750% Shopping Cart Increase

[rampzoid]

i've been with the same hosted eshop (s/cart) provider for several yrs.

received an em today stating that they have now imposed a 45gb/month cap on the basic package & due to my eshop exceeding this they will require me to transfer to a VPS (virtual private server)@ £149.00/month.

my eshop has good search engines listings so if i decided to change to another eshop provider am i correct in assuming that i will lose all my hard earned s/engine listings even though i will retain my original domain name?
also, does that cost seem rather high - maybe its not?

cheers

[jwolthuis]

The majority of your site's traffic comes from serving "images", not HTML markup or javascript.

Host your images elsewhere, but retain the product pages and checkout flow under your domain name.

On another note, bandwidth is fairly cheap these days, and £149.00/mo for 1-1/2 gB/day sounds like a shakedown to me.

[mattia]

What's the worry?
Your SEO ranking si base don your name, not on our IP address nor hosting provider.
So you could move anywhere and absolutely retain all the ranking you already earned.

best,
Marc

[jwolthuis]

It's not always possible to exactly map URLs from one eCommerce provider to another.

The OP's worry is that a new eCommerce provider may organize his catalog differently, possibly splitting/combining product variations, separating product reviews, and ultimately changing his basic URL structure.

Some providers include the parent-category in the URL; some don't. Others provide alternate organizational schemes that go beyond simple categories.

The OP is concerned that the SEO he built on his existing URL structure might be affected, if less than 100% of his existing URLs can be redirected exactly 1-to-1 to the URL structure of a new eCommerce provider.

[mattia]

There you have it!

These iseues add to the case to Stay away from Hosted ecommerce solution, such as Volusion and bigcommerce.

Buy your own shopping cart so the URL will be same FOREVER no matter where you move or the hosting company that you use.

best,
Marc

[CanadianGuy]

Or just pay the extra amount and focus on your business. It's not that much money per month if it's a good solution that's working well for you. Other option I'd pursue is negotiating with them. Moving & changing site architecture can take a lot of time & the smallest detail going wrong can mess up your entire business.

[mhansen]

Or just pay the extra amount and focus on your business.

Ditto - at least through the holiday shopping season. The LAST thing an ecom site wants to do right now is change.

[CPC_Andrew]

Agreed. I know so many websites that started a cart / platform switch in late June and they're still not 100% set up yet. If you decide to switch wait until your non-peak season and buy lots of stress balls and green tea.