So I have always used shared hosting using other carts and for the most part my site has always been pretty fast. But I have read that CS can be a little slow on some servers. While my site isn’t live using CS yet, I have noticed it to be slow to load even though I don’t even have any products in the store. Sometimes it will take 10 seconds for the index to load even with nothing on it. I currently use Dreamhost and they offer VPS hosting and MySQL VPS hosting too.
[url]http://www.dreamhost.com/hosting-vps.html[/url]
My question is what works best with CS? Should I try both or am I just needing one? What causes CS to run slow on shared servers? With my current cart I am using about 30-40 gigs of data transfer a month. And here is my weekly usage stats. This is for my CURRENT cart which isn’t CS so it is just a rough estimate of my traffic.
week beg. #reqs #pages
Sep/28/08 892214 50758
Oct/ 5/08 1605425 96615
Oct/12/08 1625823 109294
Thoughts?
No one? This post is over a month old and no one has any suggestions on what it takes (server wise) for CS to run efficiently? Right now EVERYTHING is super-slow with CS and I don’t even have any customers using it yet.
A product search using my current cart system usually takes less than a second. While the same search on CS site can take almost a minute! If CS is just this slow I will have to cut my losses on this cart as performance like this will put me out of business!
Well I am no server guru but from what I understand is Linux is best to use. As far as specifications of the server, I have no idea.
There are other things you can do to try to speed up the cart i.e. use the file system for images, enable file compression, optimize database.
Shared servers are just fine as long as none of the other clients are abusing it and/or the host isn’t cramming too many accounts on it. I have cPanel and there is a function to see the server status and most of the time there are no bandwidth issues. However, a couple of weeks ago a few of the clients were abusing my server and it was unstable for a week until they could cancel all of the abusing accounts. This is where a shared server sucks.
My main concern is that (or was) that it was extremely slow just to load the opening page even before I added any products. Just previewing the site was really slow along with the backend with no products. It currently takes about 6 seconds before anything appears in the index page…just a blank screen until then. 6 seconds doesn’t seem like long but if you are browsing the web it is about 5 seconds too long to be staring at a blank screen.
I can understand if I have 4000+ products on the site (which I do) and there are lots of customers on there browsing (which there is not). But the cart was so slow even before I added anything. I can only imagine it getting WAY worse as the store goes live.
Just because you have 4000+ products doesn’t mean it will run slow unless you plan on displaying that many on 1 page.
Basically it all depends on your host. If you think that you have your cart optimized/configured as best as possible then you may want to look into other server/host possibilities. All I can tell you is that I am on a shared server and I have no speed issues.
My current cart runs extremely quick for searches compared to CS. So I am just wondering why CS is so much slower…or what I was asking in my original post, what resources need to be upgraded for it to perform faster. Not real sure if CS would benefit more from a VPS or a MySQL VPS since I can upgrade RAM on both through my provider.
[quote name=‘IsItFast’]I can understand if I have 4000+ products on the site (which I do) and there are lots of customers on there browsing (which there is not). But the cart was so slow even before I added anything. I can only imagine it getting WAY worse as the store goes live.[/QUOTE]
4,000+ products and you’re on a VPS? For an E-Commerce website that size there are so many reasons to be on a Dedicated Server :).
I disabled the statistics add on (and all others that we didn’t need) and that really sped things up for us.
As stated before, the cart was extremely slow even before I added any products to the cart. Page loads were slow, backend was slow, everything about the site is slow. I know it is because I am currently on a shared server that (I’m sure) is overcrowded. But it works fine with my current cart.
I am using CS for another project of mine on a different host and it seems to speed right along even though it is on a shared server.
I really want to stay away from a dedicated server unless absolutely necessary due to cost…I at least have to have it managed as I have no idea about maintaining my own server.
IsItFast, I also came over here from the Quikstore community. I used Quikstore on shared hosting plans. When I moved to Cs-Cart I decided to use the Managed Hosting of Cyberlnc.com. The two sites I have with them are very fast. Their price of $19.99/month is very reasonable.
David
Hosting providers do many things to get as many domains on a single server as possible. Some of these are bandwidth throttling, cpu limitation, priority run-queue management, etc. Most hosting providers handle a variety of different “applications” within the domains. Hence it is difficult to tune a system for the best performance.
Going with a hosting provider whose sole focus is e-commerce merchants may be more expensive, but the reliability and performance will be well worth the cost.
You say you use 50 – 60GB of bandwidth per month. In my experience this must mean you have quite a bit of flash or use very large images. I have one client who uses this much bandwidth, but they have a 1.2MB flash on their home page and get about 10,000 unique visitors/month. Most stores home pages should be in the 300-700KB range. This is where a good web–designer can make a real difference. Not a graphic artist, but someone who understands what the impacts of their actions are.
You can visit the EZ Merchant Solutions site for more information. Please note that our solution includes our top-of-the-line order management system. The order management within cs-cart is really only for people who dabble in e-commerce.