We have PrintShop Web hosted on PC workstation here in our office. Our internet connection is through 2 bonded T1's which gives us a max 3 Mb/s upload. We have customers complaining about it being too slow.

Is anyone successfully hosting PSW in-house and if so can you share some tips on how to make this work better?

If we move this to a hosting service, I assume we will have to get a VPS. What do we do about the dongle?

P,

3mbps would actually be alright for perhaps 500k pageviews per week, perhaps the issue is not the speed - you say you have PrintShop Mail Web hosting on a "PC Workstation", if you mean a single-core XP machine with a couple of Gigs of RAM, that's your bottleneck.

To host any web server that has more than a few thousand pageviews per week, you would most likely need to install this on a server machine with a lot of "oomph". Say, dual- or quad-core 3ghz CPU, and 4GB of RAM. I would actually suggest more but 32-bit operating systems can't handle more than that, and PSM is not support on 64-bit at the moment.

Also make sure that you do not have anything else running on the machine (no other server, nothing that uses the CPU, no SQL server, etc) in order to give full power to PrintShop Mail Web.

If you wish to host the system on a provider that's external, you will need to find one that hosts Windows systems that are not virtualized - that is, you will need to be hosted on a physical, independent, dedicated machine where you have direct access to the USB ports without a VMWare layer (which will not work). You'll most likely need to ship the USB dongle so they can plug it in, unless it's local to you and you can go directly. Of course, you'll also need remote administration rights on the machine such as VNC or RDP to access the machine.

Hope this helps,
Eric.

Hey Eric,

Thanks for the info. I'd be surprised if we get one thousand pageviews per week. However, the computer is a dual purpose machine that has 2 Gigs of RAM with core2 duo @ 2.33GHz. I could see this causing some bottlenecking.

Aside from getting a new computer do you have any suggestions for tweaking the one I've got?

P,

Aside from changing "dual purpose" to "single purpose" (that is, not using the machine for anything else) I don't see what else could be done in this case, but I'm really not sure how this machine could fail at less than a thousand pageviews per week.

When your users are complaining about speed, how slow are we talking about? More than 15 seconds to display a page? More than 30 seconds? More than 1 minute?

Regards,
Eric.

The issue seems to only happen with businesses. Localhost runs very fast (of course). 3 of us have ordered from home and free wifi spots. They all run reasonably fast. Our customers are saying it takes them 10 to 15 seconds after logging in and the whole process is slow. Every time I try going to the web site (instead of localhost) from here (same location as the server) I get some very slow results but that is going out and coming in on the same internet connection. I'm thinking I'll try putting some php in the template to capture load times to get some more objective numbers. Any suggestions on doing this would be welcome as I am a novice programmer.

P,

If it works with localhost and not through the domain, then the issue is definitely not with PrintShop Mail - that is, if doesn't react any different from remote connections than it does local ones. I suggest you contact your ISP and check with them whether or not they know of any issues with their network. Or, it may be a network/router configuration, but that's a theory you'll have to research on your own. Basically this has nothign to do with programming, it's a networking issue.

You can't modify the PHP in any way, it's protected by encryption, however you could use Javascript by modifying the template file located in the "templates" folder of the PrintShop Web program files:
C:\Program Files\PrintShop Mail Suite 7\PrintShop Mail Web\Website\templates

You also have access to the logs from the web server here:
C:\Program Files\PrintShop Mail Suite 7\PrintShop Mail Web\Apache\logs
This may help diagnose the connection.

Hope this helps,
Eric.