Magento Struggles

Magento and GoDaddy Don’t Mix

As of late I have been trying to install an e-commerce system named Magento for a clothing company called Believe Clothing. Unfortunately it has also been one of the worst headaches ever. Despite having to down a bottle of extra strength Excedrin, I hear Magento is one of the best open-source systems out there. You can find loads of programmers developing themes, widgets and offering improvements to this robust shopping tool.

The themes made for Magento are top notch. Really high quality themes which would make anyone look like a design pro! I found the perfect grunge theme for a grungy upstart t-shirt company. It was cool, it was stylish and it had good placement for extra advertising. Perfect.

The installation of Magento seemed rather straight forward; copy the files to the server, setup the new SQL database, navigate to the install directory, and follow the wizard. But problems problems problems. Not with Magento, but rather with GoDaddy.com. Save yourself the headache and switch hosts NOW if you plan on running heavy duty e-commerce software. GoDaddy is great with their pricing. They give you lots of hard drive space, tons of bandwidth, and a great array of tools, but servers are slow and do not work with Magento. I’m not a server expert, but I do have 6 years of web programming experience and I could not after two days get Magento to install properly on GoDaddy’s server. Want more proof that you should switch? I hired a professional with several Magento install experiences. He toiled for two days and finally said he couldn’t devote any more time to it, suggesting that switching hosts was the solution.

Combing the Magento website I found their preferred hosts. Only two in North America, which I’m sure means that those are the best of the best, not that Magento only installs on these hosts. One provider, Rackspace, is for large companies only, with plans beginning in the $400/mo range. The other company, Nexcess.net Internet Solutions has much more reasonably prices plans. Want a third reason to switch hosts if installing Magento? Nexcess does the install for you. That’s right, order one of their SIP plans starting at $30 per month and it comes with Magento pre-installed and ready to go. They even promise to put you on servers which are pumped up and ready to bear the intense load that Magento requires to run. My research told me this would be yet another problem with GoDaddy’s servers.

Nexcess.net still has yet to prove itself however. They seem like a bit of a smaller company, with one phone operator only to answer sales calls and no technical support over the phone. All technical support and billing questions are submitted and answered by email. My first experience trying to have my plan changed from basic to a Magento SIP was a slow one that warranted an eventual phone call and some stern talk. However, the issue was resolved and I am on my way once again.

Share your struggles with Magento below if you have had any.