Shopify picks Google for e‑commerce site hosting
Canada-based e-commerce platform provider Shopify has selected Google to help it host the e-commerce sites it builds, customizes and maintains for its more than 600, 000 merchant clients.
“After 12 years of building and running the foundation of our own commerce cloud with our own data centers, we are excited to build our cloud with Google, ” Dale Neufeld, vice president of production engineering, wrote in a blog post.
Shopify was using Amazon Web Services for some of its cloud infrastructure. Shopify will still use Amazon for some cloud services, but the majority will now be run by Google, a spokeswoman for Shopify confirmed.
Shopify is still in the process of making the switch, but it has migrated more than 50% of its data center workloads, and counting, to Google Cloud, Neufeld writes. Shopify says that the company will have more to share about the move when the migration is complete.
Shopify is another in a growing list of large companies that have selected Google or Microsoft instead of Inc. for cloud services, according to Bloomberg—including Home Depot Inc. and Williams-Sonoma Inc. —in part because the companies deem Amazon as a competitor, Bloomberg reports.
is No. 1 in the Internet Retailer 2017 Top 1000. Home Depot is No. 8, and Williams Sonoma is No. 23. Shopify ranks No. 6 among e-commerce platform providers to merchants in the Top 1000 with 22 Top 1000 clients.
As Google seeks to attract more customers to its lucrative cloud business, it’s been opening up access to tools for its clients that before were used only by Google internally. For example, just this week, Google announced performance management tools for its cloud customers, including Stackdriver Profiler, that until today were available only to Google employees.
“Here at Google, we’re developers too, and we know that tracking down performance problems in your code can be hard—particularly if the application is live, ” Morgan McLean, product manager at Google writes in a Google Cloud Platform blog post. “Today, we’re announcing new products that offer the same Application Performance Management (APM) capabilities that we use internally to monitor and tune the performance of our own applications. These tools are powerful, can be used on applications running anywhere and are priced so that virtually any developer can make use of them. ”
The foundation of the performance management tools are two existing products, Stackdriver Trace and Debugger, which already are helping organizations analyze and debug applications while they’re running, without impacting user experience, McLean says.
On top of those tools, Google is releasing to the public Stackdriver Profiler, which lets its cloud customers profile and explore how code executes in production, to optimize performance and reduce costs. Production profiling is “immensely powerful, ” and lets companies gauge the impact of any function or line of code on an application’s overall performance, McLean says.
“At Google, we continuously profile our applications to identify inefficiently written code, and these tools are used every day across the company. ”
Inefficiently written code can impact an e-commerce site in many ways. For example, it could slow down site speed by loading page elements one after another instead of simultaneously and not prioritize the most important elements that need to be loaded quickly for a consumer to shop. Inefficient code might load the header of the page with a company logo, and then the footer of a page with the company’s address. Efficient code would load important items simultaneously and first, such as the search bar and add-to-cart button.
“If companies don’t analyze code execution in production, unexpectedly resource-intensive functions increase the latency and cost of web services every day, without anyone knowing or being able to do anything about it, ” McLean writes.
That’s not to say Amazon Web Services is slowing down. Case in point: Amazon yesterday announced website domain company GoDaddy and the 75 million domains it manages would migrate the vast majority of its infrastructure to AWS.
