Hostinger vs SiteGround for WooCommerce: Prices, PHP Workers, Caching, and Where Each Stops

Hostinger vs SiteGround for WooCommerce comes down to this: Hostinger is the cheaper LiteSpeed-based option with published PHP worker counts, while SiteGround adds Memcached and dynamic caching tuned for WooCommerce on GrowBig and above. Both are shared plans with CPU ceilings, and neither is built for a store approaching $1M a year. Here is what each includes, what it costs after the intro term, and where it stops.

Entry plans and what they cost after year one

Hostinger’s WooCommerce page lists two plans. Unlimited is $3.99/month on a 48-month term ($191.52 up front) and renews at $16.99/month with 50 GB of NVMe storage; Cloud Startup is $7.99/month on the same term ($383.52 up front) and renews at $25.99/month with 100 GB (source). Cloud Professional and Cloud Enterprise are listed at $15.99 and $29.99/month intro on 48-month terms (source).

SiteGround’s WooCommerce plans are 12-month prepay only: StartUp is $2.99/month and renews at $17.99, GrowBig is $4.99/month and renews at $29.99, and GoGeek is $7.99/month and renews at $44.99 (source). StartUp is capped at one site and 10 GB; GrowBig and GoGeek allow unlimited sites with 50 GB and 100 GB.

The number a store owner should model is the renewal, not the intro. Over a second year, GrowBig costs about $360 and GoGeek about $540; Hostinger Cloud Startup costs about $312. For a store growing toward seven figures, all of these are rounding errors next to the cost of one slow checkout week, which is the more useful lens for the rest of this comparison.

Compute: published PHP workers vs CPU-second budgets

Hostinger publishes hard limits per plan. Unlimited gets 60 PHP workers, 2 CPU cores, and 3 GB of RAM; Cloud Startup gets 100 workers, 4 cores, and 4 GB; Cloud Professional gets 200 workers, 5 cores, and 6 GB; Cloud Enterprise gets 300 workers, 6 cores, and 12 GB (source). Those worker counts are generous for shared hosting, but they are ceilings on a shared box, not dedicated capacity: the worker count says how many PHP processes may run at once, not how fast each finishes when the host’s CPU is contended.

SiteGround does not publish PHP worker counts. Instead it meters CPU seconds. Its fair-use page lists StartUp at 1,000 CPU seconds per hour and 10,000 per day, GrowBig at 2,000 per hour and 20,000 per day, and GoGeek at 4,000 per hour and 40,000 per day, with early warnings on overage and possible access limits for repeated over-usage (source). For a WooCommerce store, that matters because cart, checkout, and My Account requests bypass page cache and consume CPU seconds every time. A 4,000-second hourly budget is about 66 CPU-minutes; a busy sale hour on a catalog with layered filters and a few heavy plugins can burn through that.

Both hosts run fixed allocations. There is no horizontal scaling on the WooCommerce plans at either provider; the upgrade path is a bigger plan or a move to their cloud tiers, covered below.

WooCommerce caching: LiteSpeed vs SuperCacher plus Memcached

Hostinger’s stack is LiteSpeed with the LiteSpeed Cache for WordPress plugin, plus an object cache that its WooCommerce page says cuts store response times “by up to 3x” (source). LiteSpeed Cache has WooCommerce-aware rules for cart and checkout, and the object cache offloads repeated database reads. What it does not give you is a cache that understands cohorts, A/B variants, or sales channels; those are the cases where a generic WordPress cache serves the wrong price or the wrong stock message.

SiteGround’s approach is a three-layer system: NGINX direct delivery for static files, dynamic full-page caching, and Memcached for database queries. Dynamic caching and Memcached are available on GrowBig and above, cart and checkout pages are excluded from cache by default, and logged-in users are bypassed (source). GrowBig and GoGeek also enable what SiteGround calls its Ultrafast PHP setup, marketed as “30% faster PHP” (source). In practice, on either host the uncached path (checkout, cart updates, account pages, admin) is what a growing store lives on, and that path is bounded by the compute limits above rather than by the cache.

Side-by-side comparison

Neither vendor publishes an SLA with credits on these plans; both state a 99.9% uptime figure on their marketing pages (Hostinger, SiteGround). 99.9% allows roughly 43 minutes of downtime a month. Independent testing is mostly at small scale: one 2026 comparison measured a 230 ms average response for Hostinger and 638 ms for SiteGround on test sites, with 100% uptime for both over a month (source). Those are single-site, low-concurrency numbers and say little about a checkout under a few hundred concurrent shoppers.

