cPanel vs. Miva

I personally use it for any website hosting I do for me and others. There are a few others but I have stuck with the old tried and true and it always works for me and I know how to get around it so it has become a breeze for me. For those who are extremely new to websites and hosting or to those with very little technical know how cPanel could be very overwhelming and they might want to do like a managed WordPress hosting where they don't really have to see or deal with cPanel. I also probably wouldn't use it for straight email hosting. If you have thousands of cPanel accounts it may get very expensive and that could be a factor.

Incentivized

Miva is a SaaS closed platform. Page builder has bugs and errors, it's not as easy to work with as they say. To work with Miva, you need to work with their professional services or an agency, it's not a cheap platform to make changes to. Has anyone read the latest terms of service update from Miva sent out yesterday 5/21? It's extremely concerning. Miva could shut you off the day after a payment for your subscription fails. Why would they do this to their customers?

Under section C. (ii) Payment Terms: d (ii) Customer shall be in default of this Agreement. If Customer’s Account is not paid in full on the invoice date, Miva reserves the right to interrupt or terminate Customer’s access to and use of the Services and to any other Miva Products and/or Services on the following day. Miva is not responsible for any losses or damages resulting from any interruption or termination of the Services due to outdated or incorrect payment information.

Miva is based in San Diego, CA. Under California law (e.g., California Business and Professions Code § 17200 for unfair business practices), a 24-hour notice period for service suspension could be deemed unreasonable, especially
for a critical business service like an ecommerce platform. Courts often expect “reasonable notice” (typically 5-30 days) to allow the customer to cure the default.

This change isn't lawful and it's extremely concerning to anyone who hosts a website on their platform. No opportunity to cure? They used to have a 15 day grace period to cure. One would wonder why they would be unreasonable
in taking this away when it's best practice throughout the e-commerce industry.

• The dashboard is very intuitive. Even beginners can figure out how to do things without very much help.
• The online community is very helpful and the online documentation makes administering any tasks a lot easier.
• User creation and administration for FTP access is also very simple.

• The ability to quickly change the look and feel of any given page in the store. The storefront, category, product description, and all checkout pages are easily customize-able using simple HTML language.
• With minimal effort, more sophisticated changes and behaviors of the store can be modified using MivaScript, the language Miva Merchant is built upon.
• New features are very easy to add using a huge selection of 3rd party feature modules that typically sell for less that $100. Miva has so many features already built in, but if there is a major common feature not already in the code, it's almost a sure bet that there is a affordable and easy to install module that will meet your e-commerce business requirements.
• Miva corporation provides a high level of free support 7 days a week and 24 hours a day.

• The costs can be a limiting factor for some businesses if you are not using a web hosting company that uses it. I have been experimenting with Cloud hosting, which can be very daunting for the novice. There is an option to install it on the cloud but it is expensive.

Incentivized

• The Miva admin area hasn't been the most user-friendly in the past. However, the admin in the the upcoming new Miva Merchant 9 Release has been completely revamped, is VERY user-friendly, and is formatted for desktop as well as mobile devices.
• Some fairly standard ecommerce functionality like Gift Certificates, Coupons, Sale Prices, etc have previously required third-party modules or template customization. However, many of these features are being built into Miva Merchant upcoming releases.

For most clients, the MIVA Merchant platform, in combination with 3rd party plugins from ADS, Emporium Plus, eMediaSales and Sebenza, has all of the bells and whistles they need. While MIVA is lacking in a mobile friendly option and the ability to easily sell soft goods like mp3's or eBooks, these additions are coming to MIVA soon. The lack of connectivity to popular POS systems is also a negative for us. We will certainly continue to offer MIVA Merchant to clients.

Although it can be a little bit bloated with a lot of options and configurations, it's very straightforward to use and maintain. So it's a great option even if you don't have large experience in hosting configuration. The WHM tool is more suited to heavy users since it requires more expertise, so it has a steep learning curve to better understand how to use it.

Incentivized

I won't say usability is all bad with Miva; basic product configuration isn't complicated and assigning products to categories works well. However, when you go beyond the most elementary tasks, things almost always become needlessly cumbersome and the information stored by the platform is inherently poorly organized. They've really hyped that Miva 9 released last year features a re-worked admin interface, but from our perspective they've simply given it a fresh coat of paint, made the layout passably mobile friendly, but yet still have not in a substantive way addressed the glaring deficiencies at the core of the platform itself. Adding custom admin area bookmarks is a band aid, not a proper fix.

I work with multiple Miva sites daily, and uptime is fantastic. Outages are rare from my experience, and any issues have generally been short and handled quickly.

The support comes in the form of an extensive library of how to articles and community input. For most situations this will give you plenty of information and resources to trouble shoot. Live support really then would need to default to the hosting provider who provides the cPanel for your use.

Incentivized

I would give 10, but there were a couple of times when I was misinformed and I had to do some unnecessary work. When you have to work on every product individually and then you discover you could have done it in bulk it kind of makes you roll your eyes back. I also have an issue still with some shipping settings that no one seems to understand. But the support team is super friendly, they are trying

Creating the Miva store originally took a reasonable amount of time, 2-3 months, but we were unable to migrate our orders and customer accounts from the old platform. Additional refinements were required over the following 6 months to refine the functionality and features so that they worked properly for our store and fulfillment process.

The direct server management tool access provided by cPanel hosting accounts is far superior to any shared or "standard" web site hosting packaged offered by any of the numerous web host providers I have used and or evaluated over the 20+ years of my experience working in the internet industry.

Incentivized

Each player has positive features and value to add to a business. BigCommerce and Shopify have brand recognition that has lead to them being the more common choice in eCommerce. Overall, they have their place for simple B2C sites, and less complex B2B sites. Miva was the only one where we had access to not only the core of the platform, but every part of our page templates. Most platforms will give you a box to stay in, but Miva lets you define the box, and when it doesn't fit your needs, you can adjust it to bring it where it will benefit your company most. Some of the major benefits that we couldn't find on other platforms: Ability to incorporate APIs at any stage of customer journey Unlimited Custom / Complex Product Configurators and Builders Easy to understand the structure and hierarchy of pages and templates.

Miva has proven to be a great solution for smaller mom-and-pop stores through large enterprise-class businesses with tens of thousands of products. Performance is just as strong on enterprise-class stores as on considerably smaller stores, and an increasing number of marketing/sales tools are continually being added to the core Miva functionality to keep up with current marketplace demands.

• cPanel makes back end server administration easy. This saves time and overall effort.
• cPanel is readily available with most hosting packages. It integrates with both Apache and Nginx.
• cPanel allows you to perform some of the same functions as WHM, but with an easier interface.

Incentivized

• Running a business in general (and this applies to e-commerce of course) involves not enough time to do too many things. Any place one can automate/streamline/ simplify some of these myriad things, you gain more time to focus on high value activities. We have found that the more we have been able to leverage Miva's capabilities (often with our own tools), the more time we can spend on marketing, sales and product development.