Prestashop Installation Part 1

Tips

Before launching or setup your online shop using Prestashop, you must have a hosting and a domain name. Now choose a good hosting provider carefully because this will then reflect your online shop performance and service.

Nowadays there are many hosting provider offering different plans and such very attractive especially during some occasions ( Christmas, independence day, etc.). You should at least pick a 1GB or 5GB of web space because your online shop will grow bigger and attract more visitors.

I personally recommend TMD Hosting. They offer Free Domain forever, Softaculous Autoinstaller (very easy Prestashop installer), Unlimited space & unlimited bandwidth.

Pre-Installation Check List

1. Have your Prestashop script ready. Download latest release here > www.prestashop.com . This don't require if you install using Softaculous. Later I will add tutorial on how to install using Softaculous.
2. Extract the package locally on your computer, anywhere that you can easily retrieve.
3. Upload the script to your hosting site via FTP Client. I recommend Filezilla ( Download Here ). Upload to your favor directory, usually to your root/public_html directory. If you have a blog or web-page as the root directory, you can create other directory (shop, mymall, etc) and upload it there.
4. Then create a database that will store your shop data in it. Please remember user name and password as we will use it in our shop installation.

System Requirements

Before you operate online stores, there are some things you should know.
Please check with your hosting service is the components below are available and installed on your server space.

• Linux, Unix, or Windows
• Apache Web server
• PHP 5.0 or later.
• MySQL 4.1.14 or later

These are some basic things to have on your hosting service (for hosted installation).

If you want to install to your own PC first, you can just download and install XAMPP or WAMPP. All the components needed are bundled inside those in-house web servers softwares.

In this tutorial, we will learn how to install and update PrestaShop using hosted server.

Why PrestaShop ?

In developing any ecommerce website, the first thing we need to see is stability, easy to use, functionality and high availability.

Those features are available in PrestaShop.

Simplicity and Functionality

There are many shopping carts that we can choose. But as far as I ever use, the easiest is PrestaShop. From installation till configuring payment option, it is just need to click and click away. There is no reference that I use to install this software.

Stability

PrestaShop is very stable since I use it way back in 2009. Never crashes. And it's getting better over time. It never failed to process any search term in the front office.

What is PrestaShop ?

PrestaShop is an alternative ecommerce solutions that developed as open source and it is Free.

It is very lightweight thus only require about 6mb installation files. It was developed based on Smarty template engine.

PrestaShop supports payment gateway such as Google checkout, paypal, bankwire, and other modules that are offered as free or commercially. It is also support over 40 languages but only English and French having full support because it was founded in Paris, France.
Latest version of PrestaShop is 1.3.2 [ at the time this post was written ]
Link to PrestaShop official website > Prestashop