Who has a great osCommerce hosting service?

[dumpster]

Perhaps this topic should have been more along the lines of, 'Locating a great osCommerce hosting service' but I don't see where I can change that.

 

This seemed far more appropriate to put to the experienced who already have their own stores up and running and that is, who has a great and economical hosting service?

 

It does little good to have the sharpest looking, most user friendly, most desirable product line of an on line store if the hosting service is regularly down, people are going back to their search lists from tapping their feet waiting for your site to display or the costs associated are outrageous. There are numerous Top 10 Review lists but one can only wonder how much some services paid to be listed as numbers one through ten. Every hosting service I looked into seemed to have its share of proponents and naysayers. One service I've shied away from because *somebody* has to be paying for those bikini commercials.

 

So how about a discussion from the experienced who have already slogged their way trough the trenches of hosting services. What things should one look for in a service? What things should one look out for? What has your experience with a particular service been like? What are the monthly costs associated with a particular service and for what level of service?

 

Store owners themselves should be the best source of information as to where to set up shop and/or which locations to avoid.

[Guest]

Have a look here: http://oscommerce-solution.com

 

i have been hosted there a number of years, great service!

[Guest]

@@dumpster

 

Other than the sponsors on the top of this site, we aren't suppose to endorse commercial services.

 

 

 

Chris

[Guest]

@@dumpster Since my post was deleted I sent you a PM.

[dumpster]

OK, then without endorsing any commercial service in particular (do feel free to send me a personal message explaining why you are with a particular service, however): What things should one look for in a service? What things should one look out for? What are your own personal monthly costs associated with your nameless service and for what level of service?

[Jack_mcs]

I just PM'ed you but I would mention again here that one of the most important things to look for in a host is whether or not they actually support the package. Most do not and that leaves one open to having a site down far longer than it should be.

[flying_kites]

We've found that many commercial hosting companies are anti-osCommerce haven fallen for the "osCommerce is dead" marketing done by Magento et al so support is generally "upgrade or change CMS". Having said that, Jack is correct in that many have no clue about how it works and will do things to break it. For instance tonight we spent an hour tracking down why a client could not log into admin with osCommerce 2.3. We worked out that the hosting company had added some domain redirects to the main .htacess file when installing the SSl certificates which messes up the Admin sessions. With 2.3 you cannot log in. With 2.2 it causes other issues such as data corruption due to lost sessions. So where-ever you host, make sure you don't let them touch anything.

[♥14steve14]

I had a similar problem with my hosts. I sell lots of downloads and use the download by redirect feature. I started getting lots of complaints from customers that downloads were not working. I looked for the obvious and turned this feature off. Downloads worked again as they should. I contacted the hosts and after a few "we have not done anything" I got to a sensible bloke who found that the hosts had indeed done something and what ever they did made the download by redirect feature stop working. A simple entry in the php.ini file and all is working good again.

 

I would say that hosts are down to personal choice, and no matter who you choose, you wil get problems of some sort. All you can do is hope these problems are few and far between. I have been lucky with my hosts and apart from upgrading php and things like that, everything works fine.