Advice needed on the best web host if I have 500K+ items ?

I use TMDHosting for my websites.It is very reliable, fast and have dedicated servers.Also the support is great.Almost all my questions are answered within 10-15 minutes and dealt with asap.Check them out.

Hi,
I'm using GVO hosting.They are very reliable and their support is excellent.You can visit them here:GoGVO

I've used Wiredtree for 4-5 years. Great support!

With 500K items you are looking at a huge website. I would recommend VPS hosting. A friend of mine has recently started their business and if you look at his own website load time, you would know what I mean. I would still recommend that you reach them via contact option understand what they offer before you purchase. the website is | Ryno

Couple of things to look at there.

Firstly, you said you are using Yahoo store. Yahoo store has their own shopping cart and from their modest start in the 90's where even 100k products used to test their limitations, it is now optimized to handle large inventories (in the few hundreds of thousand items). Though I believe that adding half a million products to Yahoo store would certainly push their platform seriously as well. Seems to me, they know their limitations when they suggest you do not add more than 200K items.

You seem to be looking for another host, and that is the more interesting scenario.

I'd ask myself a couple of questions first before I venture on this route.

1- Which shopping cart is going to allow me to add 500K products. There are some out of the box solutions that may handle that, but half a million products loaded on to a shopping cart is a serious enterprise level endeavor and requires optimization on multiple levels, especially if you don't want 3 minute page loads and want people to be able to shop in a reasonable manner.

2- You certainly won't survive on shared hosting, let alone a VPS. You will need dedicated hosting for this set up, especially when you start to pull in some traffic.

3- With your half-million products scenario, it's not as much about a particular host, but the power and configuration of your server and the robustness and flexibility of your shopping cart software. Most good hosting companies offer enterprise solutions and have powerful servers available for customers like you but it'll certainly cost you $$$. Webhostingtalk forum would be a good place to start looking for deals and in fact you'll find some good recommendations there from the webhosts themselves on the type of setup you'll need. From practice and dealing with multiple customers and disasters and success stories, these guys can point you in the right direction.

Half a million products does give one a quick-dirty edge even when it comes to Google, but if the shopping cart is not optimized and the resources are not there, it can easily turn into a disaster.

Best of luck.

knownhost.com has some fair prices on VPS and a very helpful staff.
I have used them for the past year and have never had any down time as far as I know.

i would say that you might want to work on your traffic rather than adding more products, but to answer your question, if you anticipate large volume of traffic to your site, dedicated server is the way to go.