve an online shop’s search engine ranking?

In short: if the site was slow due to hosting limitations, faster response times will improve Core Web Vitals metrics and the customer experience. If the site was already fast, the migration alone will not improve its ranking.

How long does the migration take?

Transferring the files and database of an average online shop takes a few hours, whilst the DNS changeover can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours. With proper preparation, the downtime for the online shop will be considerably shorter than this.

Which operating system should I choose?

Ubuntu or Debian, if you’re running the server yourself, as most guides are written for these; AlmaLinux or Rocky Linux, if you’re planning to install cPanel.

When should you choose a dedicated server over a VPS?

If you need more resources than even the largest VPS plan can provide, or if you’d like to split your online shop across multiple servers (separate web server, database server, search engine). For most online shops, a well-sized VPS is sufficient.

• vps
• online shops
• scaling
• website speed
• virtualisation