Does anyone have a fast running CS-Cart store without all the nonsense of server slowness or downtime? Who is your web host and what MySQL version are you running?
(Since CS-Cart uses MySQL so intensely, the MySQL aspect is very important)
As I am writing right now, once again my website is completely down! Future Hosting can really just kiss my butt … Right now it has been 25 minutes for my ‘critical’ service outage ticket and no response yet. Plus Future Hosting does not have phone # to call.
This has been happening at least once to twice a week and EVERY time that tell me to contact them when the outage happens … but they do not both checking the ticket until somehow the server resolved itself so then I get the ‘I do not see any problems here’ response.
The first server Future Hosting stuck me on … they had actually given me a SPAMMER IP address (The IP address was blacklisted on several sites)! Gmail, Hotmail, etc were instantly blocking all my store e-mails. Now they moved me to a new server but this server is constantly crashing.
So Future Hosting is out.
Also ServInt is out (I had them for about a year but CS-Cart 2.2.x just ran slower than it should on their setup (Almost like a basic shared account!).
Thank you all for your suggestions!!! 
BTW: Future Hosting just replied to my ticket finally after 22 minutes with this response:
[color=#666666][font=Arial, sans-serif][size=2]Hi, Your server load is back to normal now. However I will monitor it for few hours and update you. [/size][/font][/color]
This is why I want to pull my hair out with these guys. I specifically ask EVERY TIME why did this happen … and that is the standard BS answer I get. Now time to repeat myself and ask again what happened and why does this keep happening which they will respond with 'You will need to contact use when the problem is happening)… ARGH!!!
I'm working on this at the moment http://matchdaymemories.com/shop/ so check for yourself. I still have some tuning to do.
It's host on the cloud with http://www.vidahost.com - as it's on the cloud it doesn't matter which country your in but they also do US & UK hosting. I pay £12 a month inc vat for 20gb of space and i think the bandwidth is 250gb but I'll never hit that. Voucher for ya “saveten” for 10% discount but you can try the cloud for 3 months for only £1
Thank you kickoff3pm.
I am wondering but what would be the bet minimal requirements to have a FAST CS-Cart shop.
I am sure a pure dedicated server would do the trick but assuming this is overkill for just one CS-Cart shop, thus a lot of wasted money.
Then with VPS, there are all the 'menu' options of RAM, CPU, etc … Can CS-Cart run perfectly fine on 512mb or should it be more towards 2GB?
Guaranteed RAM 512 MB 1 GB 1.5 GB 2 GB 3 GB 6 GB 12 GB Burstable RAM[sup]1[/sup] 1 GB 2 GB 3 GB 4 GB 6 GB 12 GB 24 GB Guaranteed CPU Units[sup]2[/sup] 16,250 32,500 49,000 65,000 95,000 190,000 380,000
We just switched to a litespeed server from Wiredtree and now our site is screaming.
http://www.wiredtree.com/learnmore/litespeed.html
I think it comes down to you get what you pay for. Litespeed cost more, but worth it.
David
[quote name='Tim Hensel' timestamp='1365779990' post='159874']
Thank you kickoff3pm.
I am wondering but what would be the bet minimal requirements to have a FAST CS-Cart shop.
[/quote]
I've had dedecated and vps server and still got shared hosting at 4 companies. The are swing and roundabouts dealing with them all but none of them are setup for optimum use unless you know what you are doing. My own personal opinon is a proper cloud option give by far the best resources for your buck.
But when it comes you speed and cs-cart you can't do it all with the hosting. Your first step is to optimise the admin options to disable or remove things you don't need. For example I don't need a lot of things like reviews, even stock count, my addons section has very few installed.
Then the is the content you add, opimise that and then finally move on to the server side options once you know the content and system is ready for it.
Using a DS, VPS you can't do that as you need to set the server up right to start with.
I am with stylexnetworks VPS since 4 month and never get any problem in downtime or other issues. Also they are very cheap and offering 50% lifetime discount in all plans.
Are you sure your website is down? Maybe your firewall locked you out?
Concerning Future hosting: I never had any problem with them and on critical tickets they've always responded within minutes. I have 3 servers with them, am super happy and would order there again tomorrow (and I have tried a lot of other hosts, believe me!)
