good minivend isp?

[staff <roddy@custompress.com>]

******    message to minivend-users from staff <roddy@custompress.com>     ******

We are being asked to build more and more shopping carts and are
considering where to host them, and would like to ask if anybody's got a
server offering MiniVend that they like a lot, and to get an idea of
what the norms and exceptions are. 

We lease our own web server and hired a fellow to install MiniVend on
it, but he found it problematic and it never got done. Plus, we're basic
html-ers and not really server administrators, so part of us thinks it's
better just to have somebody else, and not us, be the administrator, as
we've done so far. That's for security reasons as well; we're not
security experts. 

(On the other hand, are we silly for not just installing it ourselves
and working out the bugs. Is security the big issue?) 

But presuming we want to host our catalogs on another server, here are
some of the issues that we've considered: 

Version: We'd want the latest publicly-available version of MiniVend
(3.11, is it?). Ought we to stay away from servers offering older
versions? What about 3.10, or two-generations old, whatever it is? Is it
that much worse? 

Cost: We've seen Minivend Catalogs range from free-with-a-web-hosting
account (hmmm...), to about $40 a month per blank catalog with domain
wiring extra. We've seen setup of a catalog range from free to $125.
Given that we plan to build numerous catalogs, we wonder what the cost
options are. Do most good servers charge per catalog? Do they charge
setup charges? How much should one pay monthly? Could one expect a
diminishing cost per catalog, for multiple catalogs? 

Accessibility and control: We'd want to be able to reconfig our own
catalog at any time. We've seen where that's possible, and we've seen
where one had to request it from the server administrator, or wait for
an every-3-hr-reconfig  -- not very appealing. We'd want to be able to
reconfig any of our catalogs 50 times an hour in development if
necessary.

Access to our own files: We've developed with Minivend on a server that
had its own Minivend front end, or interface, with which we had to
update our catalog. We had no ftp access to our own catalog -- had to go
through the server's custom interface. There were some plusses and
minuses to this, but we think we'd want to be able to access our own
files via ftp, including our products.asc file so we can edit it in MS
Excel. 

Security: We wonder if all servers hosting Minivend include pgp and ssl;
as regards the former, could we just forward them the public key of our
client and have them put it on the keyring, enabling encryption of cc
numbers? Are there other security issues we should consider?

Connection to real-time CC processing. We've never done that part yet,
but we'll want to. Do most minivend-hosts support some type of it? 

Technical Support: We've used the minivend-users list with fantastic
results, but there are server-specific issues that sometimes need
attention as well, and we've found it difficult to find a server admin
who meets two qualifications: a) is knowledgeable and b) is responsive
-- either by phone or minimally by 24-hour email. 

Those are some of the issues we're considering. We'd welcome any
thoughts -- including specific favorite hosts anybody might have --
before we invest too much in the wrong place. Thanks. 

Roddy
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