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"The" Critical Question - Performance & Reliability


kab

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So obviously there will be competitors and there are already a number of options around for online stores. However, the general perception is that CC is a bit outdated (as I was told by a few online consultants I checked with). Having said that, I checked out a few stores such as CS-Cart and Magento. Yet I keep coming back to CC due to my comfort level with its customization (though CS-Cart is very, very close). Currently my installs are on my local machine and once the entire store is properly configured, I will port the files, folders and data to the target hosting platform (to be finalized between A2Hosting & Avrixe). Hence, a few critical questions now arise (in light of the existing range of options available):

1. What are the number of products which CC will be able to sustain? I am looking at around 500-1000 digital products, 2000+ physical products each having around 3 images on an average.

2. What number of concurrent users can CC sustain; the load that it can bear and the number of concurrent and mutually exclusive transactions which it can effortlessly carry out?

3. What is the current version viz. CC6's stability & robustness index on a scale of 0 - 100?

4. What is the frequency of upgrades/updates for CC6? Does it require the store to be shutdown and reconfigured after each upgrade/update (w.e.f CC6)?

 

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Hi Kab,

 

Hopefully some more experienced cubecart users will pitch in here, but I have been using cubecart on and off since v4, I also use opencart, magento, woocommerce and prestashop depending on the needs.

I find that out of the box cubecart to be quite scalable due to the default inbuilt caching, when compared to opencart and woocommerce. The peak I have had regards to product loading is circa physical 1400 items with detailed descriptions and several images each. The database structure for item storage is pretty efficient as there are multiple tables housing segregated data for different elements, so I have not noticed much affect on page load speeds as I increased product loading. Though I didnt exactly sit there with a stop watch, I never noticed any unpleasant pausing as the load increased. With regard to a hard limitation on user or product loading I am not sure.

Q.4 - I dont believe there is a set update/upgrade cycle for cubecart yet, with the release of CC6 the devs have been pretty agile about getting patches out as and when they were needed, the upgrade process itself is usually pretty straight forward and can be run in store, which will manage the temporary closure and reopening of the store ( circa 3-4 mins ), however it will overwrite the admin and default skins! so if you run a custom admin or front end skin rename it or back it up and replace it after the upgrade ... which works fine as long as the patch didnt apply a fix to the theme or components which you have now missed! 

Also on the back of that I generally avoid using a cpanel 'installer' as this will auto update the installation / overwrite any non renamed skins which has wreaked havoc on me in the past.

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I am FAR from being a knowledgeable user, but I have found v6 CC to be very easy to use. We have over 3,500 products and over 6,000 images in our plushcatalog.

I use a copy of the skin where I renamed the skin folder and changed the config.xml CDATA to match. Then, when there is an upgrade, I use BeyondCompare3 to quickly see if there are any skin changes and apply those changes to my skin version.

I comment every tweak and edit I make in the files, so it's easy enough to see which are my tweaks and mod edits that need to be kept, and what CC has changed from one version to the next. I always backup my whole site via ftp and make a copy of the database before upgrading. Then I run the upgrade. Having used BeyondCompare3 to merge all the new changes that need to be made, I overwrite the stock new CC version with my merged files.

Even though I have LOTS of mods and edits, it usually only takes a few hours to bring my far from stock CC completely up to the new upgraded version.

If you maintain a store with all stock files, you can upgrade in a matter of a few minutes.

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So obviously there will be competitors and there are already a number of options around for online stores. However, the general perception is that CC is a bit outdated (as I was told by a few online consultants I checked with). Having said that, I checked out a few stores such as CS-Cart and Magento. Yet I keep coming back to CC due to my comfort level with its customization (though CS-Cart is very, very close). Currently my installs are on my local machine and once the entire store is properly configured, I will port the files, folders and data to the target hosting platform (to be finalized between A2Hosting & Avrixe). Hence, a few critical questions now arise (in light of the existing range of options available):

1. What are the number of products which CC will be able to sustain? I am looking at around 500-1000 digital products, 2000+ physical products each having around 3 images on an average.

2. What number of concurrent users can CC sustain; the load that it can bear and the number of concurrent and mutually exclusive transactions which it can effortlessly carry out?

3. What is the current version viz. CC6's stability & robustness index on a scale of 0 - 100?

4. What is the frequency of upgrades/updates for CC6? Does it require the store to be shutdown and reconfigured after each upgrade/update (w.e.f CC6)?

 

Hi Kab, thanks for your post there are some good questions here and I wanted to get back to you. There are a great deal of competitors around and choosing between them isn't easy. 

CubeCart certainly isn't outdated. CubeCart version 6 works on all recent version of PHP and has all the order qualifying features a merchant needs to sell online. It is also responsive out of the box and very actively developed. 6.0.6 is due for release soon with adds "Memcached" caching as an option. I won't dive into our history too much but I will admit that we alienated a large section of our developer community with the release of CubeCart v5. Version 3 and 4 had very poor procedural code. By moving significantly forward we took a hit big time as a significant chunk of our users couldn't get on with the new OO code. This is the one biggest lesson I have learned whilst leading this company and sadly there is still a of of this negativity around about us from this. 

To respond to your questions quickly as I should have left the office by now!! .. 

1. I've seen stores with 60,000+ that operate fine. I'm actually doing an upgrade right now for a Swedish store that is over 7GB in size. This is mainly the product images/source folder!

2. This is impossible to answer. If you pay $5 for hosting you really can't expect much in the way of resources. If you have a dedicated server that is well optimised, has decent memory and caching mechanisms setup sell your store should handle some serious traffic. I would recommend Zends "OPCache" with "Memcached". 

3. CubeCart is fairly stable and actively developed. 8 bug reports have been resolved today. We also have technical support plans if you need them. We take responsibility for our software and look after our clients. 

4. I'd say we average a release once per month. An upgrade form and to the same major version should't see any down time at all.

 

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Hi

CubeCart is far from dated - most online "consultants" will have an axe to grind and if not will always have their own preferences 

How did you come to the choice of hosting between A2Hosting & Avrixe ? Neither are specialist E-Commerce hosting companies, let alone specialist CubeCart regardless of what their advertising banners say (they have similar banners for all other types of CMS as well !). If you are interested in a CubeCart specialist hosting company then drop me a line and we can have a chat offline.

There is no limit on the number of products in theory that CubeCart can work with and we have many clients with in excess of 30,000 products and some with in excess of 200,000 - the levels you are looking at are tiny.

The maximum number of concurrent users depends primarily on how good your hosting company is tuning their hosting servers.  The big boys tend to tune for general usage where we specifically tune for E-Commerce stores with high MySQL throughput.  We also keep the number of sites on each server MUCH lower than anyone else.  Put CubeCart on a well tuned dedicated server and it will easily support a huge number of users - we have clients with multi million pound turnover businesses running on CubeCart. 

Ian

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I believe I have received sufficient inputs to my questions and all of them seem to have been answered. Do not see any further pertinent questions on the product as such other than, perhaps, the occasional configuration issues. Thank you all for your valuable feedback. Appreciate!

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