Cart, checkout, my-account, order confirmation, search results and every page a logged-in customer sees bypass the cache entirely and hit PHP and the database directly.
Payment gateway callbacks, order emails, stock updates and coupon validation all add background work at the worst possible moment: when someone is trying to pay you.
That is why the hosting question for an online store is not "how much storage do I get." It is how much uncacheable work the server can do at once and what happens when Diwali traffic arrives and every one of those requests lands simultaneously.
SowfiHost runs ecommerce hosting on NVMe storage in Indian data centers, with LiteSpeed, free SSL, staging environments and published resource limits. This page tells you what each plan actually delivers, which platform it suits and where the ceiling is, before you move a live store onto it.
Ecommerce Store Hosting Plans
Single Cloud
Best choice for Beginners
₹300 /Month
- Free domain
- 1 Website
- 50 GB NVMe Storage
- Free SSL
- 2 Sub domains
- Unlimited Bandwidth
- 2 Email Account
- 1 MySQL Databases
Premium Cloud
Best choice for Growing Websites
₹400 /Month
- Free domain
- 5 Website
- 75 GB NVMe Storage
- Free SSL
- 10 Sub domains
- Unlimited Bandwidth
- 20 Email Account
- 10 MySQL Databases
Most Popular
Alpha Cloud
Best choice for All
₹500 /Month
- Free .com/.in domain for 1 Year
- 200 Website
- 200 GB NVMe Storage
- Free SSL
- 200 Sub domains
- Unlimited Bandwidth
- 100 Email Account
- 100 MySQL Databases
Beta Cloud
Best choice for Power Users
₹700 /Month
- Free .com/.in domain for 1 Year
- 400 Website
- 250 GB NVMe Storage
- Free SSL
- Unlimited Sub domains
- Unlimited Bandwidth
- 150 Email Account
- Unlimited MySQL Databases
Single Cloud
Best choice for Personal Websites
₹225 /Month
For 12 months You Pay: ₹2700- Free domain
- 1 Website
- 50 GB NVMe Storage
- Free SSL
- 2 Sub domains
- Unlimited Bandwidth
- 2 Email Account
- 1 MySQL Databases
Premium Cloud
Best choice for Growing Businesses
₹300 /Month
For 12 months You Pay: ₹3600- Free domain
- 5 Website
- 75 GB NVMe Storage
- Free SSL
- 10 Sub domains
- Unlimited Bandwidth
- 20 Email Account
- 10 MySQL Databases
Most Popular
Alpha Cloud
Best choice for All
₹375 /Month
For 12 months You Pay: ₹4500- Free .com/.in domain for 1 Year
- 200 Website
- 200 GB NVMe Storage
- Free SSL
- 200 Sub domains
- Unlimited Bandwidth
- 100 Email Account
- 100 MySQL Databases
Beta Cloud
Best choice for Large Enterprises
₹525 /Month
For 12 months You Pay: ₹6300- Free .com/.in domain for 1 Year
- 400 Website
- 250 GB NVMe Storage
- Free SSL
- Unlimited Sub domains
- Unlimited Bandwidth
- 150 Email Account
- Unlimited MySQL Databases
Single Cloud
Best choice for Personal Websites
₹150 /Month
For 36 months You Pay: ₹5400- Free domain
- 1 Website
- 50 GB NVMe Storage
- Free SSL
- 2 Sub domains
- Unlimited Bandwidth
- 2 Email Account
- 1 MySQL Databases
Premium Cloud
Best choice for Growing Businesses
₹200 /Month
For 36 months You Pay: ₹7200- Free domain
- 5 Website
- 75 GB NVMe Storage
- Free SSL
- 10 Sub domains
- Unlimited Bandwidth
- 20 Email Account
- 10 MySQL Databases
Most Popular
Alpha Cloud
Best choice for All
₹250 /Month
For 36 months You Pay: ₹9000- Free .com/.in domain for 1 Year
- 200 Website
- 200 GB NVMe Storage
- Free SSL
- 200 Sub domains
- Unlimited Bandwidth
- 100 Email Account
- 100 MySQL Databases
Beta Cloud
Best choice for Large Enterprises
₹350 /Month
For 36 months You Pay: ₹12600- Free .com/.in domain for 1 Year
- 400 Website
- 250 GB NVMe Storage
- Free SSL
- Unlimited Sub domains
- Unlimited Bandwidth
- 150 Email Account
- Unlimited MySQL Databases
*Prices mentioned above are excluding of 18% GST
PHP workers and concurrent database connections determine how many customers can be in checkout at the same time. RAM and CPU per container determine how fast each of those checkouts completes. Storage and bandwidth rarely cause a store to fail; exhausted workers and a saturated database do.
