Category Archives:
Hosting Reviews

Oscommerce Overview

Oscommerce is one of the olddest and powerful ecommerce solutionss and supports over 242,500 store owners world wide. Being open sourced project, oscommerce is supported by hundreds and thousands of communities and released over 7000 free add-ons for store owners to setup a full functional and successful shopping cart website.

If you use osCommerce for shopping cart development, A specialized oscommerce web host is required for guaranteed performance. The oscommerce softwae has been offered for over 15 years and supported by most web hosting providers.This article will provide side by side guidance on how to select the best oscommerce hosting service among different providers.

Best oscommerce Hosting

Since oscommerce can be running on either windows or linux and has very low system requirements. The most important thing is about the website performance and reliability. After reviewed and tested over 13 ecommerce hosting providers on plan features, ease of use, performance and customer support, Arvixe LLC is awarded the best oscommerce hosting provider.

Arvixe osCommerce Hosting Advantages

Arvixe hosting is fully oscommerce compatible with free oscommerce installation by cpanel auto installer. Arvixe oscommerce hosting comes with the following unbeatable features:

• Unlimited disk/ data transfer
• Multiple domain hosting
• One FREE domain for life
• 24/7 tech support for oscommerce
• oscommerce auto installtion in cPanel Control Panel
• 99.9% uptime and 60 day money back guarantee

Arvixe is recognized as affordable and high performance web hosting provider for personal and business website hosting purpose. There're multiple hosting solutions to support your different website requirements from shared, vps and dedicated servers. They also provide a VPS level business hosting plan where people can manage the service the same way of shared hosting. When your website is outgrowed a shared server but you're not ready to manage a server by yourself, the arvixe business hosting plan will be perfect choice. You get same or even better performance as VPS server but leave all server end tasks like maintenance/updates to support team.

Performance – Arvixe hosting is powered by newest dell server production that come with max available hardware resources including CPU/RAM, DISK is Raid10 for every server setup. Arvixe manages multiple world class data centers by leading ISP support, their bandwidth allocation is more than enough to deal with regular service requirement and medium ddos attack. The most important thing is each hosting account is allocated dedicated resource and accounts do not affect each other. In this way, the website performance/security is highly guaranteed.

Ease of use – The arvixe oscommerce hosting plan is completely cpanel based operation, Either oscommerce installation or websit file/database management, users be able to handle in professional and secure ways.

Customer support – Arvixe provides 24*7 live tech support, cliets can communicate with different level supports directly on chat, ticket or phone calls. Arvixe is official sponser of oscommerce project and recommended by their developers. The arvixe tech team is made up by a group of professional developers to this software and their people created resourceful support articles/videos to this software. Even you search oscommerce support maerials from search engines, you will be redirected to their site for professional solutions.

More about Oscommerce

Using oscommerce for shopping carts has various advantages for a successful business. Oscommerce has been improved for a long history and it's considered one of the most matured shopping cart softwares. With oscommerce, you get following advantages

• Free and opensource – Oscommerce is completely free and opensource and no restriction to revise everything as you liked. Before oscommerce, there's not any free e-commerce solution can be really deployed to online store.
• Plenty of templates – With over 10 years development and supported by large scale communities world wide, oscommerce templates has been growing by hundred per day, you can always find a suitable skin for your store website.
• Powerful administration – The oscommerce backend admin is absolutely configured like an art. As the store owner, you can easily manage website backup and monitor all on going orders and user registration. In a word, whatever you can expect from a online store could be found with oscommerce.
• Payment solution – Oscommerce can be integrated with many most popular payment gateways like authorize.net and paypal. Oscommerce also has flexible tax implementation on a state and country basis.

Another spotlight of oscommerce is it's security configuration. Normally, when you install on website, it's applied to all pages under the domain name. However, things are different with oscommerce, you can determine what pages/directory to show up the ssl page. Those regullar pages are just working the same as normal site, it's best for SEO tricks because only http address is friendly while https is protected with restricted access.

