OpenCart Community

This is just from my experience with hosts. Feel free to add your own.

Good:
HostGator - Very popular. Very Big, but still performance is excellent. Familiar cpanel.
ResellerZoom - Was with them for 4 years and they have great customer care. Never had any problems with carts or payments or anything. Familiar cpanel.
247host.com - With them now. They are about half the price of ResellerZoom, and I was afraid that I'd get half the quality, but to my surprise they are very good, very fast, and very stable.

Avoid:
Dreamhost - They have too much red tape. They don't install common libraries like bcmath, and they clutter the cpanel pages with their own ads
GoDaddy - Their webhost management software is in-house and clunky. Most sites have instant changes while GoDaddy has some ~5min delay on updates. They also require you to use a proxy to connect backend transactions like creditcards and paypal.

If you are in Sweden, Binero (http://www.binero.se/) is excellent. Their customer service is excellent and also they helped me with issues in opencart too...hmm..opencart is getting popular...

I have used secureserver to host open cart, and it worked very nicely. I will continue to use them because they have great service/support.

There is one drawback in that it does not allow multiple domain hosting in a single package. I would like to use a new host for all my other sites that is opencart friendly and allows multiple domain hosting (not just multiple domain pointing to one site).

Appreciate the suggestions!

Hostgator is quite good, see my website for a summary of their packages suitable for Opencart.

I agree. HostGator is very good. Never had downtime issues and the speed was always great. Their reseller plans were just a tad high for my tastes

I will just put down some avoids.

Dreamhost should be called nightmarehost I've had clients hosted with them that took me literally 4 days to download their sites so I could move them to another host. They overcrowd their servers till they run at dialup speeds.

Bluehost can be the same depending on what server you are on. Have had clients on them that had good speeds, and others that I spent a whole day downloading a site to move it.

I use Zenutech. There service has been good and it was through their Shopping Cart Page that I found out about OpenCart.

GoDaddy sucks! Its super slow!

I need a new host any suggestions from some US OpenCart users?

I'm just tired of it loading fine one minute and then the next minute it fails or takes forever.

yea I noticed this on your site too. Godaddy is the worst ... but there is already a thread for this:

http://forum.opencart.com/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=7247

Hostgator baby! only Hostgator.

Lunapages are good too.

stay away from the rest.

The support from hostgator and lunarpages are unmatched.

sometimes you get template answers from hostgator.. but if you ask something out of the "standard" they will still reply you with logical and sensible answers.

Lunarpages is not quite so .. but it gives you a nice feeling of being taken care of .

I seldom receive any replies that says.."sorry, this is beyond me.. I have to ask my next tier of supportr folks"..

if you do not mind not to have the online techical support on live chat.. then go with lunar..

if online chat support help is an absolute must.. then hostgator.

both lunar and hostgator never fail me so far!

I moved to hostgator and so far its outstanding compared to GoDaddy.. (Night and Day) difference.

Im in NZ and i use australian based www.webcity.com.au they are well priced and i have had no problems and they have prompt response to queries

Hey guys, can you recommend a cheap hosting for opencart? Thank you!

I recommend Aspiration Hosting. I moved to them after a few nightmares with AQ Host and have nothing but great things to say about the service AND the support.

+1 to hostgator. they do quality

i have 6 years of experience with godaddy and my area of expertise is web design/web development...all i can say about them is that they are the best on the market for quality/cost/support and so on.

I use a small hosting company called Magmahost. Their customer service and support has been brilliant for a low cost hosting provider.

UPDATE: June 2010. Since Magmahost got took over by Yomura, their service has deteriorated. Have now gone with catalyst2 who are brilliant.

tanicos wrote:i have 6 years of experience with godaddy and my area of expertise is web design/web development...all i can say about them is that they are the best on the market for quality/cost/support and so on.

You already failed. Godaddy is the biggest fail of them all

Qphoria wrote:

tanicos wrote:i have 6 years of experience with godaddy and my area of expertise is web design/web development...all i can say about them is that they are the best on the market for quality/cost/support and so on.

You already failed. Godaddy is the biggest fail of them all

Qphoria i think you have enough experience when it comes to hosting, development...etc.

It all depends what you expect from your host. I found godaddy easy to use for all carts and especially ones (i won't mention their names but their are very popular) that have a lot of system requirements. i'm not a godaddy affiliate of any kind but i found it perfect to host more than 100 templates and over 40 domains. what do you need more right? anyway this is my opinion...i'm not 100% familiar with open cart so far but will be soon.
regards

I'm sorry.. I'm biased i know.. I've actually never had them as a server host myself, I do use them for my domain hosting, only because they are big and popular and I don't think they will be out of business any time soon. My last domain registrar changed ownership and I had to move the domain so I moved here to avoid it again.

But my biggest gripes that I've seen with clients that I've helped are:
- It's not cpanel. cpanel is like the google of the website admin world... everyone uses it. It's fast and intuitive. Godaddy is designed for newbies, it also uses too much ajax and it slows it down.
- Actions are not instant. I guess maybe it is for easier manangement, but things like creating databases has this 5 min delay while it is "processing". When I'm doing dev work I don't want to wait.
- I've heard there are issues with certain ports. CanadaPost uses port 30000 which I guess doesn't work on GoDaddy. Also Paypal IPN callbacks have been reported to have issues.
- Godaddy's checkout system is atrocious. It pains me to buy a new domain just because of the gauntlet you must click through to checkout.
- Also rumors that early on they blocked googlebot from crawling their hosted sites, preventing google from listing your site.

These are enough bad marks in my mind to not think to highly of them. I use hosts like hostgator that get me up and running quickly and intuitively with no red tape or BS so I'm just used to sites like that.