Hosting advice

[Macrura]

Hi All -

I'm helping out a client who is setting up an ecommerce site...

We had originally planned and started on a processwire+foxycart site, however they need a ton of user account functionality, as well as advanced product management which is all easier/faster/cheaper accomplished with Prestashop, and they need it faster than I can build it in PW...

I want to find them a host that will work really well for this and was considering this Servint plan, with the cPanel:

SolidFire Essential 3 GB 50 GB 400 IOPS 1000 IOPS 6000 GB 4 $69.00

i need something that would perform from a server perspective as good as a hosted service like Shopify, and i want them to have enough support so that they don't need to call me about server related issues, as i can't offer SLAs at this point (too small and total freelancer)..

any advice from current Servint customers, or any alternates i should look at before signing up? I spoke to Servint and i'm pretty much sold on them (even with the recent downtime...)

on a side note - has anyone here worked on Prestashop sites, have any advice or recommendations about that? I tried many systems (lemonstand, shopify, volusion, ecwid, magento etc.) but Prestashop seems to have a special set of features that make it work really well for clothing and fashion, and the other systems basically pale in comparison, at least for this specific application... i like the admin well enough (better than the other systems mentioned) and seems put together decently enough;

[pwired]

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has anyone here worked on Prestashop sites, have any advice or recommendations about that?

Did you run ps performance tests on an online test server ? If not I would advice you to do.

Try a bunch of categories and products. My experience is that ps is slow, especially the front end.

[Macrura]

@pwired, i have it running on shared hosting and the speed is fine; i can only imagine how much faster it will run with combine/cache/minify enabled and on a VPS; certainly getting much higher speed ratings out of the box than Shopify, which AFAIK doesn't offer any caching or asset combining/minifying..

[pwired]

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i need something that would perform from a server perspective as good as a hosted service

Found this hosting:

http://www.digitalpacific.com.au/hosting/shopping-cart/prestashop/

ps read:

http://blog.dh42.com/prestashop-1-7/

[Macrura]

@pwired, thanks, yes those are all valid points... Some of them can be solved in the current version with addons;

gotta say though, none of those issues are dealbreakers for this project; we spent/wasted a ton of time on other options, but ps has really been nice to work with..

[pwired]

Hi Macrura, after weeks of testing with abantecart, I abandoned it. Lost a lot of time with it ? In a way yes.

I was enthousiastic about it but in the end: multi language doesn't work and back end lacks basic needed

shop administration features.

(discovered by my boss, so it is always good to let someone else look at the back end features)

I'm glad you mentioned prestashop, cause it gives me a new focus after abantecart.

I tried prestashop in the past and was not happy about front end performance.

That was ps 1.5.x then, but I noticed the 1.6 release not so long ago with a beautiful and responsive front !

I am testing it now and I am very curious about front performance and seo in the backend.

Technically the backend is one of the best I have seen for maintenance but not sure about shop administration. 

I have to say that if you google around on ps you will bump into one of the best articles about how to do seo.

[Macrura]

hi pwired,

this company had originally thought they could just go with Shopify for an initial launch and then gradually migrate to something different if their business took off; I had originally recommended Shopify to them, and it is good for really simple shops;

however this company has some extremely complicated requirements which were not revealed to be incompatible with Shopify until after they had already invested a number of hours into setting it up; I think Shopify is largely to blame for this because they are somewhat cagey about the limitations of their system, and there are some things that it simply cannot do (period); it became obvious after a while and searching forums that Shopify has horrible/useless support for product variants, while Prestashop handles variants really nicely; with PS, you can use the combinations generator to get your size/color combinations, and from there change the SKU#s, associated images, and many more settings per product variant. On the frontend when you change to a different product variant, the URL hash is altered to reflect the variant selected, the images are swapped out; in the cart and all the way through checkout the correct product variant image is retained. Shopify can't do this at all - it requires a hack to get it to show the right image in the cart, and then at checkout it cannot show the correct image, it can only show the default image for the parent product...

I think you'll be happy with prestashop if you are looking to replace abantecart; they have come a long way; I still have a way to go with this project so i'll let you know if anything else interesting happens..

[videokid]

Hi,

Have you ever tried Opencart? If you did, any reason why you choose Prestashop over Opencart?

I too had some experience with PS 1.5 but never used it after that because I thought it was too complicated for the shopowner... Personally I thought Opencart was a little easier... 

