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Hosting for customers worldwide, from our team in Nairobi, Kenya · Pay securely with Visa, Mastercard or M-Pesa
Online Shops

WooCommerce Hosting Kenya, with M-Pesa at the Checkout

Made for online shops in Kenya. LiteSpeed cache, free SSL, daily backups and M-Pesa STK Push built into the checkout, so your customers pay in seconds instead of minutes.

See the Plans Set Up M-Pesa
Shops and stores

Hosting Shaped Around Selling in Kenya

Most WordPress hosting was never set up with Kenya in mind. We tuned ours for what shoppers here expect: speed on 4G, M-Pesa STK push, a checkout built for phones first, and order confirmations sent by SMS.

  • M-Pesa STK push checkout on WooCommerce
  • Card payments by Visa and Mastercard, local and international
  • LiteSpeed Cache with a free CDN, quick on 4G
  • Daily off-site backups, so orders are never lost
  • Order and delivery texts sent through AfricasTalking
  • Automatic updates for WordPress and plugins
M-Pesa STK Push
The buyer taps Pay and enters a PIN, and the order is paid in 10s.
LiteSpeed
Serves WooCommerce faster than Apache.
Daily backups
Your order data is copied every day and held for 7 days.
PCI friendly
Card details never pass through your server.

Our Pick for eCommerce

Managed WordPress, which we consider the safest setup for WooCommerce in Kenya.

Will a shared plan cope with an online shop?

For the majority of shops in Kenya, yes, and with ease. A shared plan comfortably carries a WooCommerce store that has a few hundred products and orders coming in steadily. A lot of shops end up paying for far more than they need.

The size of your catalogue is not what decides it. What matters is how many people are doing something demanding at the same time. Browsing costs little because pages can be cached. Checkout, search and the cart cannot be, since each one is specific to the shopper using it.

These are the real signs that a shared plan is no longer enough:

  • More than a handful of people are often at checkout at once, not merely looking around the site.
  • You list thousands of products with variants, and the admin screens have become slow to work in.
  • Your promotions bring in a month's worth of traffic in a single afternoon.
  • You have installed so many plugins that the site is slow even at quiet times.

If at least two of these sound familiar, moving to a VPS is the right step and we will tell you so. If none of them apply, a shared plan is no compromise, and the money you save stays in your pocket.

Getting paid, plus two other things that cost you orders

In Kenya, shoppers look for M-Pesa. If your store only takes cards, you will miss orders from people who can pay but are unwilling to enter card details at a shop they have never bought from. Should you need it, we build M-Pesa checkout integration for you.

The remaining two get less attention. A shop cannot skip SSL: without a certificate, browsers flag the checkout page as not secure, and shoppers really do give up at that point. Yours comes included and renews on its own. The second is product photos, which are usually why a shop feels slow. A picture taken on a phone runs to several megabytes, while the same image sized for the web is about 200KB and looks no different on screen. Resizing your images tends to be the cheapest speed gain a shop can make, and it costs nothing except an afternoon.

Questions About eCommerce Hosting

Yes, and it is our speciality. We connect WooCommerce to M-Pesa STK Push: the customer taps "Pay with M-Pesa", gets a prompt on their phone and enters their PIN, and the order is marked paid and provisioned automatically. Our M-Pesa Integration service covers the setup.

Every eCommerce plan uses LiteSpeed Web Server on NVMe SSD, together with the LiteSpeed Cache plugin for WooCommerce. The Business tier copes easily with 5,000 to 10,000 visitors a day.

Card payments go directly through the payment gateway's hosted checkout, which is PCI-DSS compliant, so card data never reaches your server. M-Pesa STK Push runs through Safaricom's Daraja API. All you store is order metadata, and never raw card numbers or PINs.

Yes. Set WooCommerce to multi-currency: customers in Kenya pay in KES by M-Pesa, while overseas buyers pay in USD by Visa or Mastercard through your card payment gateway. If your merchant account only accepts KES, you can settle everything in KES instead.

Hosting puts you online. If you want the whole store built for you, including the product catalogue, payments, shipping zones and SEO, our Online Store Setup service delivers it ready to use in 2 to 3 weeks.

The Business plan copes comfortably with about 10K visitors a day. For Black Friday, Jamhuri Day or Christmas sales, we can move you up to a VPS or dedicated server just for the campaign and then back down afterwards, without tying you to a contract.

Yes. WooCommerce is built on WordPress, and both are fully supported on every plan, the smallest included. Most shops in Kenya never need more than that. Pick your plan by the number of separate websites you want to run, not by the number of products you plan to list.

When several people are checking out at the same moment rather than just browsing, when your catalogue grows to thousands of products with variants, or when a promotion brings in a month's traffic in one afternoon. Until that happens a shared plan really is enough, and we would sooner tell you so than sell you a VPS you will not use.

Through a Daraja integration that places the STK prompt on your checkout page. The customer pays on their phone and the order completes by itself. This is work we do: see our M-Pesa integration service. Some shops begin more simply, showing their own Paybill and confirming orders by hand, which is slower but has no setup cost.

Yes, and the padlock is only part of the reason. Browsers now mark a checkout page without SSL as not secure, and that is the screen where shoppers give up. Every plan includes it free with automatic renewal, so you have nothing to buy and nothing to remember.

No product limit applies. Disk space is the real constraint, and most of what a product takes up is its photos. If each image is sized for the web at about 200KB, even the smallest plan has room for thousands of them. Uploaded straight from a phone camera at several megabytes each, they will not fit, so an afternoon spent resizing is time well spent.

Page views are served from cache and handled comfortably. Checkout is where the real work happens, and it cannot be cached. If you have something big planned, let us know in advance and we will review the shop with you, rather than discover problems after the event. Moving up a plan for a busy month and back down again is simple.

More to read:

How to create a restaurant website in Kenya

We also host:

Clinics & hospitals Churches Schools Freelancers

Open Your Online Shop in Kenya

We move your WooCommerce shop from any host for free, and M-Pesa setup is included.