problem with my 2 established ecommerce sites

need help deciding what to with 2 sites and 2 different carts

[thinkbig]

I have 2 very well established ecommerce sites that have great organic seo with yahoo and especially google. Both websites offer the same 15k+ products and they basically compete against themselves. They both were hand coded for me back in 2003 but the backend and storefront software on both is terribly outdated. The one site has a very old copy of storefront and the other site has a custom shopping cart which is very blah and basic. We have a distributor that has a .txt file we pull from daily that updates and gets sent to our shopping cart.

Between the 2 sites i am getting around 40k unique visits and 290k pageviews.

Each site is hosted on a different shared server with each respective programmer who built it.

They both are written in asp and use mysql. Both servers each do go down 2-3 times per month and sometimes the sites are slugs when i act as a customer.

I need to do something to take these sites to the next level so my question is should i move both to 1 windows vps or ded box?

Also wondering if i should make one shopping cart for both sites for ease of use or keep each site with its own shopping cart. Having the 2 separate shopping carts is time consuming and sometimes tricky and we have been flirting with the idea of keeping the sites but using 1 shared cart/backend.

Lastly i need any recommendations on a reliable and modern ecomm- shopping cart system.

I have had these sites for years now without any major changes but im seeing decreasing sales and more problems than ever and i need to make a change. I have tested adsense on the sites and that doesnt yield greater revenue than the sales of the products so an ecommerce redo i think is the key. Many thanks

[rocknbil]

I need to do something to take these sites to the next level so my question is should i move both to 1 windows vps or ded box?

I have not messed with VPS but absolutely, positively recommend leasing (or buying, which would be co-location) a dedicated server, there is no going back! :-) The increase in reliability, speed, and uptime is like night and day.

This will offer a few additional advantages, some of which you can do with a VPS as well:

Once you are on a dedicated server, you have control over the server configuration. This is a bit of a big deal because you can do things "outside the domain" that would be helpful in configuring the two sites. You won't get this with a VPS. If you do any command-line work, or need to install server modules, etc., this is a big plus.

Second, you can program the two sites to work from a single database. You can/are probably doing this anyway, but if the mysql server is on the same box or internal network as the domain, it doesn't have to do a remote request and will be way faster.

You can begin experimenting with one of them to avoid duplicate content problems but still sell the exact same products. Just as an example:

product table
record_id item_code

site table
record id product_record_id site_id item_price item_desc

So you have two tables, the second one holding product information specific to each site. The reasoning here is you can make the descriptions and prices slightly different on one site than the other, eliminating the possibility for duplicate content penalties.

Having it all in one box (dedi or VPS) you can program a centralized interface for managing both sites. In my opinion it was the best move we ever made for my wife's biz, we couldn't really afford it but in retrospect I don't see how we could ever afford not to!

[bwnbwn]

Having it all on one box as well opens you up to losing one site as they will be connected by IP and one will tank.

If you are getting that kind of traffic and pageviews each site can host it's own server.

Keep one on the east coast on one on the west coast make a backup for each site as a disater recover on each server so all you need to do is point the dns to the respective server and both sites will be up in case one server crashes or a act of God.

Don't move them together at all period. Keep them seperated.

[thinkbig]

"Having it all on one box as well opens you up to losing one site as they will be connected by IP and one will tank."

Not sure what you mean by one will tank, you mean tank as far as traffic or SEO tank?

I was thinking about housing both sites in one VPS and then having a shared shopping cart between the 2.

[bwnbwn]

What I mean is if you put both sites on the same server one site will take a huge hit from Google especially. You can still use the same cart even if they are on different servers through the url I did this for some time myself but it sometimes gets customes mixed up as to what site they were on.

I finally went to one site and did a 301 from the other to the main site as it got to be too time consuming to keep both.

[thinkbig]

So if i get 2 separate VPS's and house site1 on VPS1 and site2 on vps2 can i have both sites use the same mysql database,cart,backend? Will this be a problem with SSL then? coming from site1 to site2 mysql?

Im planning on elancing this job out but first need to get the servers so that the elancers can move the sites to vps1 and vps2 and start the work of both sites usings one centralized cart and backend. Im trying to create an architecture so that i can explain it to them but im having trouble thinking this out myself, any help understanding or explaining would be great!

[bwnbwn]

Ideal thing to do both independent. Just make ssure that are on different c blocks as well then you can interlink them....
You going to the pubcon next week?

[pbradish]

Would one tank on the ded box because of duplicate content?

I ask because we have three ecommerce sites on one dedicated box (3 separate IPs), but each is a completely different site in a different niche.

[thinkbig]

thats a good question and im unsure, the product names would be the same as well as item#, skus on both sites and prod descriptions. Right now both sites have excellent organic listings so thats something of interest.