I read this post a couple of weeks ago as I was looking for a Canadian hosting company as well. I used to be hosting with ipage but they did not support SOAP which was needed for some extension. I wanted to give Zenutech a try, signed up, paid, and waited 3 days for nothing as nobody got back to me to set up my account. So I asked my money back and signed up with myhosting.com. At the same time, it was important to me to improve the speed of my website and I quickly realised they do not support MEMCACHE. (once more, I asked my money back)
I finally went with a VPS server. It's a little bit more expensive than shared hosting but I could not be any happier and it's worth it if you are serious with your OpenCart online store. I went with
http://www.GOTEKKY.COM and have no regrets whatsover. The great thing is that on a VPS server, there are no numerous extensions that you actually don't need and that only slow down performance. While I was setting up my OpenCart store, I had a few requests as I don't really know how to operate a VPS server. Even at 2 o'clock in the morning, I got help on the spot and they installed everything I needed for all my specific purposes. I have a server respond time that is actually below the recommended maximum of 200 milliseconds and with help of an extension to cache my website (called NITRO), I now enjoy a pagespeed of 99!
