CubeCart
Hosting
Install CubeCart in one click on our fast, reliable UK web hosting. Fully managed with free SSL, daily backups, and dedicated expert support.
What is CubeCart?
CubeCart is a UK-built ecommerce platform that has been around since 2003. It runs on PHP and MySQL, ships with a sensible admin area, and gives you a working shop without dragging in a heavy framework or a stack of paid extensions just to take an order.
The free core covers product catalogues, tax rules, multiple currencies, customer accounts, order management, gift certificates and a clean checkout. Payment options include Stripe, PayPal, Square and offline methods like bank transfer or cheque, with more gateways available from the marketplace.
CubeCart suits independent retailers and small shops that want to own their data, install on standard shared hosting and avoid monthly platform fees. It is not aimed at enterprise scale, and the extension catalogue is smaller than WooCommerce or PrestaShop, but for a few hundred SKUs and a handful of staff it does the job without much fuss.
365i’s editorial review of CubeCart
I have been hosting CubeCart shops for clients on and off since version 3, which puts us back somewhere around 2007. It is one of those platforms that quietly gets on with the job. No drama, no breaking changes every six months, no need to babysit it the way you sometimes do with WooCommerce after a major update.
What I like about it is that it is honest about what it is. CubeCart isn't trying to be Shopify or Magento. It is a self-hosted shop for people who want a real database they own, an admin they can actually navigate, and a checkout that converts without a marketing tax bolted on top. The UK heritage matters too. The default tax rules, currency handling and address fields are sensible for British shops out of the box.
"CubeCart isn't the loudest ecommerce platform out there, but in over 20 years of hosting I've watched it outlast a dozen flashier competitors. The shops that pick it tend to keep it for a long time, and that says more about the software than any feature comparison ever could."
Mark McNeece, Founder, 365i Hosting
Where I see CubeCart shine is the £20-£200 average order value range with a few hundred to a few thousand SKUs. Independent retailers, niche product brands, hobby shops, small B2B suppliers. The admin is approachable enough that the shop owner can manage it themselves without needing a developer on speed dial for every catalogue tweak.
On 365i shared hosting it is genuinely well behaved. CubeCart is light on memory, the database queries are sensible, and our PHP 8.5 plus OPcache plus MySQL 8 stack means the storefront feels snappy even on the entry £5.99 plan. If you grow past a few hundred orders a day or want to push large catalogues with heavy filtering, that's the point I'd suggest moving up to a cloud server, but most CubeCart shops never need to.
One word of caution. Pick your extensions carefully. The free core is solid, but the marketplace has a long tail and not every plugin is actively maintained. I always tell clients to favour extensions from the CubeCart team or vendors with recent updates, and to test anything new in a staging copy first. We can spin a staging clone up for you on the same hosting at no extra cost.
Why Host CubeCart with 365i?
Our web hosting is built for PHP applications like CubeCart. Every plan includes everything you need to launch and grow.
One-Click Installation
Install CubeCart with a single click from your control panel. No manual configuration, no FTP uploads, no database setup.
Free SSL Certificate
Every site gets a free SSL certificate, automatically configured and renewed. Keep your CubeCart installation secure from day one.
99.9%+ Uptime Track Record
Enterprise-grade data centres in the UK, US & Asia with redundant power, cooling, and network connectivity. Shared hosting runs on autoscaling cloud infrastructure with a 99.9%+ historical uptime record; Managed Cloud Servers target 99.99% uptime; our VPS products carry a contractual 99.99% network availability SLA with service credits.
Daily Backups
Automatic daily backups with easy one-click restore. Your CubeCart data is always safe and recoverable.
7-Day Expert Support
UK-based hosting specialists available 7 days a week including evenings, weekends, and bank holidays. Real people, real help.
SSD Storage
All plans run on fast SSD storage for snappy page loads and responsive admin panels. CubeCart performs at its best.
Where CubeCart Fits
Best for
UK-based independent retailers and small shops that want a self-hosted store without monthly platform fees. Particularly good for catalogues of a few dozen to a few thousand products, owner-managed admin, and businesses that want their order data in their own database. PHP and MySQL skills are not required to run it day to day.
Watch for
CubeCart's extension marketplace is smaller than WooCommerce or PrestaShop, and not every third-party plugin is actively maintained. Some niche payment gateways and shipping integrations exist only as paid extensions. The default templates are functional rather than beautiful, so you may want a developer for serious design work, and headless or API-first architectures aren't the platform's strength.
Web Hosting for CubeCart
Get CubeCart up and running in minutes with our fast, reliable web hosting. Every plan includes one-click installation, free SSL, UK, US & Asia data centres, and dedicated expert support.
