Rocket.net vs SiteGround for WooCommerce: Flat Edge Pricing vs Cheap Intro, CPU-Metered Plans

Rocket.net vs SiteGround for WooCommerce is a $25/month edge platform with bandwidth caps against a $2.99/month shared plan that renews at $17.99 and meters CPU seconds. Rocket.net bundles Cloudflare Enterprise and a 99.99% uptime guarantee on every tier. SiteGround is cheaper for three years, then climbs to a $100/month Cloud plan when the shared limits bite.

Plans and what a store actually pays

SiteGround’s WooCommerce hosting page lists three shared plans with WooCommerce preinstalled. StartUp is $2.99/month intro and renews at $17.99/month for one site and 10 GB of storage. GrowBig is $4.99/month intro, renewing at $29.99, with unlimited sites, 50 GB, staging, on-demand backups, and “30% faster PHP.” GoGeek is $7.99/month intro, renewing at $44.99, with 100 GB, staging plus Git, and priority support. All three state 99.9% uptime, daily backups with 30-day retention, and a free CDN with “170+ edge points.” The intro rates apply to the first term, so a GoGeek store pays $44.99/month from year two.

Rocket.net’s pricing page has no intro-versus-renewal gap: “we’ll never do price hikes on renewals.” Starter is $30/month monthly or $25/month billed annually for one install, 10 GB of storage, and 50 GB of bandwidth. Pro is $60 or $50 for three installs, 20 GB, and 100 GB. Business is $100 or $83 for ten installs, 40 GB, and 300 GB. Expert is $200 or $166 for 25 installs, 50 GB, and 500 GB. Every tier lists “Unlimited” PHP workers, Cloudflare Enterprise CDN and WAF, malware protection, daily backups with 30-day retention, free migrations, and a 99.99% uptime guarantee. Enterprise plans start at $649/month for 8 cores, 64 GB RAM, and 1 TB of bandwidth on dedicated hardware, with Object Cache Pro and Relay included.

The price gap is real but narrows fast. Over 36 months, GoGeek costs roughly $96 in year one and $540 in each later year, about $1,176 total. Rocket.net Business on annual billing is about $996 a year, or $2,988 over the same period, and it includes the edge CDN, WAF, and bandwidth allowance that SiteGround’s shared plans do not size the same way.

Side-by-side for a WooCommerce store

Where each plan stops for a high-traffic store

SiteGround’s ceiling is CPU time. Its fair-use policy allows 1,000 CPU seconds per hour on StartUp, 2,000 on GrowBig, and 4,000 on GoGeek, with 768 MB per process and databases capped at 1,000 MB. Every uncached WooCommerce request, meaning every cart update, checkout step, and logged-in page, spends CPU seconds. At 200 ms of CPU per uncached request, GoGeek’s hourly budget is about 20,000 requests, and a store past $1M in annual sales can exceed that during a promotion. The policy says when limits are approached, “your website has either outgrown the current hosting plan capacity, or it requires optimizations,” and the step up is SiteGround Cloud: Jump Start at $100/month for 4 cores and 8 GB RAM, up to Super Power at $400/month for 16 cores and 20 GB, each with 5 TB of bandwidth and “Automated Scaling” on a single instance.

Rocket.net’s ceiling is bandwidth. Its plan pages list visitors as “Unmetered” but cap transfer at 50, 100, 300, or 500 GB by tier, with overages “at $2/GB” for disk and “$0.08/GB” for bandwidth per the pricing FAQ. The terms of service still include a “$1.00 per 1,000 visitors” overage clause, so confirm which document governs your account. PHP workers are listed as unlimited, but the managed tiers run on shared infrastructure; the dedicated cores arrive at Enterprise from $649/month. A store with a heavy image catalog can pass 300 GB a month before it passes $1M in sales, which lands it on Expert or Enterprise.

How cart and checkout are cached

SiteGround documents its exclusions. Its dynamic cache configuration serves cart, my-account, checkout, and add-to-cart URLs “dynamically all the time” and bypasses cache when it sees the wp_woocommerce_session, woocommerce_cart_hash, or woocommerce_items_in_cart cookies. Memcached is available on GrowBig and above for object caching. This is standard WooCommerce cache hygiene, and it means the shared CPU budget carries every cart-holding visitor.