Online Store Requirements by Platform
Different platforms have genuinely different floors. Selling a store owner a plan that cannot run their platform is the most common way ecommerce hosting fails.
WooCommerce
- PHP 8.1 or newer; 8.2 or 8.3 recommended
- PHP memory limit of 256 MB or higher. Stores with several extensions routinely need 512 MB
- MySQL 8.0+ or MariaDB 10.6+
- LiteSpeed or equivalent full-page cache with WooCommerce-aware exclusions, so cart and checkout are never cached
- NVMe storage, because product and order queries are database-heavy
WooCommerce powers a large share of Indian online stores. A starter store with under 100 products and a few orders a week runs comfortably on a modest plan. The same store during a festival campaign does not.
Magento
- 2 GB RAM minimum for a small production store, more as catalogue and traffic grow
- PHP 8.1 to 8.3, depending on the Magento version
- NVMe storage with high IOPS
Magento is not a shared-hosting platform. If your store runs Magento, the honest answer is a VPS or dedicated environment and we will tell you that rather than sell you a container that cannot complete a catalogue reindex. See Magento hosting.
Dropshipping stores
You are not storing much inventory data, but you are:
- Running supplier integrations and product feeds that update catalogue data on a schedule
- Handling order webhooks from suppliers and payment gateways
- Possibly running two or three storefronts at once: WooCommerce, a marketplace listing and a social channel
- Scaling ad spend up and down, so traffic arrives in bursts
Cron reliability, database write performance and headroom for catalogue imports matter more than raw storage. A store with 2 GB RAM and a tuned database handles a moderate catalogue well; a store importing 20,000 supplier SKUs nightly needs more CPU and a larger database allowance.
What Decides Whether Checkout Survives a Sale Event
Most hosting pages talk about page speed. For a store, three other things decide revenue on the day it matters.
01
PHP workers
Every uncached request occupies a PHP worker until it finishes. If your plan allows 20 concurrent entry processes and 25 customers hit checkout at once, five of them wait. On a normal day nobody notices. During a flash sale, waiting becomes a timeout and a timeout becomes an abandoned cart.
02
Concurrent database connections
WooCommerce and Magento both open connections for cart, session and order writes. A plan with a low connection ceiling produces too many connections errors precisely when order volume is highest. Check the published limit against your expected simultaneous checkouts, not your monthly visitor count.
03
I/O throughput and IOPS
Product pages, filtered category pages and order writes are all database reads and writes. SATA storage saturates under sale-event load, NVMe does not. This is why we publish I/O limits on every plan.
Resource Limits: What Happens When Your Store Spikes
This is the part store owners need to read before a sale, not after.
We throttle, we do not suspend. When your store approaches its CPU, RAM or I/O allocation, the specific resource is throttled. The store stays online. It may slow briefly. You receive an automated alert naming the resource and the process responsible: usually a plugin, an import job or a database query.
Bandwidth. Store traffic is image-heavy.
Inodes matter more for stores than for blogs
Every product image variation, cache file, backup and plugin asset consumes an inode.
- A store with 10,000 products and five images each
- 500,000 to 1,000,000 inodes
- Cheap shared plans commonly cap at
- 150,000 to 250,000
- SowfiHost inode limit
- Unlimited
Payments, SSL and PCI: What Indian Gateways Require
Indian payment gateways have specific hosting expectations before they will approve a live merchant account.
Razorpay
PhonePe
A valid SSL certificate on every page
Not just checkout. Free AutoSSL is included on every SowfiHost plan and renewed automatically.
Low and stable server latency
Gateway callbacks and webhook endpoints must respond reliably. A slow or intermittent server causes failed payment confirmations even when the customer's card was charged.
Reliable webhook delivery
If your server drops the callback, the order does not record and the customer is charged without an order. This is a hosting reliability problem, not a gateway problem.
The practical point most store owners miss: if you use a hosted payment page or tokenisation through a PCI Level 1 gateway (which is how Razorpay, PayU and PhonePe operate by default), your own PCI scope is reduced substantially, often to SAQ A. You are not storing card numbers on your server. That is the correct architecture and it means your hosting requirement is security and uptime, not building a card-data environment yourself.
SowfiHost provides essential SSL, firewall, malware scanning and isolated accounts on every plan. We do not claim to make your store PCI DSS certified; that is your merchant compliance obligation and any host that tells you otherwise is overselling. We will tell you what infrastructure controls are in place so your assessor can work with them.
Security: What Protects a Storefront
An online store holds customer names, addresses, phone numbers and order history. It is a more attractive target than a blog and it is attacked more often.
