Not a programming question, I know, but is Spree suitable for shared hosting or will it consume too many resources? I cannot afford to go to virtual or dedicated hosting, so it has to be shared hosting. Would I be better off with a PHP-based solution such as osCommerce or WordPress e-Commerce? Coding is not an issue since I know both PHP and Ruby on Rails.
Question posted in Oscommerce
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Answers
I would say a spree site would be a bit heavy on a shared hosting provider for rails. You could potentially run a spree site on a free instance on heroku if cost is the issue. However, you can get a virtual server from rackspace that will handle spree for about 22 dollars a month which gives you 512mb, etc. Through spreecommerce you can get a puppet script to setup the server completely (Check out their beta deployment service).
Out of the gate, a basic application in PHP will perform better than a similar application in Rails on the same box. A PHP ecommerce application is likely to have less demand on the server than Spree, but I Magento has had some performance complaints. I don’t know details about osCommerce performance. WordPress e-commerce performance seems acceptable, but it doesn’t have all the features that a full ecommerce solution has.
That being said, there’s optimization that can be done to minimize server demand with Spree (standard Rails performance improvements, page caching, database optimization, etc.).
I’d probably recommend not using shared hosting not only for performance reasons, but also because shared hosting often has serious dependency limitations (ie version of Ruby, Rails available). Linode, Slicehost are additional affordable options.