[jain1980]

We looking to launch our Indian ecommerce store based on CS-cart 3.0.2 meant only for our Indian customers.

We are looking for a VPS hosting for our needs. The site is not content heavy but will have lot of images. The homepage itself is around 1500 KB in size. We expect traffic of atleast 10-15 visitors at any given time during our initial period and this could grow to around 25-30 visitors at a given time. The site would run on CS-cart shopping cart. Our bandwidth and size requirements are very low but we need our pages to load faster.

1) For speed and SEO purpose, should we go for an Indian hosting company with servers located in India or any Hosting company with servers anywhere in Asia pacific (singapore/hongkong) is enough?

2) Will there be any major affect on the SEO of the site if the site is not located on Indian servers?

3) Most important - please suggest some good Hosting companies with fast network speeds, reliability and reasonable support.

4) What should be a minimum VPS plan (Ram, CPU etc) that we should get to fulfil the above requirements.

Is Hostgator VPS good enough?

Any suggestions will be appreciated.

Thnx

[kickoff3pm]

Take a look at http://chhost.net/ they have German, USA and UK servers at decent prices

If you want speed and great support in the UK try http://www.vidahost.com and here's a coupon for 10% off "auction"

[Tim Hensel]

I can only suggest avoid ServInt. I am currently looking to get off this VPS as there are constant CPU usage spikes even with nothing going on with the CS-Cart. Sometimes trying to do Admin stuff (such as looking at an order) will take 1 minute to come up. Maybe it is something configured incorrectly however I asked the support many different times about the CPU usage spikes and massive slowdowns and the problems still exist.

[JesseLeeStringer]

I can only suggest avoid ServInt. I am currently looking to get off this VPS as there are constant CPU usage spikes even with nothing going on with the CS-Cart. Sometimes trying to do Admin stuff (such as looking at an order) will take 1 minute to come up. Maybe it is something configured incorrectly however I asked the support many different times about the CPU usage spikes and massive slowdowns and the problems still exist.

I'm guessing you are on the $50p/m plan? I had similar issues until upgrading to the $100p/m plan.
Not to say that CS-Cart is at fault, but I do believe that in certain cases there is insufficient CPU cycles to accommodate.

[Tim Hensel]

Yikes...$100 a month!

Yes I am on the $50 a month VPS ... But considering I am just running the single store on the VPS I would think it would not have these issues. I can understand if I have multiple stores going, but just one? This is the reason I am wanting to find another host.

[kickoff3pm]

Yikes...$100 a month!

Yes I am on the $50 a month VPS ... But considering I am just running the single store on the VPS I would think it would not have these issues. I can understand if I have multiple stores going, but just one? This is the reason I am wanting to find another host.

Most people seem to think VPS mean independent, it doesn't. Your site can be just as affected by other people on the same server as shared hosting. All VPS means is you have more control of resources and if those resources.

It's worse on some environment then others but it not the same as a dedicated server. People are selling VPS with 128mb of ram it's a joke that you couldn't run a mail server on most the time. ServInt ? free backups and cpanel ? yer sure ! your paying $15 a month for the cpanel license which they can't get around. You would be better off with decent real cloud hosting at about $20 imo.

[Tim Hensel]

Never considered cloud hosting ... actually I am not even sure what exactly the is but I will look in to.

[kogi]

Most people seem to think VPS mean independent, it doesn't. Your site can be just as affected by other people on the same server as shared hosting. All VPS means is you have more control of resources and if those resources.

It's worse on some environment then others but it not the same as a dedicated server. People are selling VPS with 128mb of ram it's a joke that you couldn't run a mail server on most the time. ServInt ? free backups and cpanel ? yer sure ! your paying $15 a month for the cpanel license which they can't get around. You would be better off with decent real cloud hosting at about $20 imo.

Having a VPS would/should guarantee the amount of memory available to you. Which would remove 1 of 3 bottlenecks in a server. (CPU and Disk Throughput will depend on other users) (ps. you can run a mail server easily on 64mb ram)

For shared hosting - Cpanel costs the hosting company $40 per server. - unlimited users
If you are running a VPS. you would have to be an idiot to need cpanel.

Cloud hosting is a widely misused term.
If you are talking about elastic virtual servers with fail over and load balancing. then you are looking at $70/month per server (and you need 2 or more servers to do fail over and load balancing)

Of if you are talking about shared hosting on the above hardware. Rough guess they start @ $50 / month


In the end it depends on the investment in skill and equipment of the hosting company. You need a group who know what they are doing. Sweet gear, and multiple fat pipes which feed your main customers

[kickoff3pm]

Having a VPS would/should guarantee the amount of memory available to you. Which would remove 1 of 3 bottlenecks in a server. (CPU and Disk Throughput will depend on other users) (ps. you can run a mail server easily on 64mb ram)

For shared hosting - Cpanel costs the hosting company $40 per server. - unlimited users
If you are running a VPS. you would have to be an idiot to need cpanel.