Included on every SowfiHost ecommerce plan
- Free SSL with automatic provisioning and renewal on every domain and alias
- Basic Web Application Firewall blocking SQL injection, cross-site scripting, file inclusion and OWASP Top 10 vectors
- Real-time malware scanning with automatic quarantine and a report of what was found and how it entered
- Brute-force protection with automatic IP blocking on repeated failed logins
- Two-factor authentication on control panel and webmail
- Isolated account environments so a compromised site on the same server cannot read your customer database
What you must do at the application layer
Keep WooCommerce, Magento and every plugin updated, remove abandoned plugins, never run a store withWP_DEBUG enabled, do not store card data, keep admin credentials out of version control and restrict admin access by IP where possible. Hosting provides the perimeter. It cannot patch a plugin for you.
Staging: Test the Sale Before the Sale
Pushing a plugin update, a theme change or a new payment gateway configuration directly to a live store is a risk no store owner should take. A broken checkout discovered on the first day of a campaign costs real orders. Staging environments are available. A staging copy lets you:
- Test WooCommerce, plugin and theme updates before they touch production
- Verify a new payment gateway or shipping rule end to end, including a live test transaction
- Let a developer or agency work without touching the live database
- Push verified changes to production once tested
If you run campaigns or make frequent catalogue or plugin changes, choose a plan with staging. It is cheaper than a single hour of lost checkout.
Backups: Orders Are Data You Cannot Recreate
A blog post can be rewritten. An order record cannot. Backup quality matters more on a store than on any other site type. Every SowfiHost plan includes:
- Daily automated backups of files, databases, email and DNS
- Offsite storage in a separate Indian data center
- Granular restore: recover a single product image directory or a single database without rolling back the whole store
- One-click self-service restore from the control panel, with free restore assistance from our team if you would rather we handle it
What we recommend for stores: daily platform backups as the safety net, plus your own weekly export of the database if order volume is significant. Please refer to clause 8 (Storage Usage Policy) of our Terms of Service.
Test a restore before you need one. A backup you have never restored is an assumption, not a plan. We will walk you through it during onboarding.
Migrating a Live Store to SowfiHost
Moving a store is different from moving a static site. The files and database are the easy part; keeping orders, customers, sessions and payment webhooks intact during cutover is where migrations fail.
What we migrate, free for first-time movers
- All website files, theme files and plugin directories with permissions preserved
- The complete database, including orders, customers, products, coupons and settings
- Email accounts, forwarders and filters
- Cron jobs, including the scheduled jobs WooCommerce and supplier feeds depend on
- SSL certificates, DNS records, subdomains and redirects
What we test before cutover
Product pages, category filters, add-to-cart, checkout, a test transaction through your gateway sandbox, order confirmation emails, account login and password reset and permalinks. The staging copy is reviewed by you before DNS changes.
Store migrations are scheduled in a low-traffic window you choose, typically late evening IST. Your old host keeps serving until propagation completes, so customers never see a parked page or an error.
Three store-specific things to plan for:
1
Order gaps during cutover
If orders are placed on the old server after your final database export and before DNS propagates, they will not exist on the new server. We minimise this window and advise pausing paid campaigns during cutover.
2
Payment gateway IP whitelisting
If your gateway has whitelisted your old server IP for callbacks, the new IP must be added before cutover. We provide the new IP in advance so you can update it.
3
Cron-dependent features
Abandoned cart emails, stock sync and supplier imports all rely on cron. We recreate every cron job as part of the migration.
Any other migration (additional stores later, plan or account transfers, ownership changes) is priced openly and quoted in writing before work begins.
Who SowfiHost Ecommerce Hosting Suits
A good fit if you are
- Launching a WooCommerce store with under a few hundred products and modest order volume
- Running a dropshipping store with supplier feeds, order webhooks and one or two storefronts
- Adding a store to an existing WordPress site and want it on the same account
- Moving off a host where checkout times out during sale events and you need published limits you can size against
- An agency hosting client stores and needing staging, per-site isolation and white-label options as you grow
- A store owner who wants Indian data centers, INR billing, GST invoices and support that answers
Look elsewhere if you need
- Root access, custom PHP extensions, Varnish tuning or Elasticsearch management; that is a VPS
- Thousands of orders per day or sustained flash-sale concurrency; a single container will throttle and a clustered environment is the correct answer
- A fully managed PCI DSS card-data environment; use a hosted payment page and keep card data off your server
- Persistent background workers for order sync or queue processing beyond what cron can do
- Shopify or another SaaS platform; those host themselves and this page is for self-hosted stores
If you are unsure which side of that line your store falls on, tell our pre-sales team your platform, product count, average daily orders, peak concurrent visitors and gateway. We will recommend a plan or tell you honestly that you need a VPS.