Looking for a new home for a ecommerce site

[8mikey]

I've been considering moving for quite awhile now, and HostGator keeps popping up at the top of my list of potential candidates.

I'd be looking at a Reseller account - technically I'm a web designer, but we usually provide the hosting service for our customers. Sometimes they want access to their own control panel, sometimes they let us handle everything. I've grown pretty comfortable with the reseller model - maybe I should be looking VPS, but I'd rather design sites than manage servers!

Right now my biggest problem is my current host seems to have some serious issues with database intensive sites - Joomla, Drupal, and osCommerce/Zencart.

I'd really love some honest feedback on HostGator and database heavy sites. How are load times, back-end editing, site searches?

Also, if I were to move, how does HostGator handle new account signups (under a reseller account)?

For instance, assuming I move 200+ accounts, and at least half of those are database driven (Joomla, Drupal, various e-commerce sites) - would these domains be spread across 'random' servers, or would HostGator start adding them to the current server, "fill it" to it's "capacity", then move on to the next open server? I'd rather have clients spread across many different servers - that way if something does happen I don't have to restore every single site!

One final question - can I make specific requests for dedicated app-pools or to move a specific site to a different server? (I realize the answer is ultimately 'get a VPS or dedicated' - but as a reseller I don't know when a site is going to become popular)

Thanks in advance for any feedback!
-Michael

[gatorAMcKee]

As for control panel access we use cPanel and WHM making management nice and easy. Under cPanel, each user may manage their own settings, and under WHM you will have access to each accounts own cPanel. I definitely recommend at least a VPS level 3, which is the first level of VPS that offers full management by us. For a large amount of sites I recommend considering a Dedicated package.

We are well known and pride ourselves on the level of service and support. Whatever you need, get a hold of us. We will at the very least point you in the right direction. Bear in mind there is a small subset of things we cannot control (domain settings managed by another host, for example).

Database intense sites on a shared server are always problematic. Obviously there needs to be a limits, and when those are reached it really does show on all sites on the same box. This is why VPS or Dedicated is highly recommended.

Load times depend heavily on the site or page itself. I'm not sure I understand what you mean by 'back-end editing', but we do allow for you to manage your own php.ini file per domain. There are, of course, certain settings you aren't allowed to change on shared servers (maximum execution time, maximum db queries, ect. These would negatively impact everyone else on the server and we can't have that).

We do our best to keep the servers balanced, but as you've said it's difficult to predict which site will become popular.

What do you mean by app-pools? Moving sites to another server is preferably avoided for a myriad of reasons - DNS propagation time for the domain and emails, configuration differences between servers, the ever changing target of which servers are busy and which ones are not. That said it has been done before, and will be done again I'm sure.

I hope this helps answer a few questions.

[8mikey]

Thanks for your reply!

By "back-end editing" I mean when logged in to the CMS admin panel for editing the site. We've noticed that almost any CMS system shows the worst database performance when you login and start editing.

ZenCart is probably the worst - a site that performs slightly slow (but mostly acceptable for a shopper) will be PAINFULLY slow for an admin editing products or dealing with orders and customer.

I'm getting more curious about the VPS option - especially after reading the list of posts from users who were happy switching from reseller to VPS.

How about a specific question:
I have about 200 domains, over half are some sort of CMS system (Joomla, Drupal, ZenCart, osCommerce, and a couple of others). On my current host I'm just over 20GB disk space and 200GB transfer - so I'm will within the resources of a Lvl3 VPS.

However, how would this many domains work under a single VPS? I realize your VPS accounts offer unlimited domains, but I also want and value fairly quick performance for my customers. I wouldn't want 100 plain HTML domains all slowed down by 100 database driven sites!

These are all 'active' sites - not thousands of visitors per hour levels of 'active', but they do receive thousands of visitors per month. Some are have constant traffic, others are geared towards events which might see HUGE spikes of traffic for a week, lots of traffic for a couple weeks, then normal traffic for a couple of months...

Again, I know it's impossible to provide specific answers based on general numbers - but from the stats of 200 sites generating 200 GB of monthly traffic (and a great deal of database use), what would you reccomend?

Thanks again for your input!
-Michael