Zen Cart and shared hosting

April 21, 2009 in Zen Cart Guides

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When I started to use Zen Cart some time ago, one of the first questions I asked was ‘Is shared web hosting good enough for running Zen Cart?’

Now, after a few years, and after dealing with a number of web hosting companies, I’ll share my experiences of using shared hosting.

In short, you won’t have much problem if you go with reputable web hosting companies.

Some users do still like to compare storage space and data transfer limit but nowadays hosting companies provide more than enough even for cheap shared hosting packages. The actual restriction lies with “resouces usage”, which is usually buried in a page called Terms & Conditions or Acceptable Usage Policy or something like that. The “resources” refer to processor cycles, memory, database connections etc.

Zen Cart, and other e-commerce software, needs to use more resources than normal static web pages.  And the more users online at the same time, the more resources needed.

From my experience, you can have up to 20 or 30 users online at the same time without problems — now, it’s not easy to have this number of users on your site at the same time :)

So, how many users will your site handle without having the web hosting provider suspending your hosting account and sending you a nasty email? Frankly, I’m not sure. But a client of mine got her account suspended when her online advertisement (Facebook CPC ad) brought about 90 users to her site at about the same time. Normally, her site will have about 20 users online most of the time.

Okay, what about choosing a web hosting provider? Well, just choose from the more reputable hosting providers. Zen Cart server requirements are similar to most other programs and hosting companies should have no problem with that.

Having said that, I did still face some issues with a couple of hosting companies:

1. Hosting company A - PHP runs with Safe Mode turned ON
Zen Cart seems to run okay but Image Handler 2 just won’t run properly. See this forum post for more info about servers with PHP Safe Mode turned ON.

2. Hosting company B - No cURL support
Zen Cart will run without cURL but some shipping and payment modules require cURL

So, if you’re not sure, ask the hosting provider first!

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One Response to “Zen Cart and shared hosting”

  1. Zen Cart and shared hosting on April 21st, 2009 10:50 pm

    [...] post:  Zen Cart and shared hosting Video sobre Cloud Hosting en españolSviluppatori di applicazioni oggi state pronti per [...]

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