Agora Cart
Hosting
Install Agora Cart in one click on our fast, reliable UK web hosting. Fully managed with free SSL, daily backups, and dedicated expert support.
What is Agora Cart?
Agora Cart is an open-source shopping cart application originally written in Perl, with a long history that stretches back to the early 2000s. It started life as a fork of the older AgoraCart codebase and has been maintained by a small community of volunteers ever since. Its design priority is simplicity: a flat-file or MySQL data store, basic catalogue management, and a single-table-style admin that runs without heavy framework dependencies.
The project is released under the GPL. It supports a handful of payment gateways through community plug-ins, basic tax and shipping rules, and templated storefronts via plain HTML. There is no built-in REST API, and the admin UI does not use modern JavaScript frameworks.
Agora Cart is best understood as a maintenance platform in 2026. New e-commerce projects almost always pick WooCommerce, OpenCart, or PrestaShop instead. Existing Agora Cart installs continue to run, and the application is included in the 365i one-click installer for owners who want to keep their store online without a full rebuild.
365i’s editorial review of Agora Cart
Agora Cart is one of those applications that almost no one asks for unless they already run one. I've kept maybe four Agora Cart sites alive over the years, all of them owned by people who set the store up between 2003 and 2008 and have never seen a reason to migrate. The catalogues are small, the orders are steady, and the owners can drive the admin in their sleep. That's a perfectly good reason to leave a thing alone.
What works well: the install is tiny, the database schema is forgiving, and Perl plus a bit of PHP runs on basically any shared host without complaint. We've never had a customer's Agora Cart site fall over because of platform changes. PHP ' . PHP_VERSION_LATEST . ' on our shared plans handles the PHP-side bits without issue, and we've kept Perl available too because we know what we host.
What's annoying: the admin UI is from a different decade, the templating system uses tags I have to look up every time I touch it, and you will not get a phone call from a vendor account manager. SSL on the admin pages took some manual work the first time we set it up because the older config didn't assume HTTPS by default. Once it's pinned down, it stays pinned, but the first hour is fiddly.
"Agora Cart is a museum piece that still happens to take orders. If your store works, keep it. If you're starting fresh in 2026, do not start with Agora Cart, start with WooCommerce or Shopify and never look back."
Mark McNeece, Founder, 365i Hosting
Hosting-wise, Agora Cart sits comfortably on our shared web hosting from £5.99/mo. PHP memory at 256MB is more than it ever needs, the MySQL 8 instance handles the tiny schema without a thought, and you'll never trip our unlimited LVE resources unless something has gone badly wrong. We back the database up daily and the file store along with it, so a Perl error or a botched template edit is recoverable inside a few minutes.
If you're sitting on an Agora Cart store and wondering whether to migrate, I'd ask two questions. First, does your catalogue change weekly or monthly? If yes, the lack of modern admin tools is costing you time, and a WooCommerce migration probably pays for itself inside a year. Second, do your customers complain about the checkout? If yes, mobile responsiveness on the original Agora Cart templates is poor and that's hurting conversion. If both answers are no, leave it alone. Working code is working code.
For the few customers who run Agora Cart on our platform, we treat it the same as any other application: 7-day expert support, free migrations if you change your mind, daily backups kept for 30 days. We won't rewrite Agora Cart core for you, but we'll keep it running.
Why Host Agora Cart with 365i?
Our web hosting is built for PHP applications like Agora Cart. Every plan includes everything you need to launch and grow.
One-Click Installation
Install Agora Cart with a single click from your control panel. No manual configuration, no FTP uploads, no database setup.
Free SSL Certificate
Every site gets a free SSL certificate, automatically configured and renewed. Keep your Agora Cart installation secure from day one.
99.9%+ Uptime Track Record
Enterprise-grade data centres in the UK, US & Asia with redundant power, cooling, and network connectivity. Shared hosting runs on autoscaling cloud infrastructure with a 99.9%+ historical uptime record; Managed Cloud Servers carry a contractual 99.99% SLA.
Daily Backups
Automatic daily backups with easy one-click restore. Your Agora Cart data is always safe and recoverable.
