While doing some more research yesterday, I came across a web-site called IX Web Hosting, who once again have a tremendous package when it comes to Magento Hosting.
Once again, these guys specialise in Magento, therefore you don’t have to worry about any troublesome installations. It is a complete doddle. I’ve been testing the speed of their service, and it is pretty damn quick. Once you load the web-site, you get a Video Spokesmodel who talks you through the company and gives you a brief sales pitch. The fact that this video runs seemlessly on my parents dodgy internet connection means that their hosting MUST be quick!
Simialrly, if you sign up to any of their packages, you get over $450 of free marketing tools, including a $50 Google Adwords voucher and $50 Yahoo Search Marketing voucher…
6 responses so far ↓
1 Stephen // Jun 26, 2008 at 4:43 pm
Hi, I am figuring out whether Magento is developed enough to rely on, I am attempting to choose between magento and virtuemart for a system that must be online within in a month, and be reliable, what do you think .
Simple Helix seems a good hosting site, is this any better…in your opinions?
Thanks Stephen
2 Sam // Jun 26, 2008 at 5:56 pm
Hi Stephen, I’d definitely say it is enough. I’ve used it extensively and have not seen any pitfalls yet. If there are any, you simply can search the forum, and if there isn’t a fix already, someone will produce one within 24 hours!
In terms of hosting it though, Simple Helix is definitely the one. I signed up one of my websites with Simle Helix again today - just the simple theme on there at the moment, however to install it, it took 5 minutes. I’m thinking of doing a video demo of how easy it actually is to do it.
Plus their support for Magento is second-to-none.
3 Stephen // Jun 27, 2008 at 9:51 am
Thanks for your reply..
I am concerned about response times/speed
…as a number of people on formums are claiming this is an insurmountable problem…
What is your experience? Have you tried large amounts of Data ( I need to the site to deal with >250 Products) Does a fast site like simple helix solve the problem?
4 Sam // Jun 27, 2008 at 11:23 pm
Hi again, well, what myself and our company are doing is bringing all our separate E-Commerce stores under one umbrella - this umbrella is Magento. We decided to this to streamline our operations. One site was OS-Commerce, another was Actinic, another was something else… it didn’t make sense.
Using Magento, we’ll have a unified look (albeit with slight colour and graphical chages from site to site), however we will be using the single admin system of the “parent” store, which will provide data to all the individual stores.
Unfortunately my manager has restrained me from posting any URL’s at present as we’re launching in a couple of weeks - but I can tell you that the parent store itself has well over 500 products in. This store features every single product we sell. Obviously the individual stores will have about 50-100 each - but we’re using the Multiple websites feature, so we’ve just got the one Magento installation.
The parent store itself runs pretty quickly. We’ve seen no pitfalls at all with it. On occasions we have experienced a slight lag, but I’ve got a feeling thats more down to our dodgy office connection, and also the fact that we’re in the UK and the Simple Helix servers are abroad.
If you’re UK based I could definitely recommend NuBlue hosting (link top right). These guys provide very fast UK hosting for Magento, and they can install it for you.
Maybe do a few ping tests to see which sites are faster for you…
5 stephen // Jun 29, 2008 at 10:47 am
I have just found this
Version 1.1 Public Alpha Available via SVN
Posted by varienchris on Thursday, June 12, 2008 |17 comments
The Version 1.1 Alpha release is now available through SVN.
The list of Magento Version 1.1 upcoming features that we discussed earlier is detailed here with the specifics of what is now in the Alpha branch:
1. Admin UI improvements
2. Web Services API: The Catalog API and Customers API are available now. The Orders API and documentation on the API’s is coming soon.
3. Virtual Products
4. Custom Defined Product Options: At this time the checkout changes to support these products is not complete.
5. Bundled Products: At this time the shopping cart and checkout changes to support these products is not complete.
6. Improved support for EU and Canadian taxes
7. New customer attributes such as prefix and suffix, D.O.B etc…
8. Magento system messages bar added to admin
Please note that these features are still in development and are not for use in a production environment.
This suggests that magento is not ready ad this version is in alpha at present
also there are queries about it running in a euro environment
What do you think
Thanks
6 admin // Jul 3, 2008 at 11:30 pm
I did get the idea that perhaps Varien did under-estimate the launch date of Magento, as they said it would be released in the first quarter of 2008, and as it was, it came out on March 31st - extremely last minute.
People are still finding bugs as the forum suggests, however most of them are solved straight away by their team, and all of them are fixed in subsequent updates.
I agree.. it is almost in an Alpha state. Software should be launched entirely bug-free. However every-one will find a bug somewhere or other. The problems with Magento do seem to increase the more technical you make your store… however they are nothing that cant be solved.. and with the releases that come out, it will turn into a fantastically stable piece of kit.
But.. is it risky? I would say, yes and no. The demo stores work fantastically well, and so does your own store when you’ add a few products in.. but then later down the line when you’ve got hundreds of customers, a plethora of order data, and the database size increasing phemominally… will it cope? I hope it does, but with the amount of bugs reported and fixes coming out… it may well require a few patches to work spot on!
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