Hi,
I am planning a website for a small book publisher in India with the following details:

1. 70-80 book titles will be put up for online purchase.
2. Expecting a traffic of approx 100,000 per month.
3. Payment can be in Indian Rupees or USD.

I wish to get advice on:

1. Type of web hosting and features I should go for.
2. Payment gateway options - paypal and Transecute are being considered. Any opinion on these or alternatives will be helpful.

Thanks in advance
icubyx

First you have to tell what programming language are you going to use PHP/MySql or DotNet/MSql.

Paypal will be suitable for online payments as now they are doing direct online transfer to Indian banks and they are quite popular and economic, whereas Transecute will be quite costly.

I intend to use PHP/MySQL.
With paypal I can remit to an Indian bank, but AFAIK, Paypal does not accept payments in Indian Rupees. Any inputs on that will be great.
Thanks
icubyx

So if you are using PHP/MySql you can start with a good shared account from a reputed company (I hope you are not looking towards huge over sellers) a company that has a proven track record and also have a good upgrade path to offer, later as you grow you can move on to a VPS or dedicated.

About Paypal and INR, I think you can show pricing in INR and post USD to Paypal on the fly, you may like to join http://www.paypaldeveloper.com & http://www.paypaldev.org you may also be interested in a Sandbox account from https://developer.paypal.com for testing your application.

If still you and your client want a Indian merchant account then you have Transecute, CCavenue and http://www.ebs.in

i recommend PacificRack

vinsar:
Thanks for your inputs. I will try paypal and also the other providers you mentioned. As for web space providers, I am eyeing secureservertech, medialayer, theprimehost, unitedhosting, dotable and asmallorange with interest. The first two specially since they use litespeed server about which I hear many good things.
I will need SSL, dedicated IP...anything else? Will 10Gb per month be adequate for this traffic and activity?
Gharibe:
I looked up PacificRack but they are dedicated server providers
Thanks
icubyx

Are these physical books, or e-books? That is going to make quite a difference in your resource and technology needs --

:D Bailey

These are physical books. Shipping outside India will have one shipping charge and another for Indian destination.
e-books may be added at a later date, but no plans for the forseeable future.
icubyx

If you are expecting a traffic of approx 100,000 per month I don't think 10 Gb will be sufficient taking in account that email will be used too. And then that 100,000 you are expecting, is it individuals or total hits, how much average content will be there in a page (text, images, animation etc.)

For hosting providers do some research, see what other says, shoot them some pre-sales email, use there live chat if that is available, and judge for your self which one is going to be best for you.

I won't get into Apache/Litespeed comparison as I don't have direct experience with Litespeed.

If you want to process CC on your own site you will need SSL & dedicated IP, but it seem processing will be done at third party server so you don't actually need it, still to boost client's confidence you can have SSL for $9 from positivessl (http://www.positivessl.com) there are many others too providing cheap SSLs.

Well, 100,000 is a rough estimate on the higher side. I feel it really won't cross 50,000 at least for the first year. I'm planning to monitor the traffic for the first few months and upgrade if it exceeds expectations.
Most of the pages will have text and thumbnails of the book covers, the site being 12-15 pages.
Thanks for the inputs on SSL.
icubyx

You should find someone that specialize in e-commerce host and solution. There are companies out that use both php an other things.
Ask them questions
1.If they support there product.
2.if they work with there client to get what they want.
3.what security do they offer
4.Do they use other things beside php scripts
5. do they over sell there server.

I have several ecommerce customers, some of them with 10 products, other with huge stores with 5.000 products.

I used to have a regular hosting with free Comersus Cart installed (http://www.comersus.com/features.html) but if something happened, the hosting guys were not programmers and they did not have any knowledge of the shopping cart (the main part of the site)

So, my advice is: select a shopping cart, then use their own hosting service. In that case, you will have the technical support provided by programmers.

Regarding payment gateways, use PayPal Web Site Payments Pro (http://www.paypal.com)