Server Space Required for Shopping Cart? OSC, Zen, etc.

Just curious about the average amount of server space required for the common free carts. I'm thinking about OSCommerce, ZenCart, CubeCart and Agora.

How large a hosting account is really needed for a stand-alone cart with several thousand items?

I know that you can get billions of MB for hardly anything. And you can take the view that you can always use more. I realize all that. But how much is REQUIRED for an average cart with let's say 5,000 items?

And also 10,000 items?

Include the MySQL space, as well. Just a shared host account with one of the carts and MySQL to run one online store - how much server space?

 

Not as much as you might fear.

I have a zipped copy of cubecart 3.XX on my hard drive. It is only 2.26MB. I think it about doubled when I installed it. BUT there is a lot of stuff you can delete like language files and themes you aren't going to use once you set it up.

A 500MB account should handle most anything the beginning user is going to need. The image files will be your big space user.

 

For the shopping cart and the rest of the items you should consider a plan of more than 2GB space or upto 2GB space.

 

I realize space is cheap. And I'm not really interested in any plans, although 2GB is definitely overkill from all the other responses I've received.

I have been running a store using AgoraCart with 200MB for a couple of years, with over 2,000 items and as many images. Agora has it's own database, does not use MySql, which is one reason for my asking.

Most of the replies I have gotten elsewhere are in the 100MB to 200MB range.

The reason I'm asking is that I want to "subdivide" a 6GB server space into a number of stores. It has one CPanel and I want to know how many Add-on Domains I can safely add as individual shopping carts.

Bandwidth is unlimited, so no problem there.

 

I've been a part of the osCommerce Team, and I've managed osCommerce stores that had 2,000, 10,000, and 24,000 products.

If your images are properly optimized and you are using thumbnails and large images a good rule of thumb is to budget for 80k storage space per product including db entries and images. Of course, if you have multiple product images for each product you should budget an extra 30-50k per image depending on their size and how well you optimize them.

This is what I've found from personal experience and is no hard and fast rule, and of course the size of your images will be the biggest contributing factor.

 

Thanks!

Right now, mostly gifs for thumbs at 12k or less and jpgs for larger image in the 45 - 60k range. I can do the math.

Looks like 200MB should be more than sufficent.

 

Yeah, definitely.

The only thing I would worry about with your proposed setup is making sure the server you are going to host all the sites on has enough processing power to server the MySQL databases quickly- most open source and even some paid solutions are not very efficient when it comes to SQL queries (I know osCommerce is one of the worst from experience).

 

Again, I appreciate the advice.

I intend to offer all of the CPanel / Fantastico shopping carts, but since I may target market is newbies to ecommerce, I will promote the AgoraCart, which has it's own, internal database.

Easier to set up and get selling, it does not require defining categories ahead of time, but creates them automatically from entry in the proper data field. Many other "get started quicker" features, as well.

As it turns out, the servers have been purchased within the last 90 days, so they should pretty much be "the latest and the greatest."

 

Hi,

I notice that most e-commerce/CMS systems charge by the bandwidth used. For you guys who are on these types of plans, what is your average bandwidth used per visitor?

Thanks