How is Headless Shopify hosted?

Going headless with Shopify introduces at least one new component into your technology stack: the headless storefront.

Your new storefront will most-likely be powered by a modern Javascript framework, and will create a bundle at build time. This bundle, (potentially along with a server as well, depending on the framework), will need to be hosted separately from your existing Shopify store.

There are numerous options available, such as Shopify's Oxygen solution if you're using the Hydrogen framework. However, there are nearly limitless options available – and particularly if the build does not use Hydrogen – there may indeed be more fitting options.

If you're purely generating a static site with Shopify, you likely won't require a Node server for the deployment, and therefore your options are significantly opened up: all you'll need is a CDN. However, if your build is using Server-side Rendering (a popular approach with Next.js), the build will need to be hosted on a platform that is capable of running Node, whilst ideally serving static assets via CDN. Vercel provides such a service, which is fully compatible with (and built for) Next.

Which platforms can be used for hosting Headless Shopify?

Many cloud platforms and CDNs will support hosting of headless Shopify storefronts. However, which provider you use, and whether you solely use a CDN, will depend on your build architecture and the rendering methods applied, as explained above.

Some of the most popular platforms for hosting headless Shopify are:

• Oxygen (if you're using Hydrogen and are heavily invested in the Shopify ecosystem)
• Vercel (particularly if you're using Next.js, Vercel supports its native functionality well, and is optimized specifically for Next builds)
• Netlify (a great all-rounder, compatible with and optimized for most JS frameworks such as Next, Astro, Remix, etc)
• Railway (a newer platform, which we use heavily for development purposes and prototyping, but still a little scrappy at this stage)
• AWS (setting up a purpose-built environment on AWS, or using S3 if the build is uses purely static site generation and client-side rendering)
• DigitalOcean (a stalwart in low-cost cloud infrastructure, perfectly suitable for production deployments. Also works great for development with affordable plans.)
• Cloudflare Pages (another great option for storefronts using SSG)

JS frameworks can also be self-hosted, on your own server, with the correct setup and configuration. We wouldn't tend to recommend this unless you have enough internal resources, or scope for the potential ongoing cost of maintaining the self-hosted server environment by a competent agency partner.