opencart hosting
Everything you need to create, grow and operate your online business. 340 000 eCommerce Entrepreneurs use OpenCart to power their online store. You'll be in good company.
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LiteSpeed webserver caching
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SSL Certificate included
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Automatic vulnerability patching
getting started with opencart
There are many ecommerce platforms out there, but none are as customizable, feature-rich, and scalable as OpenCart. It’s free, open source (meaning you can extend it if need be), and trusted by 342,000 businesses worldwide.
Starting an online shop used to be hard in the past. You had to hire designers and developers to help you build a store. Every time you wanted to change something; you’d incur more costs. Integrations with payment gateways would be cumbersome and time-consuming.
OpenCart was introduced to make it super easy and fast to launch an online store. All you need is an OpenCart hosting that supports PHP (5.4 or above), MySQL, and has at-least 500 MB storage.
OpenCart has 13000+ modules and themes that enable you to customise and grow your business seamlessly. Whether you want to integrate with a new payment gateway, or set up a new shipping method, usually there’s an extension that can help.
On HOSTAFRICA’s OpenCart web hosting, installation requires a single click. You then have full flexibility and control over your store. Choose whichever theme you want, install all the extensions you may need, and start building your own online marketplace!
Our OpenCart cloud hosting plans also include cPanel, a user-friendly control panel. You can use it to configure and manage your website, as per your needs.
Opencart Screenshots
The fastest web servers around
Our Turbo Server solution offers an additional speed boost with LiteSpeed Cache for Opencart. This powerful plugin communicates with your Turbo server and LSCache to statically cache your dynamic Opencart pages and greatly reduce your site’s page load time.
Automatic vulnerability patching
Patchman detects vulnerabilities and malware and is able to safely patch them automatically. Our unique approach allows you to rest assured that websites will continue to function properly. It literally takes 60 seconds to start scanning for vulnerabilities and malware.
choose the best opencart hosting for your business
Getting started with OpenCart is indeed super easy. It’s also very flexible, easy-to-use, and scalable. But there is one aspect of OpenCart that can make or break your online store: the hosting you run it on.
OpenCart web hosting provides the foundation upon which your online store is built. If the foundation is weak, you will never be able to build something resilient atop it. All of OpenCart’s goodness will be in vain.
Finding a dependable OpenCart cloud hosting platform is important. If you have done a Google search, you already know that everyone is claiming to have the best OpenCart hosting. So how do you pick the one that’s right for your business? You ask the following questions:
What uptime do they guarantee?
Don’t go for an OpenCart web hosting that guarantees less than 99% uptime. At HOSTAFRICA, we promise you 99.9% uptime.
How is their customer support game?
It’s inevitable to run into technical issues. You need a host that has zealous customer support. At HOSTAFRICA, we go to great lengths to ensure that our customers never feel alone. Our support team (comprising friendly humans, not bots) is available 24/7/365, via phone, chat, or email.
How’s the security situation? Backups?
Do they offer SSL certificates? Do they perform backups regularly? What about vulnerability scanning and patching? At HOSTAFRICA, we offer all these features, and more!
Is there flexibility to choose?
The plan you choose should have all the resources you need. No less, no more. This is why HOSTAFRICA’s OpenCart cloud hosting plans come in multiple flavours, giving you the ultimate flexibility of choice.
opencart hosting
Checkout our Opencart hosting packages.
opencart hosting
Save on your Opencart hosting for the first three months with a massive 80% discount on all Opencart plans. Only applies to new orders that are billed monthly.
Popular
Opencart Starter
For one Website
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Opencart Basic
For Small Businesses
(1 add-on domain)
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Opencart Power
Power Package
(2 add-on domains)
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Opencart Shop
For Companies
(4 add-on domains)
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*co.za domain name is registered free when used as the primary domain for the hosting account. Renewed annually at the normal price.
