ShopSite limitations

[Kingslayer]

I'm currently working on a online store for a tackle shop. I'm using ShopSite Manager 10 r7.2 hosted by iPower.com. I currently have about 200 pages and almost 600 products in the store now and I've just scratched the surface.

I've had and am currently having problems with ShopSite. The first problem happened last week. I wasn't able to save pages. Usually once you hit save, the screen instantly refreshes and the Publish tab is available. This wouldn't happen and IE would just time out. iPower fixed that issue.

The problem I'm having currently is along the same lines only this time it's happening on Products. If I'm entering a new product or editting a current product and want to assign that product to a page by hitting the "Select" button in the Product Pages section, I'm seeing an extremely long load time. The window to select the pages appears but it takes almost 3 minutes for the pages to populate.

iPower tells me that the ShopSite software wasn't designed for this amount of product. I still have thousands of product to enter...

I fight with iPower when this happens. I've been doing web pages for a while, I've been in the I.T. industry for 10 years, I've managed web servers, SQL servers and other databases for years. I think this is a performance issue on iPower's end. Databases just don't hit a wall and stop working unless there is problem. Sure, performance will slowly degrade as the database grows in size, but when things just stop working it's usually in the server, the connection or the software itself.

Does ShopSite Manager have a page count or product count limitation? Should I be looking at other software considering the amount of product I'll be listing? Or am I right, that this is an iPower issue that needs resolved or else I start looking for a more capable host?

[Jim]

There is no physical limit to the number of pages or products that a manager level store can handle. I know of stores that have 30-80,000 products and 10,000 or more pages.

As you mentioned problems like this are usually server related and not specific to ShopSite. Low cost hosting such as iPower provides is usually accomplished by putting thousands of sites on a single server. This may work fine for sites that are just basic sites but for better performance you should look for a host who limits the number of sites on a server to provide better access time. Do a search for iPower in this forum and you will find hosts that other ShopSite merchants have switched to when they have run into similar problems.

[Kingslayer]

Thank you Jim. That's kind of what I figured...

I'll do the search on iPower and see what others are moving to. Do you have any recommendations for hosting providers for a store of this size?

[PatG]

sounds like hosting issues to me too.

check out the partners SS lists here:
http://shopsite.com/partners.html

and definitely checkout these guys from that list:
www.lexiconn.com

i have zero experience with them, but before i bought ShopSite i found good articles on the Lexiconn site about SS and they post answers in forums about SS and seem to be on the ball.

[satamusic]

while support was very friendly, and fast to answer, ipower still does not offer 10.2. i'll leave this here just in case anyone else finds this thread via search or google.

04/27/2011 2:14 PM EDT Ticket Created
04/27/2011 2:14 PM EDT Updated Ticket: Work in Progress
04/27/2011 2:37 PM EDT IPOWER contacted Jose M. (Resolved)
Comment:
Hello Cesar,

Currently you are using ShopSite® Pro 10 r7.4 version. Currently we are providing shopsite version 10 to our customers. And regarding the future upgrdae , we can't give exact time frame.

If you have any further questions, please update the Support Console.

Sincerely,

Damaris Garza
Technical Specialist

04/27/2011 2:52 PM EDT Jose M. contacted IPOWER
Customer Quote:
http://shopsite.com/news_10_2_released.html says here current users (ipower) can upgrade for free.

ShopSite lists you as a partner in this press release.

Do they know you refuse to offer the latest version?

Why have you not upgraded?

Should I start looking atr one of the other partners they list? (NTT/Verio, IPOWER, PowWeb, FatCow, LexiConn, pair Networks, and YourHost.com)

Sincerely,

-Cesar

[MgmtSpec]

Definately a CPU/capacity issue with Ipower. I use pair.com - on a shared server I hit 80,000 skus before cpu limits hit. I moved to dedicated server after that and went up to 140,000. Note that even on dedicated with that many products, publishing takes a while if you regenerate all. So the limits in terms of ShopSite are more a practical matter that threshold.