Zen Cart offer certified Web Hosts that have pledged to provide superior customer service to all of their customers and ensure that their servers are set up to run Zen Cart without requiring any changes to the program.  Choosing a Certified Host will also help to keep Zen Cart moving forward as they have pledged financial support to the Zen Cart project.

A good little test to check the efficiency of a hosting company is to email their customer service department and see how long they take to respond to you. You can also search the Internet for forums, reviews and information about the specific web hosting providers. Price of course should be taken into consideration, but in the world of web hosting you often get what you pay for.

Zen Cart Requirements

The recommended server configuration is:

• PHP 4.4.x or higher
• Apache 1.3.x or 2.x
• MySQL 3.2x or 4.0.x (with significant memory resources devoted to the MySQL processes)
• Register Globals = off
• PHP Safe_Mode = off

Notes

• CURL
  Many shipping and payment modules require CURL to be installed and compiled with PHP.
• SSL & HTTPS
  Support for HTTPS may be required depending on the payment methods being accepted.  The use of SSL during account creation and checkout is recommended.
• PHP as CGI
  If you are running on a Unix/Linux host with PHP running as CGI, you may have some difficulties. In Linux, it is recommended to use PHP as an Apache module, not as a CGI app, unless you have server-level control of configuring the CGI options and advanced knowledge of tuning the server to function optimally.
• PHP5
  PHP5 is not officially supported by Zen Cart™ v1.3.x at this time since it hasn’t been exhaustively tested; however, many shopowners are successfully running their shops on servers using PHP5. The development of v1.3.x is using constructs that are more compliant with PHP5 but full specific testing for PHP5 is not a primary goal of the 1.3.x series. Zen Cart™ v2.0.0 is built on PHP5, and will require PHP 5.2 as a minimum.
• MySQL 4.1.x
  MySQL 4.1.x uses an encryption scheme that is not 100% supported by PHP4 on older servers, so may not work with Zen Cart™ v1.3.x unless your host has upgraded their support for compatibility between the two systems.
• MySQL5
  MySQL 5 has some tighter constraints on various SQL statement constructs. Zen Cart™ v1.2.x requires some coding alterations in order to work in a MySQL5 environment. Zen Cart™ v1.3.x has repaired these constructs and thus is expected to be compatible. Exhaustive testing has not yet been completed. You can use a simple patch on v1.2.x until then.
• Zen Cart v1.2.x and earlier are no longer officially supported
  Also note that versions prior to Zen Cart 1.3.x will not work on MySQL5 (typically installed alongside PHP 5).

More Zen Cart:

1. Configure the Zen Cart Reviews Sidebox to randomly select product reviews for display