OpenCart VPS Hosting

About OpenCart

OpenCart is a free, open-source e-commerce platform. It runs a complete online store out of the box: catalog, cart and checkout, multiple stores and languages, product reviews, and a large market of themes and extensions.

• Open source: no license fee for the platform itself.
• Easy to run: a clear admin panel for products, orders and customers.
• Feature-rich: multi-store, multilingual and multi-currency support built in.
• Large community: thousands of free and paid themes and extensions.
• SEO-friendly: readable product URLs and editable meta tags.

Running OpenCart on a VPS: a practical guide

This image ships OpenCart 4.0.2.3 on Debian 11. Here is what the store needs from the server, which plan to start with, and how to avoid the problems store owners usually hit in the first month.

What OpenCart needs from the server

OpenCart is a PHP application with a MySQL or MariaDB database. The installer checks for PHP 8.0 or newer for the 4.0 branch (8.1 or newer for 4.1) and for the gd, curl, openssl, zlib, zip and mbstring (or iconv) extensions, plus mysqli or PDO for the database. All of this is already set up in the image.

Load depends on visitors and on what the store does on each page: large catalogs with filters, many extensions and big product images need more CPU and memory than a small catalog. Traffic peaks during sales matter more than the average day.

Which plan to start with:

• 1 vCPU, 2 GiB RAM, 30 GiB: testing a theme or extensions before launch, $4/mo
• 2 vCPU, 4 GiB RAM, 60 GiB: a live store with a few hundred products and steady traffic, $8/mo
• 4 vCPU, 8 GiB RAM, 120 GiB: thousands of products, many extensions, regular promotions, $20/mo
• 8 vCPU, 16 GiB RAM, 240 GiB: high traffic and sale peaks, $40/mo

Treat these as starting points. Watch CPU and memory during your busiest hours and move up a plan when they stay high; resizing keeps your data, and a free snapshot before the change gives you a way back.

Where to put it

Put the store close to your shoppers: page speed affects both conversion and search rankings. For shoppers in Poland and Central Europe, Frankfurt is the closest of our locations; for the UK, London; for North America, pick the city nearest to most of your customers. We run servers in 14 locations across the US, Canada, the UK, Germany and France.

Getting started

1. Deploy the OpenCart image from this page. The server is ready in about a minute.
2. Connect over SSH and read the application credentials from the bitnami_credentials file in the home directory.
3. Sign in to the admin panel and change the administrator password straight away.
4. Point your domain to the server and set up HTTPS with a free Let’s Encrypt certificate. Payment providers require HTTPS.
5. Follow the security notice in the OpenCart dashboard and move the storage directory outside the web root.
6. Set your store details, currency, taxes and shipping, then turn on SEO URLs in the settings.

Tuning and common problems

• Blank page or error after installing an extension. Many extensions are written for OpenCart 3 and do not work on 4.x. Check that an extension supports your exact version before installing, and take a snapshot first.
• Order e-mails do not arrive. Outbound SMTP can be blocked on new accounts. Ask our support to open it, or send mail through an external SMTP service.
• Slow catalog pages. Resize product images to the size the theme displays, keep the number of active extensions down, and make sure PHP OPcache is on.
• Upgrades. Moving between OpenCart versions can break themes and extensions. Take a snapshot, upgrade on a copy first, then switch. The current upstream release is 4.1.0.4.

FAQ

Can you move my existing store?
Yes. INET.WS engineers migrate existing servers for free; open a ticket after ordering.

Can I run several stores on one server?
Yes. OpenCart supports multiple stores from one admin panel; size the plan for their combined traffic.

How do I back up the store?
Snapshots are free and cover the whole server. Weekly backups are included; daily backups cost 20% of the plan price.