# Questions about using Big Cartel & another web host



## TeeGeeCee (Jun 16, 2010)

I'm ready to start setting up our web site. Right now I'm planning on using Big Cartel for the shopping cart, and am looking at either Media Temple or Lunar Pages as the host for our other pages (blog, about, contact, etc...). My question is this - it appears that Big Cartel is a hosted solution - yet when I look at the example sites, I don't see them as an "https". Is this something I need to worry about? If I use Big Cartel, can I get a "lower level" (ie less expensive) web site from the other hosts? Does Big Cartel use SSL?

Or should I look at a more "all-in-one" approach? Both Lunar Pages & Media Temple have a plan ($20/month) that seems to fit the bill, and includes "1 click support" for zen cart, cube cart, etc. THey also have a shared SSL. Actually, Lunar Pages includes a private SSL Certificate.

Does anyone have thoughts on which approach might be better? Any help would be appreciated...


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## proto (Oct 13, 2008)

Yes, bigcartel is a hosted solution. Https/ssl is important for the checkout process. Since there is extra overhead involved in using https, you typically won't use it for the catalog / blog sections of your site. If you put something in your cart at a bigcartel site and go through the checkout process, you will see that the url switches to https before you enter any credit card information (actually, since bigcartel uses paypal exclusively, the change to https probably happens when bigcartel hands the cart off to Paypal).


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## HesAWhore (Jan 4, 2010)

Proto is correct, all payments go through Paypal's secure checkout process.


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## EgoismBrand (Aug 4, 2010)

For my site I'm using a seperate host,and the store link is linked directly too. My big cartel site..


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## TeeGeeCee (Jun 16, 2010)

Thanks for the info all. I finally did follow a shirt purchase through until it went to paypal, and jumped to https - it made much more sense to me then.

I've gone and purchased our domain & host (lunarpages), and plan on usinf big cartel. So it looks like about $17/month ($10 for big cartel, $6.95 to lunar pages) for keeping the site up & running. Seems pretty reasonable.

I've got a placeholder home page in place, and hopefully, in the next week or so, I'll have most of the pages (shy of the store itself) up & running!


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