An online store needs more storage and bandwidth than a blog, but not as much as people assume. Here's how to size the hosting and pick a domain that fits a store.
An online store adds requirements a blog or brochure site doesn't have: product images at scale, a shopping cart database, checkout pages that need to load fast, and a domain that needs to survive years of receipts, invoices, and customer trust.
.com is still the safest default for a store; buyers trust it, and it's easy to type into a phone. First year is $12.99, renewal $13.99. TLDs built for stores, like .shop, are tempting because the first-year price looks small ($4.99), but the renewal jumps to $49.99, nearly four times a .com. If cash flow is tight in year one, that trade might make sense. If you're planning to run the store for years, the .com's flat, low renewal is the better bet.
Whatever you register, keep it short enough to print on a receipt or packing slip without wrapping to a second line.
Product photos are the main thing that eats storage on a store, and product pages under load are what eats bandwidth. Lvato's tiers scale with that:
| Plan | Storage | Bandwidth | Databases | From |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Solo | 10GB SSD | 50GB | 5 | $0.50/mo |
| Business | 25GB NVMe | 125GB | Unlimited | $1.84/mo |
| Professional | 50GB NVMe | 250GB | Unlimited | $3.33/mo |
A store with a small catalog, under a few hundred products and moderate traffic, usually fits comfortably on Business. Professional is worth the jump once you're running promotions that spike traffic, adding a second storefront, or your catalog runs into the thousands. Storage is cheap to upgrade later; a slow checkout page during a sale is not.
Search and register your domain on Lvato's domain search, then set up the store on the Business or Professional plan from the web hosting page, both with free SSL, a CDN, and NVMe storage out of the box. Size for the catalog you have now; you can move up a tier in minutes when the store outgrows it.