Hi All
I am investigating feed update automation. At the moment, I have a Clook Reseller account and they have just told me they don't allow shell access for their reseller accounts.
Does this mean feed automation is impossible with my reseller account? I am thinking it probably does.
Has anyone made any steps towards feed automation using a Clook Reseller account?
Thanks for any comments.
Rgds
Raid
I've a reseller account with Clook - had it for about 5 years. My first price tapestry site was was fully automated. Set up cron jobs to download and import. Basically anything you need to do via shell access you can do with a cron job.
Unfortunatly the import process heavily loaded their server and they disabled the cron jobs. I had it importing about 800,000 items, 30 feeds, over a 7 day period.
I then moved the account over to a virtual server with eukhost (big mistake). Virtual server couldn't handle the load and frequently crashed.
In the end I set up my own local webserver and use it to run the imports to a local database. I then upload the database to the real website. One site Excellent Price is currently on an eukhost reseller account (1.7 million items), and 4 are on the clook reseller account (varies from 500 to 2,000 items).
I had an issue with one of my other websites running with about 500k items - A1 Price. Queires were causing high server load and again they stopped the website. Clook won't allow you to impact their servers with high load.
Thanks for your comments, Paul.
Several users running large sites have successfully avoided server load issues with 2 specific modifications to the import process - importing to a temporary table rather than the live products table and then switching tables names afterwards; and also inserting a 1 second "sleep" every 100 products or so - more information and links in this thread:
http://www.pricetapestry.com/node/2875
Cheers,
David.
Hello Raid,
There are various automation options even if you don't have shell access. The most popular is to use a PHP script instead of a shell script to fetch the feeds and run the import process, and then you schedule that PHP script to run via cron. An example script that even support unzipping etc. can be found in the following post:
http://www.pricetapestry.com/node/24#comment-750
Don't forget to make sure that your /feeds/ directory is writable by PHP in order for this to work. The easiest way to do this is normally with your FTP program - right click on the feeds folder in the remote window and then look for "Permissions" or "Properties..." and then permissions; and set as writable for all users - owner/group/world...
Hope this helps!
Cheers,
David.