A store is not a blog. It's mostly uncacheable, logged-in, database-heavy traffic — cart, checkout, account pages — exactly the stuff a cheap shared plan chokes on when it matters most (i.e., during your biggest sale). 🛒
What actually keeps a store up:
- Object cache (Redis). Non-negotiable for WooCommerce. It's what makes the dynamic pages fast.
- Enough real CPU/RAM headroom for concurrent checkouts. Test at peak, not idle.
- A cache setup that excludes cart/checkout/account — miscic here and you'll leak sessions between customers. 😬
- Fast, reliable backups — a broken store is an emergency, not a ticket.
- HTTP/2 or /3, NVMe, and a CDN for the catalog images.
Where budget shared hosting bites: everything looks fine in testing, then Black Friday brings 50 concurrent shoppers and TTFB goes to 8 seconds.
Running a store — how many concurrent orders have you actually load-tested for? If the answer is "none," that's the homework. Let's talk numbers. 📈
