Shopify Glossary Terms

Oxygen is Shopify's global edge hosting platform, purpose-built for hosting Hydrogen storefronts. It deploys your headless storefront to edge nodes worldwide, serving pages from the server closest to each customer.

Deployment is a git push. SSL certificates, CDN, scaling during traffic spikes, and infrastructure management are all handled automatically. For teams that want to focus on building the storefront experience rather than managing infrastructure, Oxygen removes that entire operational burden.

The alternative is hosting on Vercel, Netlify, or Cloudflare Workers, which are all capable options but add cost and another vendor relationship. Oxygen's advantage is that it's included with Shopify Plus and tightly integrated with the Shopify ecosystem. The trade-off is that Oxygen is specifically for Hydrogen - if you're building with Next.js, you'll need a different host.

Think: the hosting layer that ships with Hydrogen — deploy once, serve everywhere.