5 Best OpenCart Hosting: Building & Managing Your Online Shop

Paying for expensive eCommerce applications or hiring a developer team to create one can be really expensive, especially for smaller businesses. If you want to start your own web shop, you can always choose an open-source web application and make things much easier.

One of the best open-source solutions for eCommerce is OpenCart because it is perfect for beginners, yet they offer an outstanding set of features. What you get with OpenCart is an easy to understand interface based on a platform that can run websites even with a cheap shared hosting plan. You can basically set up websites without hiring a single IT guy.

OpenCart is founded by Daniel Kerr back in 2006 who wanted to try a different approach when it comes to open-source solutions. Right now, OpenCart is one of the game changers in eCommerce website building. Now their company is based in Hong Kong and they are still actively working on their services.

You can download OpenCart for free and create your own website from scratch. There are thousands of add-ons available, although a lot of them will cost you some money if you want them to constantly and effectively run on your website. Now let’s see the main advantages of choosing OpenCart for your eCommerce site.

Main Reasons to Use OpenCart

If you want an online store that is easy to manage and fully functional, you should definitely pick OpenCart. From the day you download it, you will get regular updates that either fix some issues or just improve the overall user experience.

When you log in to their interface, you can always see some useful stats on the dashboard that provide useful information about your web shop. The OpenCart admin interface lets you manage orders and products in a simple way. You can divide your web shop into as many categories and manufacturers as you want, there is no limit.

Whenever you need to deal with different tax rates, currencies, languages or shipping methods, it can be easily managed with OpenCart. On top of that, you can apply coupons, discounts, reviews and rating points to your products as well.

OpenCart has a lot to offer when it comes to style. There is a default web shop design for starters which already looks great but you can easily start experimenting with new templates. A huge number of their templates is optimized for mobile devices so your customers will have a nice time shopping on your website despite the size of their screen.

The better the SEO, the more people can find your business and OpenCart has integrated SEO that can help you a lot. They figured out an easy way to add meta tags to your categories and products, while they also made sure your web pages will be indexed properly.

5 Best OpenCart Hosting Providers

A good web host should be 100% compatible with OpenCart and user-friendly. Other than that, it should come with top-notch customer support, good performance and affordable prices. First of all, you need to take OpenCart’s requirements into account and pick a hosting plan accordingly.

In order to create a successful eCommerce website, it needs to be fast and responsive as well. Choosing one of the cheapest shared hosting plans in the market might not be a good idea. Those can easily lead your website to intolerably slow loading times and a huge decline of sales.

Picking a stronger shared hosting plan or a VPS is always a better idea, especially if it grants you features that benefit your eCommerce site. It also pays off because you will maintain your customer base. Another thing you should look for in a hosting plan is regular backups that prevent your data from disappearing.

After thorough research, we have assembled a list of the 5 best web hosting providers for OpenCart in our opinion so you can see what each of them has to offer.

InMotion Hosting

Since InMotion is officially partnered up with OpenCart a few years ago, it helped the web hosting provider a lot in improving their hosting plans to better suit OpenCart site owners. Even though you probably won’t be disappointed after choosing one of their plans, you can always get your money back within 90 days which is pretty generous of them.

If you own an eCommerce site, you will find plenty of useful features in each InMotion Hosting plan. You get an unlimited disk space and bandwidth, the latest version of SQL databases and bonus scripting languages. Server uptimes are especially important for web shop owners and InMotion keeps their servers up and running at least 99.9% of the time.

Their Dell servers are absolutely reliable with 4x core processors in each of them and a Cisco network monitoring system that keeps it secure. InMotion uses top-notch technology called Speed Zone that greatly boosts page loading speeds because of the faster data transfer.

The recommended InMotion Hosting plans for OpenCart users are their shared plans. The first, Launch plan costs only $2.95 per month and it grants you 2 websites and unlimited bandwidth, disk space and emails. Their Power plan is the top seller, costing $4.49 per month with 6 websites and double the performance.

However, the Pro plan has the best price for what you get, costing $7.49 per month with unlimited websites and 4x performance. InMotion won’t even charge you a dime for doing backups, it is completely free just like the 400+ applications you can install with a single click.

HostGator

HostGator is definitely among the biggest names out there. The company started to provide web hosting services back in 2002 which makes them one of the oldest companies in the industry. If you want to start your OpenCart web shop, you can do so even by choosing the cheapest HostGator plan.

It is powerful enough to ensure stability and fast page loading speeds until you establish a strong online presence and your website starts to grow. Then you can simply upgrade to a stronger plan. There are three shared hosting plans available that are recommended for OpenCart users.

