PrestaShop
Hosting
Install PrestaShop in one click on our fast, reliable UK web hosting. Fully managed with free SSL, daily backups, and dedicated expert support.
What is PrestaShop?
PrestaShop is a free, open-source ecommerce platform written in PHP and licensed under the OSL 3.0. First released in 2007 in France, it is now used by over 300,000 shops worldwide and is particularly strong in European markets. The current major release is PrestaShop 8.x, with PrestaShop 9 in active development.
The admin handles products, combinations, attributes, manufacturers, suppliers, customers, orders, returns, taxes, and a multi-shop mode that lets a single install run multiple stores from a shared back office. Multi-currency, multi-language, and complex tax rules including UK VAT and EU OSS are handled in core. Promotions, vouchers, abandoned-cart reminders, and customer groups are built in rather than bolted on.
PrestaShop extends through the official PrestaShop Addons Marketplace, which lists thousands of paid and free modules covering payment gateways, shipping integrations, marketing tools, and themes. The platform is built on the Symfony framework, runs on a LAMP or LEMP stack, and supports MySQL 5.6+ or MariaDB 10.x.
365i’s editorial review of PrestaShop
PrestaShop is the platform we host that I think is the most underrated in the UK market. It is enormous in France, Spain, and Italy, where it sits where WooCommerce sits in the UK, and it is genuinely a more mature ecommerce engine than WooCommerce in several specific ways. The vendor description above gives you the spec sheet. What it does not tell you is that PrestaShop is a serious shop platform built by people who treat ecommerce as the primary use case rather than as a plugin on top of a blog.
I see PrestaShop chosen by UK shops with European trading partners, by businesses that need proper tax-zone handling for cross-border sales, and by anyone who has tried to do complex product variants in WooCommerce and given up. Its product attribute and combination model is the best I have used in any open-source shop platform. If you sell something with five sizes, three colours, and two materials, PrestaShop handles the resulting 30 combinations cleanly. WooCommerce can do it but the admin UI starts to creak around 50 variations per product.
"PrestaShop is what you pick when ecommerce is the whole product, not a feature you bolted onto a blog. The catalogue model is genuinely sophisticated and the European tax handling is the best in any open-source shop I have hosted."
Mark McNeece, Founder, 365i Hosting
Where it shines: tax handling, in particular EU OSS scheme support and per-country VAT rules, is in core rather than a paid module. Multi-shop mode does what OpenCart's multi-store mode does, but the admin is more polished. The Symfony foundation makes the code more pleasant to extend if you have a developer working on it. The official Addons Marketplace is curated more carefully than OpenCart's, so the quality floor is higher even though most modules are paid.
Where it's annoying: most useful modules are paid, and the prices add up quickly compared to free WooCommerce alternatives. The upgrade path between major versions has historically been painful, with PrestaShop 1.6 to 1.7 being particularly notorious. Theme development is more involved than WooCommerce because of the Symfony underpinnings, so finding cheap freelance front-end help is harder. The community is large internationally but smaller in the UK, so when you Google a niche issue you end up reading French forum threads through Google Translate.
Hosting-stack notes: PrestaShop 8 wants PHP 8.1 or higher and MySQL 5.6+ or MariaDB 10.x. It is the heaviest of the three big self-hosted shop platforms in this catalogue, so we set 512 MB of PHP memory by default and recommend opcache always be enabled. We also set up real server cron for the housekeeping and abandoned-cart jobs rather than relying on the in-application scheduler. PrestaShop benefits noticeably from CDN pre-caching, which is why busier shops tend to end up on our Turbo plan.
If you sell across borders, run complex catalogues with proper variants, or want a shop platform built by ecommerce specialists, PrestaShop deserves serious consideration. If you want the cheapest path to a basic shop and you are already comfortable in WordPress, WooCommerce is the easier route. PrestaShop rewards the people who came to it for ecommerce reasons specifically.
Why Host PrestaShop with 365i?
Our web hosting is built for PHP applications like PrestaShop. Every plan includes everything you need to launch and grow.
One-Click Installation
Install PrestaShop 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 PrestaShop 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 PrestaShop 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. PrestaShop performs at its best.
Where PrestaShop Fits
Best for
UK shops trading into the EU where PrestaShop's native EU OSS and per-country VAT handling saves the cost and risk of bolt-on tax modules. Catalogues with complex variants, where the attribute and combination model is genuinely better than WooCommerce. Multi-store operations that want one polished admin across several branded storefronts. Sits comfortably on our Turbo plan once you are above a few thousand monthly orders, with PHP memory at 512 MB and CDN pre-caching enabled.
