Can I run Magento on shared hosting?
Magento will install on shared and reseller hosting but is not recommended. What it needs, and which WebGee plans are suitable.
Technically yes. In practice, no — and it is worth understanding why before you start.
Why shared hosting is a poor fit
Magento is unusually resource-hungry compared with WordPress or similar applications:
- High RAM and CPU baseline, even when the store is idle.
- Cron tasks that consume a lot of RAM, CPU and disk I/O while regenerating caches and indexes. These run continuously, not just under traffic.
On a shared platform this shows up as slow page loads, cron jobs being killed part-way through, and resource limit warnings — see Understanding the 503 resource limit error. The store may appear to work and then fail intermittently under real traffic, which is worse than not working at all.
What to use instead
Premium Hosting allocates substantially more CPU and memory per account, and includes LiteMage — LiteSpeed's Magento cache, which makes a very large difference to page render times.
See WebGee Premium Hosting and LiteMage.
For larger stores, a VPS or dedicated server gives you dedicated resources and full control over PHP, cron scheduling and the database — see Set up your cloud server.
If you already have Magento on a shared plan
The most common symptom is an incorrect memory limit reported by Magento's readiness check — see Magento showing incorrect memory limit.