TipTip wrote:I have checked the 6 pages and found that no one mentioned my host provider which is siteground.com, they are really the best in terms of price ( $$9.95 per YEAR, Oh yes, you read it correctly, $$9.95 per year), excellent support, one click open cart installation, cPanel, Just amazing.
We are currently using SiteGround with a "Semi-Dedicated" account. They piss me off at least once a month... and it always something different. Every time I turn around they are trying to force us into a dedicated server. We used to have CS Cart and our store was getting shut down all the time because they said the scripts were not efficient enough for how many products we had. OK I could see their point, so we upgraded to OC (Actually I need to thank them for that because OC is SOOO much better than CS Cart).
Now our biggest gripe is that we have roughly a hundred thousand products and we can't get them all in the store! Why not you ask? We can't use an import tool like Total Import Pro, CSV Import Pro, or XML Import Pro to manage pricing or other data in our store unless I break the import files down into multiple files with less than 200 lines of data each! They (SiteGround) actually recommended I limit the files to TEN lines each but I tried imports over and over until I found the largest size I could use successfully!!! Really? I am supposed to split all my CSV files (some of them have 5000 lines) and do THAT many imports every time... even if it is just to update prices??? What a joke! Their claim is that it consumes "too much memory" even on a "semi-dedicated" server!
To give you an example of how utterly ridiculous this is, I have one CSV file that is a mere 22kB file size but it is 2500 lines. All the file consists of is a product model number and new prices for a particular brand that we carry. I had to split the file into more than 10 files of less than 200 lines each to get the prices uploaded with Total Import Pro! What a colossal waste of time! Now try to do that for every brand we carry and it becomes a data management nightmare and a continuous project just to keep data up to date!
Also, although SiteGround CLAIMS unlimited storage space, they limit the iNodes used which is a joke because with over a hundred thousand product images we use lots of iNodes but only about 50 GB of space.
We don't use all that much bandwidth... SiteGround has never complained about our bandwidth usage, I just mentioned it because I don't want you to think that our store is a big resource hog that needs a dedicated server because of tens of thousands of visitors every day... I doubt we have much more than 100 visitors a day on our busiest day of the year.
Since our transition to OC we still have not been able to get all our product in the store because of the restriction of splitting all the CSV files plus we have no more iNodes available for the required images! If it weren't for the iNode issue I suppose I could do all the imports in a local install of OC then move the DB but why bother when I can't upload any more supporting files!
Time for a new host! Anyone got suggestions that won't be crippled like this? I called HostGator and they have similar iNode restrictions but they didn't think the memory issue would be a problem... but no guarantees of course. I have shopped around and there are lots of hosts without the iNode restriction but nobody can be sure about the upload issue. Surely some of you use an import tool in OC? I would appreciate your advice / experience if you do.