Shopware 6 Hosting in 2026: Requirements, Real Costs, and Which Provider to Pick
If you are carrying a Shopware hosting figure in your head from a 2025 article, it is wrong.
Hetzner raised prices on 15 June 2026, and on dedicated servers the increase was steep. A CCX23 with 4 cores and 16 GB RAM used to cost €31.49 net. It now costs €85.99. The CCX13 went from €15.99 to €42.99, the CCX33 from €62.49 to €138.49. The cause is global DRAM pricing, which went through the roof in 2026, and Hetzner was not the only provider to follow.
That shifts the recommendation I have been giving for two years. So this article works from numbers I recalculated rather than the ones that have been passed from article to article since 2024: what Shopware 6 demands of a server, which setups exist, what they actually cost in August 2026, and what the word “managed” really buys you.
All prices are net, excluding VAT. As of August 2026.
The short version (if you are in a hurry)
| Shop | Setup | Hosting/month |
|---|---|---|
| Staging, test system | Small root server, self-hosted | €11–20 |
| Small live shop, up to ~10,000 products | Root server 16 GB + backups + mail + CDN | €40–130 |
| Mid-sized, up to ~100,000 products | Root server 32 GB + dedicated search index | €150–300 |
| No in-house ops skills | Managed hosting at realistic specs | €150–300 |
Those are hosting costs only. Licence, plugins and development sit on top and are covered in the cost article.
What Shopware 6.7 demands of a server
| Component | Requirement |
|---|---|
| PHP | 8.2, 8.3 or 8.4 |
| MySQL | 8.0.17+ (broken releases: 8.0.20, 8.0.21) |
| MariaDB | 10.11+ (broken releases: 10.11.5, 11.0.3) |
| Node.js | 20+ (asset build only) |
| Redis | 7.0+, optional per the docs |
| php-redis extension | 6.1+ from Shopware 6.7.7.0 |
| RAM | 8 GB practical minimum, 16 GB for live shops |
Three notes that appear in no requirements table and still decide your hosting choice.
You need SSH and cron jobs. Shopware processes order confirmations, newsletters, search index updates, image scaling and imports through a message queue. That queue runs as a CLI process, not inside the web server. No SSH, no queue. No queue, no order confirmation, and you find out when a customer calls.
memory_limit is the most common stumbling block. 512 MB is treated as the floor; for imports and the theme build, 1 GB is the calmer choice. The official requirements page names no figure at all, which explains why so many installations start at 256 MB and fall over on the first sizeable import.
php-redis 6.1 is the trap in the 6.7 upgrade. From Shopware 6.7.7.0 onwards Symfony 7.4 LTS applies, because Symfony 7.3 dropped out of active support in January 2026. Symfony 7.4 raises the minimum php-redis extension version to 6.1 and enforces it through a Composer conflict. Ubuntu 24.04 LTS ships php-redis 5.3. On stock Ubuntu the upgrade therefore aborts until you pull the extension forward via ondrej/php, PIE or a suitable Docker image. More on that in the 6.6 to 6.7 upgrade article.
The docs list Redis as optional. For a single-server shop that is true. The moment you run two application servers you need shared session and cache storage, and at that point Redis stops being optional and becomes the reason carts do not vanish.
Shared, root server or managed
Shared hosting
On paper €5–20 a month. In practice it fails at four points, and none of them can be solved with money:
memory_limittypically sits at 128–256 MB; Shopware wants 512 MB and up.- No SSH, no cron jobs. That kills the message queue.
- No Redis, no dedicated search index.
- No control over OPcache, which throws away the single biggest performance lever PHP has.
For a live shop: no. And if you only want to try something out, run Docker on your own machine. Faster to set up, and free.
Root server, self-administered
This is where 2026 moved most. The two obvious providers in the German-speaking market, all figures net:
| Provider | Plan | Cores | RAM | NVMe | Net/month |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| netcup | RS 1000 G12 | 4 dedicated | 8 GB | 256 GB | ~€10.75 |
| netcup | RS 2000 G12 | 8 dedicated | 16 GB | 512 GB | ~€18.01 |
| netcup | RS 4000 G12 | 12 dedicated | 32 GB | 1 TB | ~€33.55 |
| Hetzner | CX33 | 4 shared | 8 GB | 80 GB | €8.49 |
| Hetzner | CCX13 | 2 dedicated | 8 GB | 80 GB | €42.99 |
| Hetzner | CCX23 | 4 dedicated | 16 GB | 160 GB | €85.99 |
| Hetzner | CCX33 | 8 dedicated | 32 GB | 240 GB | €138.49 |
One quirk worth knowing if you are comparing German providers: netcup quotes prices including VAT, Hetzner excluding it. I have converted netcup here so the column stays comparable.
That flips a comparison which for years came out the other way. The netcup RS 2000 G12 has twice the dedicated cores of the Hetzner CCX23, the same RAM, three times the storage, and costs a fifth. For a single-server setup it is not a close race.
Why anyone still picks Hetzner: hourly billing, a clean API, snapshots, load balancers and firewalls as building blocks, a good control panel. If you spin servers up and down automatically or build several environments from Terraform, that is worth money. If one server runs and keeps running, you are paying for flexibility you never draw on.
netcup has its own drawbacks. Fixed monthly terms instead of hourly billing, a panel from an earlier design era, and new orders occasionally pass through a manual review before the server is ready. For a machine that then runs for years, that is survivable.
In both cases, watch for the word “dedicated”. Shared vCPUs are the wrong economy for a shop: they behave well under normal load and collapse exactly when a crawler and your newsletter campaign arrive together.
