Maintaining Performance For Low Traffic Sites

[ZLA]

Our site generates a dozen or two sales a day. I saw a post (which I can't find now) which suggested that AC 7 works best with large volume / traffic sites. Furthermore, we're currently using a shared hosting test environment from Discount ASP.NET which is somewhat slow (and prone to intermittent logoffs in admin before the 20 minute timeout kicks in). We do plan to use a shared hosting plan but with some other vendor. (One possibility is WebHost4Life.)

Given the above, what can we do to make our site perform best? I would appreciate responses to any of the following:

• What shared hosting companies / plans do you recommend for small sites?
• Can we set up a recurring job to keep our site loaded in memory? For example, with Discount ASP I can set up a task to access the home page every 5 minutes. Is that good enough or do I need to hit several different pages? Do I need to create one page which then accesses several other pages in turn to keep multiple sections of code in memory? Do I need a page that instantiates a number of core CommerceBuilder objects to keep performance high?
• What other settings (besides the obvious debug="false") can / should I configure for improved performance?
• Other suggestions?

Thank you in advance.

[jmestep]

I have used something like smarter ping utility and did it every 5 minutes to the home page. It seemed to be sufficient.

[ZLA]

Thanks Judy. I added a ping task to my test environment and will see if it makes a difference.