Oscommerce resources:

• Oscommerce official site
• Oscommerce templates

Oscommerce vs Opencart vs Magento

The three shopping cart softwares are mostly used by business owners. If you're going to use any of which, let's find which would be best for you. Being one of the earliest shopping cart solution, OScommerce already very powerful over every side and probably complex to new users because it offers everything you expected or unexpected. It's best if you're experienced web developer and familiar to php programming.

Opencart is lightweight among the solutions but very powerful. It's currently supported by over 10 languages communities and developed plugins/modules for local user requirements. Comparing to oscommerce, opencart is very clean and easy to use. It's perfect choice if you don't want to make lots of change for source codes but just want to launch a professional store in quick time.

For Magento, it's mainly designed for large business purpose and not quite compatible with shared hosting environment. Hosting support will always recommend to use VPS server for this cart. Similar to oscommerce but more server resource sensitive. Magento is now managed and supported by Amazon group and mostly availalable for commercial usage.

Conclusion, if you just need a personal or small shopping cart site, opencart is suggested for best management. If you have a large store with lots of products to promote, oscommerce would be good free choice.

Opencart introduction

OpenCart is an open source "out of the box" shopping cart solution. With Opencart, you have the ability to create your own online business and participate in e-commerce at a minimal cost. You simply install, select your template, add products then you're ready to start accepting orders. The system provides order management with multiple payment gateways built in, the most important is opencart team provides lifetime free support and free software updates.

Best Opencart Hosting

The best Opencart hosting awards turns to Arvixe LLC. The opencart official site is actually hosted by Arvixe.com! Being the official open cart hosting sponsor, arvixe hosting is fully optimized for opencart website purpose. With only $4/mo you get full access to your open cart installation and database files. Arvixe provides 24*7 developers support by experienced technicians.

Arvice Opencart hosting features

• Unlimited disk space / data transfer
• Multiple domain name hosting
• One FREE domain for life
• Opencart one click auto installer
• 24/7 professional tech support
• 99.9% uptime and 60 day money back guarante

Arvixe web hosting is combination of unmatched reliability, quality and affordability and well known of "Arvixe Advantage", the advantage of working with the best. Being an Inc500 fortune group and solid hosting group, arvixe is simply the most successful choice for open cart site!

How to select the right Opencart hosting?

Unlike many other e-commerce solutions which has high system requirements. Opencart can be deployed to various web servers as long as php mysql supported. what you really should look at is the opencart site performance and the hosting support level. Especially on the following:

Enterprise grade server plan: Shopping cart sites need high performance to archive business success. A high quality opencart hosting plan must be setup on powerful hardware platform with enterprise grade CPU/RAM and disk space. The arvixe hosting servers are advanced DELL production with custom reinforcement on security and system level optimization. Not only the bare servers, their data centers provides extra support for security based the strong hardware facilities.

Ease to use service: Ease to use not only refers to a good hosting control panel, it also means the service response time, service upgrade and communication between user & support team.

Professional support: Arvixe support people are everywhere from the country. they have very free work style and can be always contacted when there's need. Beside live tech support, their people created resourceful documents &　FAQ knowledge base　for opencart. Because arvixe is official sponsor of opencart project, the support team is capable of offering perfect solutions for development support.

Opencart Hosting Advantages

Opencart is actually a light weight but pretty powerful shopping cart software that's being supported by lots of social communities in the world. Currently the core system is available in multiple languages.

Open source – Opencart is an open source project with all codes public. Beside, there're many nice templates /plugins to choose from in order to make a professional store. The official site alreayd provided lots of free themes to download and many other commercial templates are provided by lots of groups.

SEO Friendly – OpenCart is search optimised allowing pages to be indexed by all major search engines and includes support for custom product and category META tags.

Multi-store function – You can manage several stores from one admin page, this is extremely useful if you want to promote many different products.

Payment gateways – They payment gateway system is absolutely the most outstanding feature with opencart. Almost all online transaction methods are supported, this key feature let people be able to setup online store even from the most undeveloped area. The different gateways are mainly offered by opencart local community support and there's some fee included.