Try Martfox. We provide CS-Cart optimized servers with the most possible performance and services.
These are with martfox in th UK
www.hivis.co.uk
www.elitesignsandbanners.co.uk (this is fast enough but not upgraded yet from v2)
Btw, Tim, i'm wondering: didn't FH send you a mail that they were checking stuff? This is what they do in my experience:
- you get an automatic confirmation mail immediately.
- within a couple of minutes, I get an email from a person saying they are checking the problem.
- when they know what is is or have fixed it they mail again.
You see, 22 minutes to fix a problem isn't long at all in my opinion. But they should have let you known they were checking it before that.
Which country are you in?
How many products in your store?
How many categories in your store?
no. Pageviews?
There are MANY factors which affect, the speed of you cart. We probably need a lot more information before we can begin to help you
[quote name='kogi' timestamp='1365858589' post='159934']
Which country are you in?
How many products in your store?
How many categories in your store?
no. Pageviews?
There are MANY factors which affect, the speed of you cart. We probably need a lot more information before we can begin to help you
[/quote]
This won't help the OP to fix his issue with the provider. Of course downtimes will happen by every provider, the important thing is how they resolve it and what are they doing to avoid such problems in the future. Also in the most cases it doesn't depend of the company but of the datacenter and network where the physical servers are located.
We can offer to you a VPS with:
2 GB Guaranteed Ram
80 GB Disk Space
1500 GB Bandwidth
1 Free IP Address
100Mbps Uplink Port
FREE Instant Setup
FREE Website Transfer
FREE Server Management
FREE cPanel/WHM License
CORE RESOURCES
Dell 16 Core Xeon Servers
RAID 10 Controller
cPanel Powered
Nightly Backups
Whitelabel Servers
Linux Operating System
for only $69.00
If you are interested, just send me a PM.
Regards,
John
Thanks for the replies!
I barely have any time so having to think about moving to another host again is horror in itself.
Flow, I don't know what the actual problem is going on with this Future Hosting Hybrid VPS server I'm on … every once in a while the CPU load just spikes up so high (beyond 30+) that just the website goes offline for anywhere between 10-30 minutes. And only twice I have actually been using my site at the time this happened so I was able to put in the 'Critical' ticket … Yet each time it took them about 15-20 minutes to respond. So by this time the site already began to 'fit itself' and come back online and have the server load slow drop back down. And their response is always 'I don't see anything wrong…seems to be working fine'. Yet if they would have responded within minutes then they would have seen the problem themselves.
This load problem happens at least once a week (I have a site monitoring deal setup to watch for the site going down). And Future Hosting support just tells me 'The next time it happens, contact us while it is happening so we can see what is going on' … So it has been a very frustrating circle dealing with this problem and Future Hosting.
That is weird Tim. I'd advice you to mail exactly this to FH and see what they say.
Did you setup the box yourself or did they do it? If they did, I'd advice you to let a specialist look at it and see what he says.
Future Hosting Hybrid VPSs are managed. We have a few previous FH customers with the same problem. But nobody is perfect.
When I've seen this type of behavior in the past, it has been related to two conditions.
- The server is running in fastCGI mode (suggest suPHP instead)
- A “caching proxy server” is hammering your site by trying to do “read ahead”. I've usually seen this when the IP has been a government/military site where they try to limit outside connections and prefer to cache pages so they stay internal.
I find the IP and then block it with the Linix firewall.
The customer I had where this occurred frequently sold specialized Mazda parts and so the primary audience was young and of military age. When they accessed the site from the base, the caching server would try to follow every link on the page (in parallel) to cache the results. Unfortunately this can have very adverse affects on the server. They also seem to ignore any nofollow attributes in links. So if you have several languages and currencies enabled, you can get huge spikes in load.
But the worst thing is that most of them don't try to “find” the problem and fix the issue. Instead of this they recommendations are like:
- …then you would need to upgrade your RAM to solve the issue.
- …the user “xxx” was consuming high memory and CPU resource earlier
[quote name='martfox' timestamp='1365793255' post='159891']
Try Martfox. We provide CS-Cart optimized servers with the most possible performance and services.
[/quote]I heard that Martfox keep on getting hacked? I need a VPS that is fully managed. Is Martfox still getting hack?
Tom
Try hostgator