Watch for
Most useful modules in the official Addons Marketplace are paid and the costs accumulate quickly compared to WooCommerce's free plugin pool. Major-version upgrades have historically been work, with the 1.6 to 1.7 transition being particularly notorious, so always run upgrades in a staging environment first and budget developer time. Theme customisation is more involved than WooCommerce because of the Symfony foundation, so plan ahead if you need bespoke front-end work.
Web Hosting for PrestaShop
Get PrestaShop 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 PrestaShop?
For high-traffic sites, large catalogues, or mission-critical deployments, our fully managed cloud servers give PrestaShop 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 PrestaShop case from our books
A south-west speciality food retailer trading into Ireland, France, and Germany came to us in spring 2025. They had been on WooCommerce with a stack of bolt-on tax and currency plugins, and the EU OSS reporting alone had been a quarterly fire drill since the scheme started. Catalogue was around 1,400 SKUs with multiple options on most products. They were paying for four separate WooCommerce plugins to get tax and shipping behaviour that came to roughly £620 a year in licences plus support time.
We rebuilt the shop on PrestaShop 8 on our Turbo plan, ported the catalogue across including all variants, configured the EU OSS scheme using PrestaShop's built-in tools, and tuned PHP memory to 512 MB with opcache enabled. The OSS quarterly report now exports straight from the admin without any plugin bridges. They cancelled the four WooCommerce plugin licences. Mobile checkout time dropped from 4.1 seconds to 1.7. They told us six months later that the quarterly tax filing went from a half-day job to about 40 minutes.
What we'd tell anyone in the same spot: if you sell across borders and you are paying for tax plugins on WooCommerce, get a quote on rebuilding on PrestaShop. The upfront work pays back in licence savings and admin time within a year.
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:
PrestaShop Hosting FAQ
Common questions we hear from people running PrestaShop on our hosting.
PrestaShop 8 needs PHP 8.1 or higher, MySQL 5.6+ or MariaDB 10.x, and the standard PHP extensions for image handling, cURL, JSON, mbstring, ZIP, OpenSSL, and either GD or Imagick. We host every plan on PHP 8.5 by default with all required extensions enabled. We set 512 MB of PHP memory for PrestaShop sites by default because the platform is heavier than WooCommerce or AbanteCart, particularly on catalogues with many product variants.
PrestaShop is a one-click install on our web hosting plans. Open Software Installer in My365i, search for PrestaShop, pick the domain you want it on, set the admin credentials, and click Install. The installer creates the database, drops the files into place, sets file permissions, and emails the login. The whole process takes under a minute. If you are migrating an existing PrestaShop shop, send us the backup and we will move it across for free.
Smaller PrestaShop shops run on our standard web hosting plan, but the platform is the heaviest of the three big self-hosted shop engines in our catalogue, so most growing shops end up on our Turbo plan with NVMe storage and CDN pre-caching. Once you are above a few thousand monthly orders, running a multi-shop setup, or doing regular bulk imports across several language sites, a small managed cloud server gives you dedicated resources. We will look at your actual numbers and suggest the right tier.
In our experience, yes, and it is the single biggest reason UK shops with European trading partners pick it. PrestaShop ships with per-country tax rules, the EU OSS scheme, and proper handling of B2C versus B2B VAT in core. WooCommerce can be configured to do similar things but typically needs two or three paid plugins to get there, and the OSS quarterly export is something WooCommerce shops generally end up doing through a third-party reporting tool. PrestaShop exports it directly.
Our support covers the hosting platform, PHP and MySQL tuning, SSL, backups, and migrations including major-version upgrades. We will help with module diagnosis when something breaks the site, but we are not your PrestaShop theme developer or paid-module support contact. For custom Symfony module work or bespoke theme development, we recommend specialist PrestaShop developers and handle the hosting side of the relationship.
Yes, free of charge on every plan. We move the PrestaShop files, the database, the image and download directories, and any custom modules. Most migrations finish within a working day with no downtime, and we test the site on a staging URL before pointing your domain across. If you are also upgrading from PrestaShop 1.7 or earlier to PrestaShop 8 as part of the move, we factor that in and run the version upgrade in staging before going live.
PrestaShop releases security patches regularly and you should apply them promptly through the back office. On our side we provide free SSL, daily backups, brute-force protection on the admin login, modern PHP with security patches, and our optimisation panel can block known bad bots and reduce attack surface. The most common PrestaShop compromises we see come from outdated paid modules where the original developer has stopped maintaining them, so audit your installed modules at least twice a year and remove anything no longer supported.
Ready to Host PrestaShop?
Get started with PrestaShop on our fast UK web hosting. One-click installation, free SSL, and dedicated expert support included.