Marketplace hosting and security: 5 guarantees to demand

A marketplace that goes down on a Saturday night loses its weekend bookings, and some of its sellers’ trust. Reliability is chosen before you open: who hosts the site, who updates it, where the data lives, who holds the money, what you take with you if you leave one day. This guide from the Marketplace Factory team, which creates complete marketplaces from a single sentence and hosts them for its customers, reviews what brings a marketplace down, the five guarantees to demand from any tool, what we take care of, what is still yours, and how to leave with everything.

What brings a marketplace down

Spectacular outages are rare. What brings a marketplace down is almost always something simple that nobody was in charge of watching:

1. A forgotten update. A site assembled from a CMS, a theme and plugins has to follow the fixes of each one; an abandoned plugin, or an update that breaks another, is enough to block payments.
2. A stolen administrator account. A password reused elsewhere, no two-factor authentication, and someone publishes, deletes or edits in your place.
3. Data lost with no usable backup. A wrong move, a damaged database, and the last backup is a month old, or was never tested.
4. Money that flows the wrong way. Collecting for your sellers on your own bank account takes you into payment services, reserved for licensed institutions; our guide to marketplace payments with Stripe Connect explains how to avoid it.
5. A traffic spike. A TV appearance, a successful campaign, and hosting that is too tight gives way at the worst moment.
6. A key person who leaves. The developer who had the access, the domain registered in their name, the only copy of the code on their laptop.

None of these failures is inevitable. Each one is prevented by a question asked before you choose your tool.

The five guarantees to demand from any tool

Before choosing software, a host or an agency, ask these five questions. The answers must be written down, in a contract or on a public page, not just promised on the phone.

1. Who hosts it, and who maintains it?

The site must be hosted and updated by someone whose job it is, with a written response time if something goes wrong. Be wary of “updates included” that boil down to a bundle of hours: ask who applies a security fix, and within what time.

2. Where is the data, and with whom?

Your data and your users’ data must stay within a framework you can explain: hosting in the European Union, named processors, transfers outside the Union properly covered. Under the GDPR, you are the controller of your users’ data and your tool’s vendor is your processor: its commitments and the list of its own processors must be in writing. The rest of your duties is detailed in our guide to marketplace legal requirements in the EU.

3. Backups: how often, and for how long?

Article 32 of the GDPR lists among the security measures expected of those who process personal data “the ability to restore the availability and access to personal data in a timely manner in the event of a physical or technical incident”. Ask for the frequency, the retention period and how a restore is done: a backup nobody knows how to restore protects nothing.

4. Is access protected?

Two-factor authentication for administrators, separate roles for those who administer and those who moderate, encrypted secrets. The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency puts it simply on its page on multifactor authentication: “Users who enable MFA are significantly less likely to get hacked.”

5. Who holds the money?

Your buyers’ money must go through a licensed payment provider, into an account in your name, never your software vendor’s. And card numbers must never pass through your site. Stripe, for example, says a PCI-certified auditor certified it to PCI Service Provider Level 1, “the most stringent level of certification available in the payments industry”; on a marketplace created with Marketplace Factory, the card is entered on Stripe’s secure page, and no card data passes through your site.

What Marketplace Factory takes care of

Hosting and maintenance

Your marketplace is hosted and maintained for you: nothing to install, nothing to update, not a line of code. Your legal notice even names Marketplace Factory as the host. Support answers by ticket from your account, within 48 business hours on Launch and Pro; on Dedicated, on WhatsApp and by ticket, seven days a week from 9 am to 8 pm, with a first reply within 4 hours during those hours.

Data in Europe, named processors

The API, the database and the files run on Amazon Web Services in Stockholm; the application is served by Vercel, with its functions in Stockholm. Payments go through Stripe, emails through Brevo, artificial intelligence through Anthropic and Google, which only receive what the task requires, never your account or payment data. Every processor, its role and where it operates are listed in our privacy policy, with our security measures: encrypted connections, irreversibly encrypted passwords, each marketplace’s data kept separate, restricted and logged access.