The real catch is the same for both. The server is yours. So are the updates, the backups, the monitoring and the 11pm phone call.
Managed Shopware hosting
Worth it when nobody on the team wants to or can administer servers. What you get for it, though, is less than the name suggests.
What “managed” actually includes
This is where most contracts get misread. A good provider covers:
- Operating system patches and security updates
- PHP, MariaDB and Redis updates within a major version
- Monitoring, backups, and restoring from them
- Web server, OPcache and FPM tuning for Shopware
- Support for everything below your shop
What is not included is refreshingly explicit in maxcluster’s price list: an application migration costs €120 per installation. Developer support, meaning analysis of faults inside the application, costs €30 per 15 minutes, or €50 outside office hours. That is €120 to €200 an hour for precisely the work many people assume the managed package covers.
Concretely, you pay extra for:
- Shopware major version jumps, 6.6 to 6.7. That is a project, not a server service.
- Plugin updates and the conflicts that follow them
- Bugs in your theme or your own code
- A failed asset build after the move to Vite
The line runs at the server, not at the shop. The provider keeps the machine alive. What runs on it stays your problem.
Three questions before you sign:
- Who performs the jump to the next Shopware major version, and what does it cost at list price?
- How often are backups tested rather than merely taken? A backup that has never been restored is a guess.
- What is the response time outside business hours, and does it appear in the contract or only on the website?
Real monthly costs by shop size
The server alone is never the bill.
Small live shop, up to ~10,000 products, self-administered
| Item | Net/month |
|---|---|
| Root server, 16 GB | €18–86 |
| Backup storage | €10 |
| Transactional mail | €10 |
| SSL (Let’s Encrypt) | €0 |
| CDN (optional) | €0–25 |
| Total | €38–131 |
Almost the entire spread comes from which provider you pick for the server. That is new, and it is why the section above runs long.
Mid-sized shop, up to ~100,000 products, self-administered
| Item | Net/month |
|---|---|
| Root server, 32 GB | €34–138 |
| Search index as a service | €30–80 |
| Backup storage | €20 |
| Transactional mail | €25 |
| CDN | €25 |
| Monitoring | €15 |
| Total | €149–303 |
Managed, mid-sized shop
At maxcluster the maths runs like this: Extended Web Cluster as the base at €39, then €15 per additional GB of RAM and €10 per core. Going from 4 to 16 GB costs €180 in RAM alone. Add €4 for IPv4 and €60 for Managed Basic as the SLA. That is roughly €300 a month for a machine netcup sells, with twice the cores, at €18.
Timme Hosting starts at €149 for 16 cores and 64 GB DDR5, plus a €69 setup fee, with Redis and OpenSearch on board. Oversized for small shops; for mid-sized ones it is the more honest price-performance ratio among the managed providers.
Then there is the item no table captures: the hours somebody spends on updates and incidents. On a self-administered setup, budget two to four hours a month. At agency rates that is the largest single line on the whole list, and that is exactly where managed hosting starts to add up. The roughly €280 premium over netcup buys about two hours of agency time.
When Kubernetes is overkill
Almost always.
The threshold is not a visitor count but two conditions at once: you need several application servers behind a load balancer, and you deploy often enough that manual deployments become the bottleneck. Very few Shopware projects meet both.
Until then you scale more cheaply and more boringly: a bigger server, the database on its own machine, the search index moved out. A single well-configured server carries far further than the cloud marketing slides suggest. At current RAM prices the gap has actually widened, because every additional node now hurts noticeably.
If you adopt Kubernetes because the setup genuinely will not scale otherwise, that is a decision. If you adopt it because it looks good on a CV, the shop pays for it.
My shortlist
Self-administered: netcup has been the clear Shopware recommendation since June 2026, because dedicated cores and RAM cost a fraction there. Hetzner remains right if you build infrastructure automatically and genuinely use hourly billing, the API and snapshots.
Managed: maxcluster knows Shopware rather than just PHP, and the published price list makes the maths honest. Do run the configurator all the way through before anchoring on the entry price. Timme Hosting ships Redis and OpenSearch and is the better offer from mid-size upwards. Mittwald has the cheapest managed entry on the list at €21 for the vServer, Redis included, though it publishes no specs. Its dedicated server starts at €169.
No affiliate links, no commission. I earn nothing from any of these recommendations.
What is missing from the list is deliberate: providers who advertise “Shopware hosting” but have no Shopware experience in support. You can spot them in the sales call with a single question. Ask how they handle a stuck messenger:consume process. Anyone who asks what that is, is selling you web space with a sticker on it.
Frequently asked questions
Why did prices rise in 2026? Global DRAM prices. Hetzner adjusted on 15 June 2026, and other providers followed. RAM-heavy plans took the brunt, which is exactly what a shop needs.
How much RAM do I need? 8 GB for a small live shop, 16 GB for mid-sized. The demand comes less from PHP than from MariaDB, Redis and the search index all wanting memory at the same time.
Do I need Elasticsearch or OpenSearch? Shopware names “several thousand data sets” as the guide. Below that the database-backed search is fine.
Is a separate database server worth it? From the point where MariaDB and PHP-FPM start fighting over RAM on the same machine. At 32 GB and moderate traffic you are still a long way from that.
Once you have picked a server, the configuration is still ahead of you: PHP-FPM pool sizing, OPcache and Redis. Badly tuned, a well-specced server costs you more performance than the next size up would give back. A separate article on that follows.