There is the Hatchling plan with the basics that costs only $2.75 per month. The second one is the Baby plan for OpenCart sites with higher traffic for a price of $5.95 per month. What they mostly recommend is the Business plan for high-traffic eCommerce sites that also costs $5.95 a month.

HostGator has an award-winning customer support team that can be reached on every day of the year, 24/7. They also uploaded hundreds of articles and video tutorials to their Support Portal where you can learn a lot about how to manage your hosting plan and website. On top of that, you can use HostGator’s own website builder and gain access to 4,500 free templates for your website.

A 99.9% of uptime is guaranteed and if you didn’t like their service, you can always get your money back in 45 days.

BlueHost

BlueHost is in the industry since 2003 and they evolved into one of the most popular web hosting providers on the Internet. Tens of thousands of people purchase their plans on a monthly basis and plenty of them are OpenCart users. Although BlueHost is not specialized in the platform, their hosting plans provide solid specs and features that can run an OpenCart web shop without a problem.

They invested a lot into reliable Dell servers and an overall hardware that ensures less than 1-second of page loading speed and more than 99.9% uptime. The network connections at the BlueHost data centers are always monitored and secured with 10 Gigabyte Ethernet. They also include some bonuses such as daily backups and a free domain name with each plan.

At BlueHost, you can find affordable prices with plans that are great for small and medium businesses. Even their cheapest shared hosting plan can provide enough resources for those who just started off with an OpenCart web shop. From then on, you can easily upgrade to a stronger plan once your website starts to grow.

Their Basic shared plan costs only $2.95, while the Plus is $5.95 and the Prime is also $5.95 per month. If you consider the specs and features you get for the price, the Prime plan is the most recommended one. VPS plans are also available for those who want to upgrade even further. The Standard plan costs $19.99, the Enhanced plan is $29.99, while their Ultimate plan costs $59.99 per month.

InterServer.net

InterServer.net is a great choice for small businesses and basically anyone who has a tight budget. They even offer a price lock guarantee, meaning that once you purchase their plan, the price will always stay the same. InterServer.net also supports nonprofit organizations by offering their web hosting plans for free.

The company was established in 1999 and their services attracted many freelancers and businesses from many different countries. InterServer.net is one of the cheaper providers out there, but you still get a high-quality service, a skilled support team and top-notch security for your data if you join them.

What makes InterServer.com unique is that they have built a whole datacenters for themselves, built their own servers, installed a nationwide fiber network and developed a custom Linux kernel for the servers. They literally handled and still maintain everything themselves while saving their customers money by not hiring other companies to do it.

InterServer.com offers a hosting plan that is fully optimized for OpenCart and costs only $5 per month. For the price, you get unlimited storage, transfer, websites and email accounts as well. But that’s not all, they have numerous one-click install scripts available and they also automatically update OpenCart and all the plugins for you. There is no need to pay for the backup either and you can always find the daily backup copies of your data for the previous 30 days.

GreenGeeks

GreenGeeks is a full-featured web hosting provider that offers plenty of features for OpenCart users. They not only optimized their hosting plan for OpenCart but also made sure there is a reliable customer support team available via phone, email tickets and live chat if you need help with the platform. If you already have an OpenCart website, they are ready to migrate it at any time.

You can find plenty of positive reviews about GreenGeeks on the Internet and one of the main reasons behind that is the great social responsibility of the company. To compensate for the energy used up by their datacenters and offices, they invest three times of that energy cost into Green Energy. This also means that by purchasing their plan, you are also contributing to a better environment.

Their OpenCart Hosting plan costs only $3.95 and you get unlimited storage, data transfer and domains, a free website builder, free tools for marketing and SEO and much more. For such a cheap price, they basically provide everything you need to set up a powerful website. A 99.9% uptime is guaranteed and you can get your money back in 30 days if you are not satisfied.

Conclusion

If you want to avoid using WooCommerce or Magento, then OpenCart paired up with one of the web hosting options will be a great deal for you. It is quite straightforward to use OpenCart and there is not too much to learn in order to master it. With the extra features of these 5 providers, it will be more than easy to achieve your goal.

After our short reviews, it’s up to you to decide which web hosting provider suits you the best. Each of them has its own characteristics, but their hosting plans are definitely premium-level with the latest hardware. OpenCart is perfect for small and medium businesses that are not experienced in web development, yet they want to set up an eCommerce site as quickly as possible.

These 5 hosting sites ensure a high-level security that every business demands. Their special features even guarantee a performance that is better than the average shared hosting plan nowadays in the market. This also means that the transactions through your eCommerce site will happen quickly and securely.