Backups every day

Your data is copied automatically, every day. The privacy policy gives the details: database backups are kept for thirty days, restorable to the minute, then erased; a deleted photo can be recovered for thirty days.

Protected access, an encrypted Stripe key

• Two-factor authentication for every administrator: once switched on, the back office stays closed without the code.
• A team with roles: invited administrators and moderators, each with their own role; 2 administrators included on Launch, 10 on Pro.
• Your Stripe key, encrypted on receipt: we only ever show its last four characters, only the account holder can connect or change it, and the screen refuses more than five key attempts an hour, so it can never be used to test stolen keys.
• Disconnecting without a trace: if you disconnect Stripe, the key is erased, nothing of ours stays on your Stripe account, and your site switches to request mode.

The money on your Stripe, never with us

Payments land in your own Stripe account, through Stripe Connect: your sellers switch on their payouts from their space, and your commission, from 0% to 50%, is taken automatically on every payment. Marketplace Factory never touches the money from your sales. Our share, 2% on Launch, 1.5% on Pro, 1% on Dedicated, only applies to what your customers pay online; it is invoiced to you once a month, separately, and is never added to the price your customers pay. For a rental, a stay or a service, the seller is paid after the start or the end of the service: if a customer reports a problem before that payout, the money waits for your team’s decision.

What each plan includes

The details are on the pricing page. During the beta, you try everything without paying a thing: payments run in test mode.

What is still yours

A solid tool does not protect you from a password shared on a sticky note. Five moves are yours:

1. Keep your team list up to date. Only invite the people who need access, give each the right role (moderating is not administering), and remove access straight away for those who leave.
2. Switch on two-factor authentication on your account, and ask every administrator to switch on theirs.
3. Choose long, unique passwords, kept in a password manager, never reused from one service to another.
4. Protect your Stripe account like a bank account. Stripe offers several forms of two-factor authentication and, on its security page, recommends passkeys or hardware security keys “because they’re resistant to phishing”.
5. Keep control of your domain name, if you connect one from Pro: registered in your company’s name, renewed automatically at your registrar.

One extra habit: export your data once a month and file the archive with your accounting documents. You should never need it; the day you do, it will be there.

Reversibility: leaving with everything

A solid marketplace is also one you can leave. At Marketplace Factory:

• Your data belongs to you. “Export my data” gives you your listings, orders, customers, payments and messages as spreadsheets that open in Excel, and your photos in an archive, on every plan and whenever you like.
• Leaving does not hold you hostage. Monthly Launch and Pro plans can be cancelled at any time, effective at the end of the paid month; your marketplace then goes offline, and the export stays open for thirty days.
• A pause rather than a closure. For a seasonal business, with a monthly subscription, a pause costs €29 excl. VAT a month, up to six months a year: the site shows a “back soon” message, your data, photos and domain are kept, and you reopen in one click.
• The source code, at a price known in advance. If one day you want to take over your marketplace’s code, with the features of its trade, without the studio or the generator, its price is thirty-six months of Dedicated, paid upfront, with optional maintenance at 20% of that price a year.

By comparison, a marketplace built on WordPress leaves you the code, but also the hosting, the updates, the backups and the security. Custom development leaves you everything, including the maintenance of every line. The full comparison of solutions is in our comparison of Sharetribe alternatives, and what a ready-to-open marketplace must contain is in our turnkey marketplace checklist.

In short

A marketplace that holds up is first of all a marketplace someone looks after every day. With Marketplace Factory, hosting, maintenance, backups and access protection are our job; the money stays in your Stripe account, your data in Europe, and the way out stays open. Your time goes to what makes a marketplace live: your sellers and your customers. For the rules your users accept when they sign up, read our guide to marketplace terms and conditions.