Thx!

[Macrura]

@videokid - Opencart does look good; hmm maybe i should use that instead? there are so many factors i'm needing to provide the client, and been testing carts for so long.. maybe i'll setup an opencart demo and see how it goes... thanks

[videokid]

Please also check this

https://processwire.com/talk/topic/6406-need-an-e-commerce-solution-that-works-well-with-pw-and-offers-the-ability-to-sell-digital-music/page-2#entry67328

but back to topic...

Anyone experience with Cloud hosting [non and dedicated]?

VPS or Cloud, and why?

Configuring Cloud/VPS servers? Who's a master? Or should this go in 'Jobs'? lol

[pwired]

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@videokid - Opencart does look good; hmm maybe i should use that instead?

@macrura - yes - from my own experience this week, you should really look at opencart.

OpenCart seems to have the same architecture as processwire: say what !?

I´m already running checks on it and I can tell you that it is a very fast webshop.

And to my big surprise, under the hood, opencart looks very similar to processwire !!!

I think we have a winner webshop here !

Will report back on this later on.

Edit:

Lots of modules and templates available. (saves precious time)

Look what I found here - yeah !

http://inanecoding.co.uk/piwik-opencart-ecommerce-vqmod/

[goro2]

hi, i'm pretty sure that DIGITALOCEAN would satisfy every your needs

for example, $40 / 4GB RAM / 60GB SSD, but they also have different options

enjoy here is the link (<- affiliate link removed by moderator)

Edited July 19, 2014 by diogo
removed affiliate links

[apeisa]

I don't know what our guidelines are about affiliate links, but I think it would be cool at least always mention when using affiliate links.

Referring to above post.

[diogo]

I went ahead and removed the affiliate links and altered the first one to a regular link to the digitalocean homepage. Sorry @goro2, I would prefer to be welcoming you for the first post, but nothing on it tells us that you will stick around in the forum after dropping the link here.

[apeisa]

Diogo, you might want to edit the other link too

[diogo]

Already done

[Macrura]

hey - thanks; I went with Servint for now; Appreciate the Digital Ocean referral; they are somewhat less expensive than Servint...but the support is pretty good..

[MatthewSchenker]

Greetings,

I would have to strongly (very strongly (very very strongly)) advise against ServInt. They have experienced an unusual amount of failures recently. Don't bother looking at their "99.9 uptime" stat, which is either misleading or measures something other than uptime.

I have posted at length about this elsewhere in the forum.

Thanks,

Matthew

[Macrura]

Hi Matthew - thanks - i do take your opinion very seriously and have followed your thread about the outage(s).

So right now i'm on Servint, and the site seems to be running well; haven't had any major issues yet, and the support has been responsive.

This is my first time ever using anything other than reseller shared hosting, and the performance of the server has been very good, and the scripts i need to run on there have been really running well...

As it was quite a bit of work to migrate the client's cpanel account over to Servint from the previous shared host, i have my fingers crossed that I won't need to move again.. but I will post back here some further updates and ratings for this server, specifically the performance and uptime. This one is in the DC datacenter.

[clsource]

By the way an alternative to prestashop and opencart is tomatocart

http://www.tomatocart.com/

but I don't have experience with that.

[Joss]

Wow, still going?

I remember playing with it a few years ago when they were first experimenting with extjs - looked interesting, if cumbersome. 

[pwired]

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extjs - looked interesting, if cumbersome

Remember the days ? extjs is a main reason why many ran away from revo and found pw

[Martijn Geerts]

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extjs is a main reason why many ran away from revo and found pw

Slow loading of the pagetree forexample is for most not an extjs issue, but a getting the data quick to load the tree is the issue. 

Lot's of people do blame extjs, but I don't think that is fair. 

[pwired]

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Lot's of people do blame extjs, but I don't think that is fair.

That doesn´t say much, you are putting extJS in general and thus out of context with revo where it was about.

In the context it would be better to compare jQueryUI with extJS.

More of extJS there was or still is no possibility to use the revo manager on an iPad.

The mobile version based on jquery mobile is not solving the problem only the symptoms.

[Martijn Geerts]

There a few reasons why I won't choose Revolution as CMS again, but extjs isn't one of them.

But developing tightly GUI integrated plug-ins for MODX is for most users who have no experience with extjs (like me) way more difficult.