Online shop and shopping cart platforms for selling products and services, processing payments, and managing orders. All available with one-click installation on 365i web hosting.
AbanteCart is a free, open-source eCommerce platform that enables users to create and manage online...
AgoraCart is a free, open-source eCommerce platform that allows users to build and manage online sto...
CubeCart is a free, open-source eCommerce platform that provides businesses with the tools to create...
Magento is a powerful, open-source eCommerce platform that provides a comprehensive suite of feature...
OpenCart is a popular, free, open-source eCommerce solution that enables businesses to build and man...
OSCommerce, or Open Source Commerce, is a free and open-source eCommerce platform that has been empo...
PrestaShop is a powerful, open-source eCommerce platform that allows businesses to create and manage...
Zen Cart is a free, open-source eCommerce platform designed to make setting up and running an online...
Self-hosted ecommerce means running the shop software on hosting you control: your product catalogue, your customer accounts, your order history, your database. The eight shopping carts in this category are open-source PHP applications, and most of them are older than the hosted platforms people compare them against. osCommerce dates from 2000 and Zen Cart forked from it in 2003. PrestaShop, OpenCart, Magento, CubeCart, AbanteCart and Agora Cart followed.
The obvious alternative is a hosted store. Shopify's Basic plan is £25 a month billed monthly in the UK, or £19 billed annually, plus 2% on every order if you use any payment provider other than Shopify Payments. BigCommerce Core is £29 a month billed annually. Both take the patching and the server off your hands, and both have opinions about what your shop is allowed to do. A self-hosted cart costs the hosting, whatever card rates you negotiate directly, and the work of keeping the software current. No percentage of turnover goes anywhere.
That trade suits large or awkward catalogues, trade pricing and customer groups, unusual VAT or shipping rules, and existing shops carrying years of order history that would be painful to move. It suits nobody who has no plan for security updates. And one of these eight, Magento, is a poor fit for shared hosting in any form. Both of those points are dealt with below rather than skated over.
Situations we see often. If one of these sounds like you, this category is worth a look.
Different customers see different prices, some pay on account rather than at the checkout, and the catalogue runs to several thousand lines. Customer groups and price rules are core features in these carts rather than an app you rent by the month.
At a few hundred orders a month the platform fee plus the transaction percentage starts to resemble a part-time salary. Self-hosting fixes the platform cost at the hosting bill and leaves you negotiating card rates directly with a provider.
The shop works, the staff know it, and the real value sits in the order and customer history rather than the software. Moving it to a host running a current PHP version is a far smaller job than replatforming the whole business.
Cut-to-length products, bundles priced by weight, or VAT treatment that varies line by line rather than per order. When the pricing logic is the business, being able to edit the code that calculates it is the reason to self-host.
Five percent of all Adobe Commerce and Magento stores ended up with a payment skimmer on their checkout page this summer.
One store in twenty, on one platform, in a single season, because a published patch went unapplied. Card skimmers are why self-hosted ecommerce carries a duty a blog does not: what gets stolen is your customers' card details, on your domain. If you cannot commit to applying security releases the week they land, a hosted platform is the safer choice and there is no shame in it.
62% of Magento stores remain vulnerable to a critical remote code execution attack.
That was measured six weeks after the fix shipped, on the day real exploitation started. Read it next to the version numbers below: the useful question is never whether a cart still receives security releases, but whether the shop running it actually installs them. A store nobody updates is a liability whichever of these eight it runs on.
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.
Magento first, because it is the awkward one. Adobe's own published requirements for 2.4.9 list PHP 8.5, MySQL 8.4 or MariaDB 12.3, OpenSearch 3, Valkey 9, RabbitMQ 4.3, Varnish 8 and nginx, and note that upgrading marketplace extensions can need up to 2GB of RAM. That is a stack of long-running services, not a PHP application, and it has no business on a shared account. Where Magento really is the requirement, the honest answer is a managed cloud server sized for it, and we would rather say that before you buy than after.
The maintenance picture across the rest. PrestaShop (9.1.5), OpenCart (4.1.0.4), CubeCart (6.7.6, GPLv3 with paid support), AbanteCart (1.4.4) and Zen Cart (2.2.2) have all released this year. osCommerce is the one to look at twice: the 2.x line one-click installers still offer last saw a GitHub release in 2014 and the repository has been quiet since 2016. osCommerce 4 is a later separate rewrite, not an upgrade path from it. Agora Cart moves rarely.
Hosting reality. PrestaShop 9 asks for a 512M PHP memory limit, and it is bulk imports and thumbnail regeneration that exhaust it, not shoppers. Cron matters for stock feeds and abandoned baskets. Not for you if nobody will apply security releases within days of publication.
Common questions we hear from people running ecommerce applications on 365i hosting.
Below roughly a hundred orders a month, usually not. Shopify Basic is £25 a month billed monthly in the UK and that price includes the updates, the patching and somebody else owning the uptime. Self-hosting swaps that for a hosting bill plus somebody's time. The arithmetic changes as you grow, because Shopify adds 2% to every order when you use an outside payment provider and the plan price steps up with scale. Work out your annual platform cost plus percentage, then compare it against hosting plus a realistic maintenance figure rather than a hopeful one.
PrestaShop, OpenCart, CubeCart, AbanteCart and Zen Cart all shipped releases during 2026. Magento Open Source is maintained by Adobe and 2.4.9 arrived in May 2026, though see the hosting answer above before you get excited. osCommerce needs care: the 2.x line most one-click installers offer had its last GitHub release in 2014, and osCommerce 4 is a separate later rewrite rather than a continuation of it. Agora Cart sees very little movement. Check a project's own release history before you build a business on top of it.
Keep card data off your server and the burden drops sharply. Use a gateway that redirects or iframes the payment step, so card numbers never touch your hosting, and you fall into a much lighter self-assessment category. PCI DSS 4.x added requirements 6.4.3 and 11.6.1, both mandatory since 31 March 2025, covering management of scripts loaded on payment pages and tamper detection on those pages. They apply even when the payment form itself is hosted elsewhere, so a self-hosted checkout page still has work to do. Free wildcard SSL is on every plan here; the rest is application configuration.
Yes, when it is a like-for-like move of the same cart software. You run the Migration Centre yourself from the My365i control panel: it copies files, databases and mailboxes from most Linux hosts, there is no file size limit, and you can run it as many times as you like at no cost. Your old host keeps serving traffic until you change the DNS. Changing cart software at the same time is a separate project, because order and customer imports between different carts are rarely clean and the reconciliation is where the time goes.
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All 8 ecommerce applications available with one-click installation on our fast UK web hosting.
