nopCommerce Hosting @ SmarterASP - First Glance. [Yes! no more admin logout problem]

I'm no expert in this area but I would safely assume you need something more than a shared/personal plan for such traffic.  It is "shared" after all... its cheap but the risks are just too high to host such a site.  Any "neighbour" with bad code could bring down the whole server.  

You should really look for more "dedicated" kind of hosting.  I don't know how "truthful" is SmarterASP's claims but they claimed to have only 5 to 10 customers for each SEMI DEDICATED server.  The prices for their semi dedicated server still looks good... assuming they KEEP to their promise.  Of course I would still say VPS is a better option albeit more expensive.  :P

Look here for their semi dedicated plans.

Hope that helps.

limsy wrote:
You are quite right. I guess VPS is still the best choice. They are cheaper than Arvixe (and still more if you take into account that you get some free static IPs) and have options with mor RAM (Arvixe maximum is 3G). Most important is that service is GOOD. In this matter Arvixe has improved in the past months, but still  is deficient.

I finally got around to doing a test...

I created a nopC 2.80 system using their One Click Installer.  It went well - nopC was set up with sample data.   (Note: Arvixe also has installer, but it's for 2.70, not 2.80)

I set up:
store information settings.  Store Name, Store URL  (prevents 404 error for keepalive task)
email configuration, and sent test message.  Received OK.
I then
placed order as a guest.  received all emails
registered as customer
placed order as customer.   received all emails

In general, I'd say this shared hosting performance felt equivalent to the Arvixe shared hosting.  Not better, not worse.  (Just anecdotally - I did not do a scientific test, or time anything.).   And, this is also based on only the sample db install (which does not have very many products/categories).  Id also say that both have good/usable/equivalent-feature control panels, but I did not do any real comparison at this point.

I used PingAlive to monitor uptime overnight:
I noted a 10 minute period of inaccessibility early this morning.  The remote server returned an error: (500) Internal Server Error for 10 minutes. (pings occur every 2 minutes).
I also note that overnight there were two spikes of equal size - 12 seconds.  This could be indicative of an app restart.  The first was at 1:30am, and the second at 6:00am.  I'll let it run a few days more before I make any conclusions.

SQL Server
I used my local SSMS to access the remote DB.  I had some funny warning messages, but in general, I was able to query the tables.  It turns out that by default, DBs are created with SQL Server 2012.  I have SSMS 2008R2, so suspected that's why I was getting warning messages.  I used HelpDesk link in the control panel where I was brought to my support ticket area  (this is nice feature; with Arvixe, I'd have to go to a separate online support page and login again).  I asked if they could give me access to a 2008 SQL server.  Three hours later I got an email response that I could do this myself - when creating a new DB, I'm given a choice to select which version (although next to 2008 option it does say "not recommended" :(  ).  

Since the trial only allows for 1 DB, I deleted the 2012 DB that was automatically created with One Click installer, and then manually created a 2008 server, since that is the version I use locally.  I then deleted nopCommerce files Settings.txt and InstalledPlugins.txt, and reran the installation.  All went well.  I repeated the setup/ordering as per above.  All went well.

Used host control panel and backed up database
Used FileZilla to FTP copy the db backup file locally
Used SSMS to restore db file to my local SQL server.
Restore OK. Query tables OK. No funny warning messages :)

SmarterASP having their DBs hosted on separate servers from where the ASP app thus seems to come with this benefit of being able to choose amongst different versions of SQL server - nice if you need to use both for different apps.  Arvixe hosts the SQL on the same server as the ASP, so that option does not appear to be available (although I've never asked them).


The next step is to try installing/using nopC 3.00.  I may make it accessible to the community so that it's easy for others to do beta testing (especially for non developers).   However, I would probably only make the public store avail, because having multiple people do admin changes at the same time would be confusing to each other.   However, since people probably want to try out different multi-store scenarios, providing just public store access may not be so beneficial.  Anyone have any thoughts?  Maybe I could "loan" full control to someone on demand for a day or few.

Also, I'd like to load about 10,000 products, but I'm not sure yet how I'm going to do that.  (Does anyone have a large DB they would be willing to donate?  I can upgrade it if it's in a prior version.)


P.S.
I note that SmarterASP control panel has a feature "IP Deny".  I didn't try it.  (It would be nice if this was built in to nopC :)

New York wrote:
I'm very interested in the results you get with PingAlive.  I've pretty much come to the conclusion that Arvixe shared hosting is useless for any production database driven app, .net/SQL or php/mysql.  (My son was testing a Wordpress installation and was getting frequent timeouts.) I've been monitoring a non-public (hence, no traffic) setup of nopCommerce for some time now and the frequency of errors and timeouts is abysmal.  They may clean things up temporarily if you complain long enough, but they can never (or are unwilling to) correlate the errors from PingAlive with anything on their end and the problems always start up again quite soon afterwards.  They would first try to discredit the PingAlive errors as invalid, but I have on numerous occasions gotten the same errors or delayed response in a browser if I happen to do a page load at the same time that PingAlive is reporting a problem.  I realize that shared hosting isn't adequate for heavily accessed sites or for sites with large databases, perhaps, but it should be for small, light traffic sites.

Personally, I can't say that Arvixe is "useless for any production database driven app".  I have a client with 40 products, and it is OK.  Perfect? No.  But OK.   The bottom line is that you get what you pay for. As you too mention, if you're running a business where uptime and performance is critical, then you can't use shared hosting - from any vendor.  I also have clients using Arvixe Business class, and they are fairly satisfied.  There have been some outages, but recently they seem to be related to infrastructure/network changes - not the server itself. (So, hopefully these infrastructure changes will make the environment overall better).  Also, Arvixe stands behind their 99.9% uptime guarantee.  They will refund your month if the system does not meet the uptime (you do need to ask)  BTW, that 0.01% is only about 43 minutes per month.  Granted, that $30+ dollars probably doesn't mean squat to a high volume business that could lose more during that downtime, but Arvixe puts it in writing and explains exactly what it means.  I've seen other hosts claim it, but can't seem to find anything to back it up, and as per my experience on a chat with SmarterASP, they would not give me a straight answer, and although I asked that someone followup with an email, they never sent one.

I won't make any conclusions about SmarterASP until I've monitored for about 30 days.  Additionally, if it does go down, to see how their tech support handles it.

I've also shared my PingAlive results with Arvixe tech support, and have also found that they tend to ignore them; the downtimes/timeouts are generally very brief, and by the time they look at the site all is well.   I would suggest that if you are otherwise reasonably happy with them, that you ask to have your site moved to another server.  It could be worth the try, though you would experience an outage for the time of migration, and possibly a bit more time if you have SSL (may need to regenerate) and from DNS changes if you have to change a dedicated IP.

New York wrote:
Well, if you have to continually report outages, I don't consider it a practical solution.  Another interesting thing is with PingAlive, even when there are no errors, I see a periodic timeout spike at about 1 hour intervals, as if some process is consuming all resources, on a regular basis.  Then the timeout will turn into an error on a not infrequent basis...

Hi! I really appreciate everyone sharing their experiences here - it's always beneficial to see overall hosting experiences. Just a reminder - if you're an Arvixe hosting customer running nopCommerce, and you're having issues, please send me your user ID and ticket (if any) at [email protected], and I'll see to it that it's escalated to the QA team for faster resolution.

SWW wrote:
See the first post on this thread.  This is due to the automatic restarting of the app pool on shared servers.