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BUSINESS BASICS
HOSTING PLAN
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$39.95
per month
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Miva Merchant 5
Plesk Control Panel
300MB Disk Space
1GB Transfer
5 Email Accounts
MySQL Database
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Recently we were working on a customer site that was mostly
static HTML with the store part embedded in a frame. As an aside,
never, never, never put your Miva Merchant store in a frame,
but that's another article for another day. So our job was
to integrate the site content and look and feel into the
Miva Merchant store to get rid of the frameset.
Well, things took a turn for the worse pretty quickly.
The static HTML site ran pretty fast, but our designers kept
complaining about how slow it was to edit the Miva Merchant
store. Sometimes the speed was fine, sometimes it seemed to
take forever just to load the store front page. It was fairly
erratic, but definitely noticeable, and more so during what
I would consider "peak shopping hours".
When we discussed this with the customer, our advice was
to speak to their host - find out why their HTML side was
very fast but the Miva Merchant side was very slow. Honestly
we knew the answer to this, and wanted to guide the customer
in the right direction but didn't want it to be a sales pitch.
So we educated the customer on good and "bad" Miva Merchant
hosting, and what performance they should expect from a Miva
Merchant store on a good host. We even showed them another
one of our customer's sites hosted on one of our shared
servers.
Perhaps "peppy" could be an adequate description of what to
to expect; a Miva Merchant site should load nearly as fast as a static
HTML site. Not necessarily as fast but close. Some
overhead is certainly involved in the dynamic pages, but you
do get a lot of benefits for this. The ability to show a
customer if they're logged in or not, change links from
"Login" to "My Account", etc. If there is a noticeable
difference, it should be a second or two at most, not 10
or 30 seconds! Shared servers are what they are - you can't
expect the speed of a Ferrari when riding public transportation,
but it should get you there adequately and affordably.
So the customer was resolved to contact their host
and ask about the performance problem. Honestly we do want
our design customer to host with us, but we want this to be
an educated and well informed decision. And we want to build
our customer's trust, not by bashing another host - but by
educating them on what questions to ask and what to expect.
So, as expected, the (other) host's response was to try to
upsell this customer on a dedicated server - and they don't
have any traffic yet!
Wrong answer in my opinion. Shared hosting with Miva
Merchant should support a reasonably performing Miva Merchant
site with low traffic. If you can't load your store front
and you don't have tons of traffic, you're on an overloaded
server. And if your host tells you to buy a dedicated server
for a store that isn't getting a lot of visitors, it's
probably time to run... quickly... not slowly.
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