*Unlimited Web Traffic (Bandwidth): HOSTAFRICA reserves the right to reduce the bandwidth in cases of extensive use. Contact us if you have any questions.
opencart functions
- eCommerce management
- Order management
- Sales tax management
- Electronic payments
- Shipping management
- Social media integration
- Sales orders
- Online forums
- Periodic reporting
- Discount management
- Third party integration
- Activity dashboard
- Sales analytics
- Multi-store management
- User access controls
- SEO management
- Periodic reporting
- Discount management
- Third party integration
- Activity dashboard
- Sales analytics
- Multi-store management
- User access controls
- SEO management
resource limits
| Resource Limits | Starter | Basic | Power | Shop |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Speed | 100 | 150 | 250 | 400 |
| PMEM | 1024 | 1536 | 2048 | 4096 |
| IO | 20M/s | 25M/s | 35M/s | 60M/s |
| IOPS | 256 | 386 | 512 | 1024 |
| EP | 20 | 20 | 35 | 60 |
| NPROC | 100 | 100 | 150 | 200 |
Opencart opensource* online store
get your online store in no time
Freedom to grow without the restrictions of a 3rd party.
Opencart hosting.
We are known for our fast and reliable support. Besides providing superior speed and other solutions for Opencart, we have a list of features available for Opencart clients.
Serve faster by design
A combination of SSD drives, PHP 7+, Linux, CDN and Litespeed Caching solutions speed up your site’s performance by a factor of 2+. Additionally, HOSTAFRICA provides custom security solutions for all users, by way of DDoS protection, firewalls, SSL certificates, online backups, account level protection, CMS patching and more.
just how feature-rich is opencart?
It’s hard to get value out of a free platform. Unless that platform’s OpenCart. Here are some of its most exciting features:
Run multiple stores at once
One administrator interface allows you to manage multiple stores. However, to run multiple stores seamlessly, you must invest in dependable, fast hosting for OpenCart.
A built-in affiliate system
An inbuilt affiliate feature allows affiliates to promote your products and get paid for it automatically.
Multi-currency support
Sell worldwide, without having to worry about currency conversions. You also have the ability to set up country-specific taxes.
A comprehensive administrator dashboard
The main dashboard is a store owner’s best friend. With one glance, you can know how well your store is doing, which products are selling the most, where your customers are coming from, and who are the people currently online. The dashboard is fully customizable. You can remove widgets or add ones that you want.
Easy payments
OpenCart comes pre-integrated with 36 payment platforms, including PayPal, Blue Pay, and Paymate. You can also set up recurring payments, sales analytics, and different shipping methods.
To get the most out of the platform, you must carefully consider your OpenCart hosting requirements. Don’t choose a host just because it’s cheap or running a limited-time promotion!
Let's advise you on Opencart hosting:
why use an open source e-commerce platform?
Wondering if you should go with an open source ecommerce platform as opposed to a paid for solution? Do you have reliability or security concerns?
Here are a few things to put your mind at ease:
Ease of customization:
If ever you want OpenCart to behave a bit differently for you, you can tweak your copy of its source code and redeploy it on your OpenCart hosting. Remember, only the best OpenCart hosting providers may give you this flexibility, so choose wisely!
Absolute freedom:
There are no contracts, no usage limits, and no boundaries! At-least not by OpenCart. Your host may set some resource usage limits on your account. This is why you should be very careful while specifying your OpenCart hosting requirements.
“Open” doesn’t mean unreliable:
Anyone can contribute to the codebase of an open source software. But not all contributions are accepted. Only when a code contribution gets vetted and tested by experts, does it get added to the codebase.
Bugs are resolved fast:
Bugs in open source software usually get patched instantly. The OpenCart developer community is large, and any approved contributor can apply the fix, and release an update.
Audits and scans:
So many companies have performed vulnerability scans and audits on the OpenCart source code. You can do so too! This ability to check for code compliance and safety, isn’t available with proprietary software.
opencart questions?
