Reccomendation against Volusion

The focus of the company from a service point of view appears to be on features that they think enterprise customers require. It is very important to be aware of this.

Why anyone would build an Ecommerce website tied to a single hosting provider is beyond me.

We have now been unable to accept credit cards for almost two weeks on our Volusion based site. There has been no sense of urgency on behalf of Volusion to fix it or to communicate with customers regarding the issues. Thousands of their customer's sites have been impacted because they failed to prepare for a change in PCI rules. Downtime is the norm with Volusion. They try to host their own stores and just do not have the expertise to do so. Don't believe a word they say and skip it. There are much better options available. You will regret it if you do not take my advise.

I can certainly understand moving to one location, but why would you cause an overall loss of support to your customers?

Can you advise what service you are using now that you are satisfied with?

We have used Volusion since 2009. I think the software is great, unfortunately the hosting, downtime and speed is a real problem. We are an enterprise customer on a semi-dedicated server and still have downtimes, very slow times etc.. My issue is they are reactive instead of proactive "sorry we are having a Denial of Service Attack it will take some time to sort out. DOS happen to even the biggest hosting co's" Or "sorry we have a software issue we will keep you informed when it is resolved." I have been asking for redundant servers, faster speeds, more reliability for a 2 years so that when these normal hosting issues to arise there is a redundant server system in place and we do not shut down our $10,000,000/year e-commerce site.

So far the only thing they have offered is $14,000/mo for a dedicated server. Yes that's correct... $14,000/mo (which obviously is $168,000 year). For that I could buy my own servers, T1 lines and an administrator.... which I would do except Volusion only enables there cart to work on their servers.

We are a manufacturer of a product (not just a virtual web co) and we are growing so quickly that we are so focused on keeping up with our own growth, our own products etc that we have not had time to investigate new e-commerce platforms. Additionally we are ranked #1 organically in Google for many of our industry major search terms. Accordingly we are very reluctant to switch carts. It will be very costly, risky, expensive so we would prefer not to. Unfortunately since we have grown to $10MM/year in 3 years and are still growing quickly, we feel it is irresponsible to not investigate a more reliable hosting platform. We may not switch do to the reasons above, but have it on the list to investigate. Any suggestions on a great SEO friendly cart for a $10MM+ ecommerce site?

Thanks!

This is all rather unfortunate to read but I must say I am happy I decided not to go with Volusion after reading all of this. I decided on bigcommerce instead and so far so good. I will say this though, time will tell if Volusion is truly interested in the pleasing their customers. Companies that do not care about their customers ultimately will not succeed anyway. Screwing over your customers (and employees) will only last so long. So if these claims are true, the company will self destruct on its own. No need for everyone to try to sink their ship for them. Although I can understand why you would want to. Good luck to everyone! (I just had to interject, this post caught my eye).