Rocket.net caches full pages at the Cloudflare edge and describes “Smart Full Page Caching” plus free Redis on its WooCommerce hosting page. It does not publish the exclusion list, so run the two-browser test before launch: add an item in one session, open the store in another, and confirm the cart never leaks. Because the edge absorbs anonymous catalog traffic, the origin mostly sees carts and checkouts, which is the right shape for a store as long as those paths hold up under a burst.

What the 2025 benchmarks show

Hostingstep’s full-year 2025 panel (Pingdom checks every 60 seconds from 19 North American locations, 525,600 checks per host) recorded Rocket.net at 373 ms average TTFB, 66 ms global TTFB, and 99.9943% uptime with two outages, and SiteGround at 632 ms average TTFB, 1,200 ms global TTFB, and 99.9629% uptime with 44 outages totaling 193 minutes, per the 2026 benchmark roundup. SiteGround’s Loader.io run returned 170 ms with 0% errors; Rocket.net’s was “not testable” because Cloudflare security blocked the tool. Hostingstep’s Rocket.net review for October 2025 to May 2026 measured 346 ms TTFB and 99.97% uptime across seven outages. None of these tests exercise a WooCommerce checkout under load, so they describe cached delivery, not the cart path.

Which one for a store heading past $1M

• Pick SiteGround if the store is still under roughly $500K a year, you want documented cart exclusions and staging for under $45/month at renewal, and you accept that the next step is a $100 to $400/month Cloud instance rather than a bigger shared plan.
• Pick Rocket.net if you want edge caching, WAF, and 24/7 support on every tier at a flat price, your monthly transfer fits inside 300 to 500 GB, and you are willing to verify cart-cache behavior yourself. Enterprise from $649/month adds dedicated cores when the managed tiers run out.
• Look elsewhere if a launch can multiply traffic in minutes and checkout must not slow down. Neither vendor publishes horizontal autoscaling, application tracing, or a credit-backed SLA on the plans a $1M store would buy.

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

Urumi is the platform layer for WooCommerce stores between $1M and $50M GMV, where a slow checkout or an outage costs more than hosting does. It is priced custom and is not cheaper than either host above; below $1M GMV, one of them is the sensible choice. Above it, the difference is structural: horizontal auto-scaling across multi-zone Google Cloud, a 99.99% uptime SLA with active-active zones and auto-failover, fully managed APM with traces, logs, and alerts, isolated staging per branch with one-click rollback, Cloudflare Enterprise delivery, and a WooCommerce-aware cache that is cohort-aware, A/B-aware, and channel-aware. Revenue AI watches checkout, cart, pricing, and payments around the clock and prices every regression in dollars; Builder AI builds features from plain English; Analytics AI answers questions about your store data. In published stress tests with the edge cache disabled, Urumi returned a 236 ms median cart response, 321 ms median checkout, and 7,861 orders in under two minutes. Already have a team or an agency? They ship faster with the grunt work covered. See WooCommerce hosting built for high-traffic stores.

Frequently asked questions

Is SiteGround or Rocket.net better for a WooCommerce store?

SiteGround costs less for the first three years and documents its cart and checkout cache exclusions, but its shared plans meter CPU seconds per hour and step up to a $100/month Cloud instance. Rocket.net costs $25 to $166/month with Cloudflare Enterprise on every tier and caps bandwidth instead. For stores under $500K a year, SiteGround is the value choice; above that, Rocket.net’s flat pricing and edge delivery usually cost less than SiteGround Cloud.

Does Rocket.net limit visits?

Rocket.net’s pricing page lists visitors as “Unmetered” on managed plans and caps bandwidth at 50 to 500 GB per month by tier, billing overages at $0.08/GB. Its terms of service still contain a $1.00 per 1,000 visitors overage clause, so confirm the current terms with sales before signing.

What happens when a WooCommerce store exceeds SiteGround’s CPU limits?

SiteGround’s fair-use policy caps shared plans at 1,000, 2,000, or 4,000 CPU seconds per hour. When a store approaches the limit, SiteGround says it has outgrown the plan or needs optimization, and the upgrade path is SiteGround Cloud from $100/month with automated scaling on a single instance.

Does either host include application monitoring?

No. SiteGround shows resource-usage graphs and Rocket.net does not list monitoring on its plan pages. Neither provides transaction-level tracing, so a store that needs to know which plugin slowed checkout will need a separate APM tool.

For the mechanics behind these limits, read why WooCommerce slows down under load and how to scale WooCommerce for high traffic.

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