We have answers
Opencart allows you to setup and manage an online store. Well supported system with a thriving support community. You'll be up an running with the basics in very little time. More experienced users will be able to take full advantage of the CMS flexability. HOSTAFRICA will ensure the server, network and server security are kept to our high standards.
Our security team at HOSTAFRICA ensures that your Opencart websites are as secure as possible. Firewalling, fail2ban, Patchman and server hardening are all used to secure our servers and your website.
Opencart Hosting has all the bits and pieces you need to have an optimal online store. Where as a server, if self managed, and would require additional license costs, monitoring, administration and timely setup. Our OpenCart packages take the burden out of the platform setup.
Our hosting is packed with features in addition to the preinstalled and setup online store hsoting platform. Emails, databases, FTP accounts, backups statistics, DNS administration and more all included.
The most obvious difference is that OpenCart is free to use, whereas Shopify and BigCommerce are paid solutions. All three solutions are easy to use, but only OpenCart gives you the ability to customize its source code.
Unless you can find an extension, adding customizations to Shopify or BigCommerce will either cost you a lot, or just be impossible. Even though Shopify is currently the most prevalent ecommerce solution, OpenCart is slowly starting to catch up.
All the platforms are easy to use for the user, however, Shopify’s interface can be considered the most user friendly. There are intuitive screens to add products and customize the outlook of the store.
Shopify and BigCommerce are ideal for large ecommerce websites that don’t mind paying a monthly fee. Conversely, if you want a free solution, that can get you started in the minimum amount of time, while offering maximum customizability, then OpenCart is the best choice for you.
Yes, you can. Most hosts provide a 1-click installer to install OpenCart, along with all its dependencies, on your hosting account. However, even if your host doesn’t provide a 1-click installer, you can install it yourself, without any coding knowledge. Here are the steps:
- Visit the official OpenCart website and download the source code.
- Upload the downloaded files to your server, using FTP.
- You also need to create a MySQL database for OpenCart to work. If your host supports phpMyAdmin, you can access it to create a MySQL database. It’s as easy as clicking a button.
- Now access the OpenCart directory in a browser. You will find the installation wizard.
- You will be asked to read the license and fill out configuration and administration details. Once you are ready, click Continue.
- Wait for the installation to complete. Once done, you will be prompted to log in to the administration dashboard.
There are a few caching and optimization plugins you can install to speed up your website. However, at the end of the day, your OpenCart website will only be as fast as the hosting it’s running on.
The best hosts, like HOSTAFRICA, go to great lengths to ensure a fast-shopping experience for your customers. For example, HOSTAFRICA uses SSDs instead of traditional storage, which are built for faster information retrieval.
HOSTAFRICA also uses the fastest possible web servers to run your website. The Turbo server solution is made even faster by using LiteSpeed Cache for OpenCart. LiteSpeed performs various optimizations to ensure that your website always loads faster than your competition.
They also use the latest version of PHP and the most optimized distributions of the Linux operating system to further increase your website’s speed. Remember, no matter how hard you try and optimize OpenCart, if your hosting is slow by design, it won’t help!
Yes, it is. With OpenCart, it’s super easy to make your website mobile-friendly, and SE-optimized. By default, your website will be responsive. This means that its outlook will be perfect, regardless of the device it’s being viewed on. And no, you don’t have to tweak any settings for this to happen!
A lot of SEO features like meta titles, meta descriptions, and keywords come built-in with your OpenCart installation. There is also a huge collection of SEO extensions that you can install, to further increase your SEO rankings.
Tracking marketing campaigns is also possible on OpenCart, without having to install any extensions or paid add-ons! You can connect with Google Sitemap or Google base to configure how Google displays your products.
Lastly, OpenCart gives your visitors the ability to checkout as a guest or register their account. This is pivotal in guaranteeing a great user experience, which is a proven Google ranking factor!
