Zencart slow on Dreamhost?

nothing you can do thier servers are not optimized to help you, I do not believe they are going to do that anytime soon.

I do disagree what some of Araunah statements, however, I know for a fact that dreamshost does oversell, ALOT. Some servers have 800 customers on them, but they are perforance servers. I host a handful of sites that get over 12,000 hits a day and you can tell the difference in performance during peak-hours and non peak-hours. My sites seem to handle the load pretty well, even with multipul digg bombing.

Having said that, I think zen cart itself (probably with dreamhost server config) is slow. I run 2 ecommerce sites from my server, and I'm sorry to say that cubecart performs much better. I much prefer the feature rich zen cart, so what I have done is optimized the code down to even the most miniscule details.

1. Dropped the standard store theme and built a simple yet stylish storefront via CSS, then compressed the file to bring the file size way down.
2. Compressed the .js files
3. Optimized the template code.
4. Kept images to a minimum.
5. etc...

knuckle-101 - their servers are very well optimized. But zen cart is bulky, and their servers a geared to handle a moderate number of connections to hundreds of users at a time. Sure their "not optimized to help you", but they are optimized to give the best performance for everyone on the server.

But for $9 a month, why complain. I'm satisfied with my dreamhost experience, but if Verizon ever wanted my to host their website, it certainly won't be on shared server.

-robj

actually rob, their servers are NOT optomized and they are very overloaded,

and comparing cube cart to zen is like apples to bannannas

take a look at https://www.moissaniteco.com

thats a zen and loads great,

this is what an optomized server gets you

Merlinpa1969 you don't know what you're talking about.

Dreamhost = optimized for the greater good + very overloaded

https://www.moissaniteco.com = Dedicated server with:
4 Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 3.20GHz w/ 2meg cache
PCI Express everything
4 GB RAM currently pushing a 96% load (that's optimized?)
Red Hat Enterprise 4 which is ironic because they're running a very old version of Apache (a version that's older then the one distributed with RHLE4) and an old version of PHP (again not the version packaged with RHLE4).

And if you really want to talk, I can post a link to their hosting server where you can create you're very own zencart webstore. Or possible just overwrite they're current store. Whichever option you find more interesting.

I digress. On a lighter note, I love my zen cart store and it loads in... wait for it... 41ms response and I'm on DH.

-robj

Opps, didnt' realize that you're server. You should really look into that.

-robj

robj:

Merlinpa1969 you don't know what you're talking about.

Dreamhost = optimized for the greater good + very overloaded

www.moissaniteco.com = Dedicated server with:
4 Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 3.20GHz w/ 2meg cache
PCI Express everything
4 GB RAM currently pushing a 96% load (that's optimized?)
Red Hat Enterprise 4 which is ironic because they're running a very old version of Apache (a version that's older then the one distributed with RHLE4) and an old version of PHP (again not the version packaged with RHLE4).

And if you really want to talk, I can post a link to their hosting server where you can create you're very own zencart webstore. Or possible just overwrite they're current store. Whichever option you find more interesting.

I digress. On a lighter note, I love my zen cart store and it loads in... wait for it... 41ms response and I'm on DH.

-robj

What's your site thats hosted with DH?

I thought this question migh arise. Unfortunately, I can't share that info with you.

1. My client would be very unhappy, as it's a private store for customers they directly refer for discounted product.
2. You'd need a username and password to get past the login page and actually see the store.

Sorry about that. Want to see my Cubecart store? I'm kidding. That one's going live Friday.

-robj

actually if your going to check on things get it right,

thats a very optimized SHARED server with dual quad cores and 8 GB of ram,
running php 4.7 and apache 1.3.7

I was just making a point wasnt to get into a war,
we will continue to take the DH clients that jump ship to run on properly setup servers,

and these are the speed results on that site
Parse Time: 0.594 - Number of Queries: 1035 - Query Time: 0.23045413708496

that is from this page
http://www.moissaniteco.com/166ct-princess-diamond-engagement-ring-14k-wy-psd-3547.html

Point taken. No more arguing.

-robj

Merlinpa1969:

actually if your going to check on things get it right,

thats a very optimized SHARED server with dual quad cores and 8 GB of ram,
running php 4.7 and apache 1.3.7

I was just making a point wasnt to get into a war,
we will continue to take the DH clients that jump ship to run on properly setup servers,

and these are the speed results on that site
Parse Time: 0.594 - Number of Queries: 1035 - Query Time: 0.23045413708496

that is from this page
http://www.moissaniteco.com/166ct-princess-diamond-engagement-ring-14k-wy-psd-3547.html

I might consider joining camelot, especially if you migrate my existing site, can I get a gurantee of speed if I bought the lancelot plan?

https://www.wiipedldler.com is the site.

Reply in PM

I would just like to say, my experience with Dreamhost has been quite the opposite from those stated in this thread.

I live in the UK so having a US host instantly highlighted myself to some of the issues with speed so I made sure everything was ok.

My speeds were very good, and in the last month unfortunately began to slow. Sometimes shockingly so. I emailed dreamhost to ask what was the problem and they immediately located the users (shared hosting obviously) that were causing the load on my server and im now back to 0.4sec parse times. I have nothing but good things to say about how the support team communicated with me and I will be continuing to use them for as long as they keep up this service. I dont expect a hoster to be flawless, what I do expect is for flaws to be corrected when found, dreamhost did this.

Just thought I would show the opposite side of the coin. I realise this is an old thread, but its the primary thread when searching dreamhost here, it could just be that dreamhost have got their act together, this time at least.