Today, the beta version of BV Commerce Hosted officially launched. I’m still requiring people to request invitation codes so that I can control the number of signups while we scale out servers. If you’re interested stop by http://www.bvcommerce.com and request an invite code.
For those that are curious, BV Commerce Hosted is NOT simply a copy of BV Commerce 5 thrown up on a server. It is a completely new application. Parts of the hosted version come from the BV Commerce code base because it would be silly not to reuse good code but many parts are brand new.
The software is multi-tenant which means that there is really only one “web site” or “application” running and every store lives in that one application. In reality there are several “web sites” because the software runs across many servers at the same time. This means that Store A and Store B are both running on the same application but every server in the farm at the same time. This means that if Store A gets busy it can access more resources while Store B is not very busy.
The service is written in c# using ASP.NET MVC as the front end technology. This is a new way to build .NET web applications that gets rid of things like ViewState and some other HTML quirks that made working with ASP.NET web forms difficult at times. JQuery is the main JavaScript library along with some great plugins and modules for color pickers and animations.
The overall philosophy for the hosted version is to reduce unnecessary features and options. BV Commerce 5 is extremely flexible but flexibility usually comes with the price of complexity. The hosted service uses “best practices” learned from over a decade of building and creating ecommerce solutions. That doesn’t mean you can’t configure the hosted version to your needs. It just means that for some things we know what works well and will “guide” you to choices that will be beneficial to your store’s sales. The pricing plans are based on total products AND total sales so it’s in my best interest to have growing, well run stores on the platform.
Sign up for an invitation code and take it for a spin: http://www.bvcommerce.com