- 1 website
- 10 GB SSD storage
- Free SSL certificate
- 80+ 1-click installs
- Unlimited LVE resources
- Autoscaling cloud platform
- UK, US & Asia data centres
- 5 websites
- Unlimited SSD storage
- Free SSL certificate
- 80+ 1-click installs
- CDN included
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Timeline Backup/Restore
Timeline Backup
- Website files and databases
- Daily snapshots, 30-day retention
- One-click file and database restore
- Everything above, plus email mailbox backups
- 60-day database retention
- Mailbox restore (to a temporary mailbox first, then sync back)
- Unlimited LVE resources
- Autoscaling cloud platform
- UK, US & Asia data centres
- 10 websites
- Unlimited SSD storage
- Free SSL certificate
- 80+ 1-click installs
- CDN included
-
Timeline Backup/Restore (Pro)
Timeline Backup
- Website files and databases
- Daily snapshots, 30-day retention
- One-click file and database restore
- Everything above, plus email mailbox backups
- 60-day database retention
- Mailbox restore (to a temporary mailbox first, then sync back)
- Unlimited LVE resources
- Autoscaling cloud platform
- UK, US & Asia data centres
All prices exclude VAT. No contract, cancel any time.
Need More Power for CubeCart?
For high-traffic sites, large catalogues, or mission-critical deployments, our fully managed cloud servers give CubeCart dedicated resources and enterprise-grade performance.
- Dedicated CPU, RAM & SSD storage
- 99.99% uptime
- Fully managed by our team
- Choose 365i, AWS, or Google Cloud
Servers
Servers
Servers
A CubeCart case from our books
A specialist UK homeware retailer came to us in 2024 running CubeCart 6 on a budget host that was throttling them at peak times. They had about 1,400 SKUs, three staff users, and were doing 30-50 orders a day with bigger spikes around Christmas. The previous host kept hitting CPU caps mid-checkout, and they were losing roughly 8% of carts to timeouts during their two busiest weeks of the year.
We migrated them to our £5.99 starter plan, ran the migration overnight to keep downtime under 20 minutes, and tuned PHP-FPM and OPcache for their setup. Page-load times on category pages dropped from 2.8 seconds to under 900ms on a cold cache. Through the following Christmas period they saw zero checkout timeouts and a 14% lift in completed orders against the previous year, which they attributed mostly to the speed change rather than any new marketing.
What we would tell anyone in the same spot: CubeCart on tuned shared hosting handles a lot more traffic than people assume. Before you assume you need a dedicated server, get the PHP version, OPcache and MySQL configuration right. Most "CubeCart is slow" complaints come down to the host, not the software.
Anonymised at the client's request. Industry, scale, and timeline preserved.
What we look for in ecommerce hosting
Hosting an ecommerce app well is rarely about raw CPU. It is about three things we end up tuning for almost every shop: PHP memory limits high enough to handle bulk product imports, a database engine sized for the read-heavy mix of catalogue browsing, and reliable cron plus SSL for whichever payment gateway the shop uses. We give all of that out of the box on our web hosting plans, but we will also tell you honestly when an app is ill-suited to shared hosting and a small managed cloud server would save everyone pain.
More applications you can install on 365i hosting
Beyond eCommerce, our one-click installer covers 79 open-source PHP applications across 27 categories. A small selection from across the catalogue:
CubeCart Hosting FAQ
Common questions we hear from people running CubeCart on our hosting.
Yes. CubeCart is in our one-click installer, so you pick your domain, set an admin user and password, and it deploys with a working database in under a minute. You can also install it manually by uploading the files and running the web installer, which some developers prefer for control over the document root and database name.
Yes. Both Stripe and PayPal modules are included in the free core, along with Square, offline payment options like bank transfer, and several other gateways. Additional gateways including Worldpay, Sage Pay and various regional providers are available from the CubeCart marketplace, some free and some paid.
CubeCart's tax engine handles UK VAT properly, including separate rates for different product categories and B2B VAT-exempt orders with valid VAT numbers. For post-Brexit EU shipping with IOSS or paperwork, you may need a third-party extension or to integrate with a shipping platform like Royal Mail Click and Drop or Parcelforce. The core handles UK domestic shipping rules natively.
Migrating from WooCommerce is reasonably straightforward because both expose product data via CSV export. Customer accounts and historical orders take more work and usually need a custom import script. Shopify exports are more limited because of the platform's lock-in, but we have done it for clients and it is manageable. Plan a staging environment, test the import, and only switch DNS once everything is verified.
Our 7-day expert support covers the hosting layer, PHP, MySQL, file permissions, SSL, email and any platform-level problem that affects CubeCart. We don't write custom CubeCart code or theme work, but we can point you to the official forum, recommended developers, or help diagnose whether an issue is hosting-side or application-side. For migrations from another host we do all the heavy lifting at no charge.
Ready to Host CubeCart?
Get started with CubeCart on our fast UK web hosting. One-click installation, free SSL, and dedicated expert support included.