Cloud hosting is a widely misused term.
If you are talking about elastic virtual servers with fail over and load balancing. then you are looking at $70/month per server (and you need 2 or more servers to do fail over and load balancing)

Of if you are talking about shared hosting on the above hardware. Rough guess they start @ $50 / month


In the end it depends on the investment in skill and equipment of the hosting company. You need a group who know what they are doing. Sweet gear, and multiple fat pipes which feed your main customers

As you say Cloud hosting is a often misused term but if anyone wants to try it for 3 months for the cost of just a £1 these are the people I trust https://www.vidahost.com/cloud/

Voucher code - AUCTION for 10% discount - I'm currently using just minimum cost of £9.99 a month for hosting two shops. Support is the best I've ever had - no I don't work for them.

[Tim Hensel]

Wow this cloud hosting is very confusing when trying to do this for the first time...or should I say when i am used to flat month rate standard hosting and VPS hosting. It looks basically the same as regular shared hosting but you pay per hour...could they make the 'cloud hosting' any more confusing?? It seems like a bad cell phone plan that will constantly hit you with weird fees and keep changing from month to month.

This one is supposed to be popular but so many options :
http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/


Here is a question maybe someone can help me with.

What I am looking for is basically something that is managed fully, will host my site, and use a simple CPanel (or something simular) which I can easily make basic changes. Even though having something like root access/AWS is fine too but if not available that is fine. I just need something that will run CS-Cart quickly, stay up all the time, and that I can of course fully access my site/mail/databases/etc.

I first started off almost 10 years ago with basic shared hosting...it was fine at the time but I could not stand the occasional downtime. Then I finally jumped to VPS last year however my CS-Cart can get slow on it as the CPU usage ticks up...plus it is
costing $50 a month. The cloud hosting seems like it again is just 'shared' accounts but instead of all the shared accounts being on a single server they are shared over multiple servers??

Is cloud hosting what I should be looking at?

[kogi]

Tim. Where are you located? Or a better question, Where are you customers located?

[Tim Hensel]

Tim. Where are you located? Or a better question, Where are you customers located?

Hi, I'm located in the USA and about 60% of my customers are in the USA also...The other 40% of customers are all over the globe.

[kogi]

Jim

Your current hosting looks pretty sweet 2s load times on a 570kb page.

http://gtmetrix.com/...ds.com/V3IVup5s

Have you checked where the VPS is bottlenecking?

[Tim Hensel]

Jim

Your current hosting looks pretty sweet 2s load times on a 570kb page.

http://gtmetrix.com/...ds.com/V3IVup5s

Have you checked where the VPS is bottlenecking?

Actually the main page is just a very basic information HTML page and not the actual CS-Cart store.
Here is my report for the main CS-Cart store page:
http://gtmetrix.com/...ds.com/G2QZv9WN
(Actually I just looked at this yesterday and it improved the score just from 12 hours ago...strange)

Anyhow, sometimes when I am in the admin side and click on an order it can take from 5 seconds up to a minute to actually come up. This is not all the time...and it seems to only do it if I have not be 'active' on the store/admin panel for sometime. Example if 30 minutes go by and then I go to check on the store, click and order, etc ...it can take a long time before whatever I clicked on will come up. Once the initial delay occurs then and clicks through the admin panel afterwards are okay (still slow maybe 2-3 seconds load time but tolerable). Then if I walk away for 15 or 20 minutes and come back there is that extremely long delay again.

Also this seems to occur when I see on the server status that the CPU Usage is way up (which happens a lot for some reason on my VPS).

Another thing I can mention is occasionally I have to restart the MySQL service as it will slowly begin to eat up all the available memory (according to the server status page in the CPanel again).

[kogi]

Centos is a rock solid distro. And it looks like you have 768mb of ram which is plenty.

Can you go into cart admin - Administration: Database. and tell me what's your database size?

[Tim Hensel]

Also to mention what JesseLeeStringer mentioned on ServInt about something similar:

I'm guessing you are on the $50p/m plan? I had similar issues until upgrading to the $100p/m plan.

Not to say that CS-Cart is at fault, but I do believe that in certain cases there is insufficient CPU cycles to accommodate.

[Tim Hensel]

Centos is a rock solid distro. And it looks like you have 768mb of ram which is plenty.

Can you go into cart admin - Administration: Database. and tell me what's your database size?

Last night I cleared all the statistics which I have to do at least once a week or the database grows quickly over 200MB...
Right now it is at:

Current database size: 52,759,897 bytes

[Emerson]

Hey guys,
If you are looking to try something new we have a 25% discount going on for all CS-Cart users!
http://forum.cs-cart...a-limited-time/

Thank you!

[JesseLeeStringer]

Last night I cleared all the statistics which I have to do at least once a week or the database grows quickly over 200MB...
Right now it is at:

Current database size: 52,759,897 bytes

Depending on your store traffic, it could be much higher.
I have statistics turned off entirely, but then again my store size is 673.8 MB.

J.

[Tim Hensel]

Wow ... That is one busy store you have...are you still running your store on ServInt with the $100 a month option or do you use something else for the CS-Cart store?

BTW - JesseLeeStringer you have always been very helpful!! You answered some of my questions way back in the CubeCart 2 forums maybe 7 years ago!