Hello,
I'm new to CS-Cart and am discouraged at how slowly it moves on my Hostmonster server, So I'm looking for something new. I've read though many of the posts here, but I don't quite fit into standard e-commerce requirements.
We are manufactures of a very esoteric product and sell directly around the world. Last month, we had a whopping 1.8GB of data transfer from our site. We only have twenty or thirty products for sale and a good day is four or five transactions. so we're tiny by the standards of almost any e-commerce site, even though our average sale might be higher than most. Most features of CS-cart are turned off and we're designing a minimal client interface. But, we need the sophistication of CS-cart to calculate real-time shipping rates (several options) around the world, calculate taxes, and interface with our merchant provider and with PayPal.
Our page load times leave a lot to be desired with any client or admin selection, but whenever our site has to talk to an outside source–pretty much anytime viewing the cart or checking out–we wait… and wait some more! I haven't timed it, but I'd guess ten or fifteen seconds is average.
My questions are: Should I expect a shared plan with one of the recommended host here (wiredtree, servint, hostgator, etc…) to improve things substantially? Or is most of this time waiting to work through the checkout procedure spent waiting for other servers, such as FedEx, to respond for each of the shipping options? I don't mind paying for more server resources, but I can't justify managing a VPS with my tiny volume.
Has anybody found a cloud server that works well with CS-Cart? It seems like this could be very cheap, if I'm paying for my bandwidth, yet still powerful. But I don't fully understand the ramifications.
On another note, if any of you speed gurus would like to help me get set up, I'd be interested in your proposal.
Thank you! Robb
Cloud is horrible for any DB intensive environment (like cs-cart).
What are you doing that is generating that much output? That is probably the source of your performance issues. If you're only getting a few conversions a day then I'm guessing you're not seeing all that many new visitors a day. So if you're generating that much output then you're either doing a lot with video and/or other things that are simply sending way too much stuff. If you are embedding this into your descriptions (or other methods whereby it's stored in the database) then your cache is probably huge and/or your DB queries are taking forever to retrieve all that data.
Impossible to diagnose from your description.
[quote name='tbirnseth' timestamp='1320194939' post='125129']
Cloud is horrible for any DB intensive environment (like cs-cart).
What are you doing that is generating that much output? That is probably the source of your performance issues. If you're only getting a few conversions a day then I'm guessing you're not seeing all that many new visitors a day. So if you're generating that much output then you're either doing a lot with video and/or other things that are simply sending way too much stuff. If you are embedding this into your descriptions (or other methods whereby it's stored in the database) then your cache is probably huge and/or your DB queries are taking forever to retrieve all that data.
Impossible to diagnose from your description.
[/quote]
Thanks for the reply, tbirnseth
I'm not knowledgeable enough about this to dispute anything you say, but I'm curious as to why cloud is so horrible. Is there a major website now that is not DB intensive? Are you saying Amazon is not?
I may have misled you with my bandwidth statement. Sorry. I was being facetious when saying “whopping” That 1.8Gbytes was for all of last month. We don't get much traffic. Maybe performance is so bad just because I'm running the current site on the same cheap hosting plan and can't delete it until the new CS-Cart site is ready to go.
Your current site seems to be loading a few external resources sitewide, such as Flash content from another domain.
I would also put the speed issues down to the 'external' domain you are loading data from is hosted on BlueHost which has overcrowded shared hosting, presumably due to the very low price and service offered for that price.
Using gtMetix, I hazard a guess you own both domains and have one redirecting to the other. This has caused some extra load on the server.
Your current site would load pretty much instantly if you were able to make a few changes to the server setup, which due to being in a shared environment, is very unlikely.
Without doing a full SEO analysis of your site(s), it is difficult to confirm whether or not your slow page load times are a direct cause of your relatively low sales volume. In any case, due to Google's algorithms detecting page load speeds and using it as a deciding factor in your search rankings, VPS hosting is a must for CS-Cart (and of benefit to your current site too - see gtMetrix test results for Compression-related issues) or at the very least a shared hosting provider that will change their setup to include things like gZip compression.
From what I seem your hosting requirements are not unique. What you do need is hosting that does not suck.
Be prepared to pay approx $30 a month,
“Cloud” is an architecture and as such can have any number of implementations. If you have the resources of Amazon, then you can have the resources to ensure that the “locality of data” is appropriate for the task at hand. However, since I'd guess you're looking at cloud to lower your already low costs, then the implementation you will end up with will not effectively server a database. I'm not going to go into all the technical details as to why, suffice to say I would doubt that any hosting environment (including big ones like Raskspace) are built to support DB type activities. (note: at this scale db is based on files and so performance of the filesystem is critical).
[quote name='tbirnseth' timestamp='1320330083' post='125245']
“Cloud” is an architecture and as such can have any number of implementations. If you have the resources of Amazon, then you can have the resources to ensure that the “locality of data” is appropriate for the task at hand. However, since I'd guess you're looking at cloud to lower your already low costs, then the implementation you will end up with will not effectively server a database. I'm not going to go into all the technical details as to why, suffice to say I would doubt that any hosting environment (including big ones like Raskspace) are built to support DB type activities. (note: at this scale db is based on files and so performance of the filesystem is critical).
[/quote]
I endorse this comment, generally speaking you are better off with a dedicated VPS provider - I pay $80USD p/m to host a dozen low traffic sites. If you don't have the cash to cover $50 plus, you'll be hard-pressed to find decent hosting these days.
Thanks for all of your comments!
Kogi writes, “What you do need is hosting that does not suck”. Thanks, I guess. But that's exactly what I'm trying to figure out. Specifics or suggestions would be eagerly considered.
tbirnseth & JLS: You guys have me convinced. No cloud server. Thank you. I'm not trying to lower my already low cost. I plan to spend more.
But I don't want to become a server administrator–or a manager of one, for that matter. So even though my website idles in obscurity much of the time, I need it to work hard and fast when it needs to. It seems like a shared server environment is what I need. I just need to find one that supports CS-Cart well and isn't loaded to the max.
Seems like Semi-dedicated is the way for me to go. tbirnseth, I've read comments from you (as well as from others) elsewhere supporting good shared hosting, as opposed to VPS. The trick seems to be finding the good one.
One thing for sure: This move to CS-cart has certainly dominated my extra time for the past few months. I'm looking forward to making some good choices and moving on!
Thanks again, Robb
I use to recommend hostgator for basic csc hosting. Now I recommend hawkhost. is faster, cheaper and you can upgrade the package as you need; Same cPanel with extra resources report. You can buy a couple of months and try for yourself. So far so good.