Comparing to all other shopping cart softwares, opencart is pretty clean from both layouts and management interface. In case it's a challenge to manage a sophisticated system, open cart simply cuts most tasks and just leaves what you really needed for store setup. However, further functions can be added through modules /plugins directly. In this way, opencart is perfect ecommerce software solution for both start users and developers.

More about Opencart

We played with Opencart before and I have to say it's probably the most easy shopping cart comparing to all other solutions. You don't have to be a programmer or developer in order to use this software as everything could be done via friendly GUI. The best we liked is about it's social community support. At the moment opencart is supported by hundreds of communities in different countries via multiple languages. They developed opencart skins/modules as well as local payment gateway plugins to fulfill our requirements. There's not another shopping cart software managed doing so at the moment. Since it's a lightweight software, you don't have to worry about the hosting compatibility issue like magento or other big ones.

Magento Hosting Review

Magento is an open sourced ecommerce solution led by ebay inc. The software is capable of any class shopping cart development. Magento Commerce Platforms provide the scalability, flexibility and features for business growth. Magento provides feature-rich eCommerce platforms that offer merchants complete flexibility and control over the presentation, content, and functionality of their online channel.

Best Magento Hosting

The best magento hosting awards goes to Arvice LLC, The arvixe shared hosting server is fully optimized for magento website purpose with automatic installation from hosting control panel. Magento stores on arvixe server are isolated from each other through a custom-made server setup so each site could never affect the others. The arvixe experienced Magento tech team apply server level security fixes frequently along with official development fixes are released.

Arvice Magento hosting features

• Unlimited space / data transfer
• Multiple domain names hosting
• One FREE domain for life
• 24/7 live tech support
• cpanel auto installer for magento
• 99.9% uptime and 60 day money back guarantee

While the arvixe shared hosting is fully magento commerce compatible, please keep in mind it's only good for small shopping cart. In case you're deal with a big store or you have a good plan to promote your site, we highly recommend you to check out their VPS server plans. The arvixe vps servers are setup via newest hardwares with rich feature plans. Everything is pre-configured and optimized for a magento site.

Why magento?

Magento is probably the most powerful shopping cart software that's designed for enterprise store purpose. When you have lots of different products and need to sell via multiple stores for efficient mangement, you don't have to have multiple installations, you just manage everything from the same store admin center. It's extremely helpful especially when you like to have retailers for your products. You'll be able to monitor how's going for all users. Magento is best choice by advantages below

Open source – Magento is complete open source ecommerce solution and you can customize everything according to your requirements.

Multi-store function – If you like to have different brands and would like to open different web stores for each, you just manage them under the same admin interface so you don't have to deal with multiple logins with different credentials.

Reliable and secure – Magento is definitely the art of ecommerce solutions. The code already optimized in most degree and is quite search engine friendly. SEO is absolutely the most important for online business site.

Payment solution – No matter if you prefer to use credit card of paypal or bank transfer, magento have everything ready for you and you just fill out a single form to setup the complete order process.

Which version magento is suitable for you?

Magento has Enterprise and Community Editions. the main difference is you get different level support from their official team. As for start user, the free community edition is good enough.

How to select the right magento hosting plan?

Before you search for the proper magento hosting plan, you should know about the sfotware basic requirements and what you're going to use the store for. Let's check the magento system requirement first.

• Apache 1.3.x ~ 2.2.x
• PHP 5.2.13+ with no less than 256Mb memory limit
• Mysql with InnoDB storage engine
• Schedule jobs with php5
• more details available here

We see, the hosting provider must offer Linux with latest php support and be able to run schedule jobs. It also has requirements of Mysql InnoDB engine and PHP system memory. Not every hosting be able to meet all above. A budget hosting service is always set at a low standards with strict system limits. Because of this, we don't recommend to try out those cheap hosting service that's designed for personal or hobby site purpose. What you really need is a magento hosting optimized provider, they should also offer upgrade options in case you grow out the shared server.