Can anyone tell me the best hosting company for open cart and the requirements needed. Is shared hosting ok? I will only have about 500 items in my ecommerce site and was thinking about using Godaddy, any suggestions?
I would avoid the big brand names. You will likely run into trouble with them. We always end up with people coming from them after having resource issues.
There is a great number of ecommerce solutions nowadays (http://smallbiztrends.com), but sometimes it cannot be easy to choose the right ecommerce solution if the user doesn’t know what he is looking for. First of all, you are to decide how many things you are planning to sell via your online shop. If there are less than 10 products on your sites which are planning to sell, a small hosting plan will surely suit you (for example, with 500 mb of diskspace and 5 Gb of traffic). In case the number of goods provided on your site starts rapidly growing day by day and the total number is not less than a thousand, then you will need higher bandwidth and disk space limits set for your hosting plan (at least 30 Gb of diskspace and 500 gb of traffic, aka “unlimitedâ€). Moreover, you will need a secure certificate (SSL certificate) which will help you to protect the customers’ privacy. An important fact for an ecommerce website is the payment tool you are going to use to get payment. You can either collect the payments yourself or automate the process by using the third-party payment service (here you will find the list of most popular payment services - www.shopify.com). If you decide to collect payments yourself, you will need a secure connection which can be established for your site by means of SSL certificate. The secure connection is necessary so that the information (adding ssl certificate to oscommernce to store credit card information, for example) which is entered by your customers couldn't be intercepted and read by anyone else. To have secure connection for your site, you can apply for an SSL from different providers, like Verisign, Geotrust or Rapidssl, or read a godaddy ssl certificate review at webhostingtalk.com. As soon as the certificate is generated for your site, you will be able to install it on the server and connect to the site using https connection. If it is more convenient for you to handle your transactions via a third party service, you can always choose the appropriate service (like Paypal, Geotrust, Authorize.net or Quickpay). As soon as the customer makes the payment on your site, he will be instantly redirected to the site of the payment service and there he will have to fill in his payment details. Pay attention while using the third party services, because they sometimes charge a setup fee and then they keep a percentage of each sale which they process for you. While ordering a top ecommerce plan, you should also pay attention to the shopping cart feature offered by the hosting provider. A shopping cart is rather important when operating online business, as it connects your customer’s funds with your bank account, ultimately closing the sale and giving your visitors the most convenient experience possible.They also help you to followup constant site buyers, suggest related items for the customer to buy before checking out.The shopping carts also sometimes have a rating system which gives the customers an opportunity to post reviews. The most popular shopping carts offered by the business web hosting companies are: Miva Merchant,OpenCart, Agora, osCommerce and Zen Cart. Make sure that your shopping cart is compatible with your payment service while choosing the cart for managing your sales. Among the best hosting providers, OpenCart is supported by inmotion company. You can read the details about OpenCart at http://www.inmotionhosting.com/opencart-hosting.html
I have experience with OpenCart installations on GoDaddy and 000WebHost. I do not recommend them if you will use customized extensions. Especially 000WebHost. It was a nightmare. Hostgator could be a solution. I am not sure though if it is the best hosting for OpenCart. We host there hundreds of OpenCart websites and we do not have major complains. You should check if the terms of the shared hosting of Hostgator differ much from dedicated server services.