Where each plan stops for a growing store

The honest upgrade path at both hosts leads off shared hosting. Hostinger’s top cloud tier, Cloud Enterprise, is 6 cores, 12 GB of RAM, and 300 PHP workers (source). SiteGround Cloud starts at $100/month for 4 cores and 8 GB (Jump Start) and runs to $400/month for 16 cores and 20 GB (Super Power), on Google Cloud, with an optional automatic scaling feature that adds resources to that one instance (source). Both are still single-server, vertically scaled setups: there is one database, one PHP pool, and one zone.

Signs a store has outgrown either: CPU-limit warnings during promotions, checkout requests over one second uncached, admin order edits that time out, staging that cannot reproduce a production bug because it shares the same box, and no trace-level view of which plugin or query is slow. At that point the question is no longer “Hostinger or SiteGround” but whether a single-server host of any brand is the right shape.

A realistic read: if the store does under roughly $250K a year and has a small catalog, either plan is fine and the price difference is noise. Between $250K and $1M, SiteGround’s GoGeek or Cloud, or Hostinger’s Cloud Enterprise, will usually hold if the plugin stack is lean and someone is watching the CPU graphs. Above $1M, the cost of one bad launch day exceeds the annual hosting bill many times over, and that changes the math.

The third option: when neither fits a high-traffic store

Urumi is the platform layer for WooCommerce stores doing $1M to $50M GMV, where a slow checkout or a launch-day outage costs real money. It is not a cheaper alternative to Hostinger or SiteGround; pricing is custom and higher. What it replaces is the single-server shape: horizontal auto-scaling across multi-zone Google Cloud, a 99.99% uptime SLA with active-active zones and auto-failover, a WooCommerce-aware cache that understands cohorts, A/B variants, and sales channels, fully managed APM with traces, logs, and alerts, isolated staging per branch with one-click rollback, and 30-day point-in-time recovery in a separate region. Migration is zero-downtime in 24 to 48 hours. On top sit three AIs, including Revenue AI that watches checkout, cart, pricing, and payments around the clock, prices every regression in dollars, and ships the fix as a PR.

grüum grew revenue 13.3% year over year on Urumi, with cached loads going from 4.0 s to 0.3 s and 0 incidents through peak weeks. Urumi publishes its own load-test results on the WooCommerce performance benchmark page: a 236 ms median cart response and a 321 ms median checkout with the edge cache disabled. Already have a team or an agency? They ship faster with the grunt work covered. Details are at the Urumi WooCommerce hosting platform, including a free performance audit.

Frequently asked questions

Is Hostinger or SiteGround better for WooCommerce?

For a small store, Hostinger is cheaper at renewal and publishes PHP worker counts, while SiteGround’s GrowBig and GoGeek include Memcached and dynamic caching that exclude cart and checkout by default. Neither is designed for a store past roughly $1M a year, because both are single-server plans with CPU ceilings and no horizontal scaling.

How many PHP workers do Hostinger’s WooCommerce plans have?

Hostinger’s published limits are 60 PHP workers on Unlimited, 100 on Cloud Startup, 200 on Cloud Professional, and 300 on Cloud Enterprise. SiteGround does not publish worker counts and meters CPU seconds instead, from 1,000 per hour on StartUp to 4,000 per hour on GoGeek.

Does SiteGround throttle WooCommerce stores?

SiteGround’s fair-use policy sets hourly, daily, and monthly CPU-second budgets per plan and says it issues early warnings and may limit site access for extreme or repeated over-usage. Uncached WooCommerce requests such as cart and checkout consume that budget, so busy sale periods are when the limits tend to surface.

What should a WooCommerce store use above $1M a year?

Above about $1M GMV, a store should look for horizontal scaling, a contractual uptime SLA, application-level monitoring, and isolated staging with rollback, none of which are part of shared plans at Hostinger or SiteGround. Options include the cloud tiers at each host, other managed WooCommerce platforms, or a platform layer like Urumi.

If you are sizing compute, see how many PHP workers WooCommerce needs, and for the full checklist read what managed WooCommerce hosting must include.

Last reviewed September 2026. Competitor details come from their public pages on the dates linked; check them before you buy.