Over the past decade, hosted platforms like Shopify and Squarespace have become incredibly popular. They’ve made it possible for almost anyone to launch a website or an online store without needing to understand servers or code.

That convenience has been transformative. Designers can build and sell websites more easily, small businesses can launch stores in a weekend and entrepreneurs can test ideas quickly.

But there’s an elephant in the room that very few people talk about anymore…

When you build your business on a fully hosted platform, you’re not really running your own infrastructure. You’re renting a product. And that comes with trade-offs that many people don’t fully consider.

It’s something I always used to flag to clients choosing a platform but now so many agencies specialise in Shopify, or designers specialise in SquareSpace, it’s given this choice of hosted platform more validation.

The Trade-Off: convenience vs control

Platforms like Shopify and Squarespace are SaaS products (Software as a Service). They combine hosting, software, infrastructure, and platform features into a single package. And so they’re very easy to use.

You don’t need to worry about:

  • servers
  • scaling
  • security updates
  • CDN configuration
  • database optimisation

The platform handles all of it.

But the trade-off is that you also lose control over those things.

If your site is self-hosted, whether on AWS, another cloud provider, or a managed hosting platform, you can make decisions about how your infrastructure works. You can scale it, optimise it, move it, or redesign it entirely. With a hosted SaaS platform, you can’t.

When you run your own infrastructure, your website is also ultimately portable. You can move hosting providers, replicate environments, or redesign architecture without rebuilding the entire business.

But with a hosted solution, your store isn’t just hosted there – it exists entirely within the platform’s ecosystem (known as vendor lock-in). Moving away from that environment means rebuilding the site from scratch.

When the platform sets the rules

One of the risks of SaaS platforms is pricing control.

With a traditional set up, where you pay for hosting your own code, you can shop around. If one provider becomes expensive, you can move to another. If traffic spikes, you can adjust architecture to control costs.

With a platform like Shopify, the pricing structure is fixed by the company.

You pay for the plan tiers they offer. If features move to higher tiers or pricing changes, your options are limited – you can accept the higher cost, lose the feature, or start over somewhere else. (And starting somewhere else would feel like a headache, wouldn’t it?!)

In other words, the platform ultimately controls the economic terms of running your website.

For many businesses this isn’t a problem… until it is.

What happens during huge traffic spikes?

Last week we had a client receive over one million visitors per day for several days in a row. And that made me wonder – what would have happened if they weren’t on a custom auto-scaling architecture on AWS and instead were on a hosted solution?

I looked into it, and was surprised to find that actually, their platform cost with Shopify probably wouldn’t have changed.

Shopify plans include ““”unlimited bandwidth”, so hosting costs generally don’t increase directly with traffic. A store receiving one million visitors per day might still be paying the same monthly subscription fee.

On the surface, that sounds ideal. But it highlights another limitation.

On a self-hosted infrastructure, you can respond to traffic spikes in many ways:

  • adding caching layers
  • scaling compute resources
  • adjusting load balancing
  • deploying new CDN strategies
  • optimising database queries

You can tune the system – and we do just that for this client who can get massive traffic spikes with no warning.

On a hosted SaaS platform, you can’t access or change the underlying infrastructure. You rely entirely on the platform’s internal scaling decisions. And most of the time that works well. But when it doesn’t, you have very limited options.

Transaction fees

Now, our client who gets a million visitors would probably want to be on a reasonably high tier on Shopify (if that suited them) but if they were on the Grow plan, their transaction costs would be 1.7% – 2.7% (as of 17th March 2026). And that’s where Shopify can make a lot of money.

For example:

  • 1,000,000 visitors per day
  • 2% conversion rate
  • 20,000 orders

If the average order value is £50, that’s £1,000,000 in daily revenue. That could mean roughly £20,000 per day in fees.

In other words, the platform’s business model scales with your success.

If you paid the Advanced Tier’s 1.5% (by spending more per month on your Shopify plan, and hoping most of your sales were domestic) your fees would be down to £15,000, which is the same as you’d be paying with Stripe.

Outages and single-vendor risk

There is also the question of outages.

Every platform has downtime occasionally, even the largest ones, and if a SaaS platform experiences a major outage, every site on that platform can be affected at the same time.

When you run your own infrastructure, there are often mitigation strategies available:

  • multi-region failover
  • alternative CDN routing
  • temporary infrastructure scaling

On a hosted platform, you generally have to wait for the provider to resolve the issue. For most businesses this risk is acceptable. But it’s still a dependency worth understanding.

The 20 year shift in how websites are made

When I started making websites, you needed to be able to code. Or use Dreamweaver but even then you were a bit “techy”.

Then platforms like WordPress changed the landscape. Plugins allowed people to add features without writing code, which dramatically lowered the barrier to entry.

Hosted website builders took that idea even further with tools like Shopify and Squarespace allowing people to launch websites without worrying about hosting, servers, or updates at all.

For designers and entrepreneurs, that accessibility has been hugely empowering. But it also means many people building websites today never have to think about infrastructure. The convenience is so good that the underlying trade-offs aren’t even known.

None of this makes hosted platforms “bad”

It’s important to say that hosted platforms solve a real problem and to be honest – whilst writing this blog post I’ve found some pretty cool things on the Shopify website!

For many businesses, hosted solutions are are exactly the right choice:

  • fast to launch
  • easy to maintain
  • predictable costs
  • minimal technical overhead

Not every company wants to manage infrastructure or hire engineers. But I just still think it’s useful to understand the architectural trade-offs involved. Convenience always comes from somewhere.

The trade-off

Hosted platforms didn’t remove complexity from the web, they just made it not your problem. Instead of managing infrastructure yourself, you trust a platform to do it for you. Instead of hiring engineers, you depend on a vendor’s roadmap and pricing model. And for many businesses, that’s a perfectly reasonable trade-off – but it’s still a trade-off.

And in a world where more and more businesses rely entirely on hosted platforms, it’s worth remembering that your website might feel like your own property – but the infrastructure underneath it belongs to someone else. It’s a glorified Etsy profile. And the world feels unstable enough right now that I’m not sure I’d be comfortable with so much of my business being totally at the whim of another company.