Favorite
How Does Hosting Work with Shopify? | We Make Websites
Shopify is a fully-hosted e-commerce solution, meaning every brand on the platform is hosted on Shopify’s servers. Those opting for Shopify will benefit from this in a number of setupsNon-hosted platforms demand a degree of web development and programming skills to get your store going. Many brands don’t want the hassle of this. By contrast, when you sign up to Shopify, they’ll show you exactly how to get rting your domain nameIf you already own a domain name that you’d like to keep, this can be easily sorted and just requires a small configuration change to your DNS settings at can also buy a new domain name through Shopify, if you prefer. One bonus of this is that it comes with unlimited forwarding email addresses. These work by directing all incoming mail to an existing email account of yours, keeping your on-site contact information on-brand, consistent and professional. For example:Your domain name:
Related email addresses you might want to present:,
Emails directed to: [specific existing account]No additional costsMany competing platforms are what we call ‘self-hosted’. This means the brands using them will have separate server costs to consider. Whilst these may start low, they can soon rack to up thousands of pounds per month for a managed service. Whereas no brand on Shopify ever pays a penny for external mitless bandwidth means no overage feesWith alternative platforms, you’ll also have the costs of acquiring traffic and products to consider. Every new visitor and new product that arrives on your online store uses up additional bandwidth. Most e-commerce platforms limit your available bandwidth and charge you for exceeding opify, on the other hand, offer bandwidth uncapped. This means you’re not punished for high traffic periods, but rather, they’re welcomed! Better still, unlimited bandwidth is included in every Shopify plan out business and customers are kept secureAnother great thing about Shopify’s hosting is that all stores are PCI DSS Level 1-compliant, out-of-the-box. This means you can rest easy knowing your customers’ payment info and business data is always going to be safe. And not only this, but it will be easy to start accepting payments with your payment gateway of stant software updatesOn Shopify, not only will you be eligible for software updates at no additional costs, but they’ll all be handled for you — automatically. This means you’ll have immediate access to every new feature, before you even have time to think about them. Some recent examples include Apply Pay, multi-currency, and Augmented, reliable loading all over the globeShopify uses a large network of servers around the world to host merchants’ online stores. We call these ‘Content Delivery Networks’ (CDNs). Shopify’s CDN is run by Fastly, who have a great reputation. By using a CDN, Shopify promises that all stores can be loaded as quickly as possible, wherever customers are for high-volumeAside from speed, handling capacity is another aspect that will take away your hosting worries. There can’t be many things more gut-wrenching than having thousands of visitors on your store, all ready to purchase, only for it to crash. Thankfully, Shopify handles traffic volume exceptionally. Your store will manage around 4, 000 checkouts per minute before throttling kicks in — and this figure’s more than 99. 999% of all stores will ever see! So, what’s the catch? The main difference between Shopify, as a hosted platform, and a traditional, self-hosted platform, is that you don’t get access to the full code base. Truth be told, this can make customising certain features for your online store quite tricky. But does this outweigh the above? We think the benefits we’ve listed are possible because Shopify is providing a cloud service. So it’s a pretty small tradeoff. If you even want to call it that — Shopify’s app marketplace and theme layer actually give us enough flexibility to deliver on business needs, big and small, whilst keeping your store a full breakdown of Shopify prices and the benefits of each plan, visit the Shopify pricing page.
Shopify Hosting
Hi Have been testing the speed of the server in line with the new Google page experience roll out in May 2021 have found that using gtmetrix if I test in Canada I presume that is where Shopify webserver is my page is A 96% But if a change to any other country it drops to B or F now It seems to me and correct me if I’m wrong, that the reason is! the time it takes to transfer information from Shopify server to another country server Now this is a problem because I’m in Sydney this means an extra load time of 777ms, and that means I will never get a fast Mobile experience ranking I’m at 20% now on google on mobile search but for desktop around B at 90%When I contacted Shopify about the problem and asked if they have their own servers in Sydney the reply back was we are Global, so in other words, the answer was noConclusion This is an issue that needs to be addressed by Shopify, I have also seen a lot of posts up in regards to Shopify owners asking about how to clean up their unused javascript most of the unused java script is Shopify they also need to clean up this as well Below is Screen Shot to prove the lack of speed between Shopify servers to other parts of the world
Frequently Asked Questions about what server does shopify use
Does Shopify have its own servers?
Shopify is a fully-hosted e-commerce solution, meaning every brand on the platform is hosted on Shopify’s servers. Those opting for Shopify will benefit from this in a number of ways.Oct 5, 2020
Where does Shopify host their servers?
Our servers are located in the United States, and that’s where our main data is stored. However most of your website information will be stored locally via a Content Delivery Network (CDN). You can read more about the CDN here.Jul 4, 2016
Does Shopify use Google cloud?
Google Cloud expands partnership with Shopify, forms merchant integration with Square. Shopify said it will utilize more of Google Cloud’s technology across a broader set of regions in an effort to provide more merchants access to Google’s cloud infrastructure.May 27, 2021