7-Day Expert Support
UK-based hosting specialists available 7 days a week including evenings, weekends, and bank holidays. Real people, real help.
SSD Storage
All plans run on fast SSD storage for snappy page loads and responsive admin panels. Agora Cart performs at its best.
Where Agora Cart Fits
Best for
Long-running small stores already on Agora Cart, where the catalogue is stable, the owner knows the admin, and the cost of migration outweighs the cost of staying. Small craft sellers, niche hobby stores, and one-product micro-businesses who set up in the 2000s and never had a reason to switch.
Watch for
The codebase is barely maintained, the admin UI is dated, and the templating system has a learning curve nobody under 35 wants to take on. Modern payment gateways often need community-built bridges, and PCI compliance for card-not-present transactions is harder than picking a platform with native Stripe.
Web Hosting for Agora Cart
Get Agora Cart up and running in minutes with our fast, reliable web hosting. Every plan includes one-click installation, free SSL, UK, US & Asia data centres, and dedicated expert support.
- 1 website
- 10 GB SSD storage
- Free SSL certificate
- 80+ 1-click installs
- Unlimited LVE resources
- Autoscaling cloud platform
- UK, US & Asia data centres
- 5 websites
- Unlimited SSD storage
- Free SSL certificate
- 80+ 1-click installs
- CDN included
- Unlimited LVE resources
- Autoscaling cloud platform
- UK, US & Asia data centres
- 10 websites
- Unlimited SSD storage
- Free SSL certificate
- 80+ 1-click installs
- CDN included
- Timeline Backup/Restore
- Unlimited LVE resources
- Autoscaling cloud platform
- UK, US & Asia data centres
- Priority support
All prices exclude VAT. No contract, cancel any time.
Need More Power for Agora Cart?
For high-traffic sites, large catalogues, or mission-critical deployments, our fully managed cloud servers give Agora Cart dedicated resources and enterprise-grade performance.
- Dedicated CPU, RAM & SSD storage
- 99.99% uptime SLA
- Fully managed by our team
- Choose 365i, AWS, or Google Cloud
Servers
Servers
Servers
An Agora Cart case from our books
A small specialist hobby retailer in the East Midlands came to us in late 2025 with a 14-year-old Agora Cart install on a creaking shared host elsewhere. The site was taking around 80 orders a month and turning over roughly £4,200/mo. Their host had quietly downgraded PHP support and the cart had started throwing 500 errors on checkout for around 12% of mobile users.
We migrated the site to our shared hosting at £5.99/mo, set the PHP version explicitly to 7.4 (Agora Cart's own templates were not happy on 8.x without modification), and pinned a free SSL certificate across the whole domain. The bulk of the work was untangling a custom shipping module and rewriting two payment-gateway calls so they used the merchant's current Stripe account instead of a defunct WorldPay one.
End-to-end, the migration took us around six working hours over two days. Checkout error rate dropped to under 1%, page load time improved by roughly 38%, and the owner asked us to leave the platform alone rather than rebuild on WooCommerce.
What we would tell anyone in the same spot: don't replace what works, but do put it on a host that knows what Perl and old-style PHP carts need. The migration paid for itself in recovered orders inside the first month.
Anonymised at the client's request. Industry, scale, and timeline preserved.
What we look for in ecommerce hosting
Hosting an ecommerce app well is rarely about raw CPU. It is about three things we end up tuning for almost every shop: PHP memory limits high enough to handle bulk product imports, a database engine sized for the read-heavy mix of catalogue browsing, and reliable cron plus SSL for whichever payment gateway the shop uses. We give all of that out of the box on our web hosting plans, but we will also tell you honestly when an app is ill-suited to shared hosting and a small managed cloud server would save everyone pain.
Agora Cart Hosting FAQ
Common questions we hear from people running Agora Cart on our hosting.
Agora Cart needs Perl plus PHP and MySQL. Our shared hosting plans include all three, with PHP 8.5 default and PHP 7.4 available for older Agora Cart templates that haven't been updated for modern PHP. MySQL 8 handles the small schema easily, and 256MB PHP memory is plenty. We've hosted Agora Cart sites for over a decade without specialist server config. If your install uses old Perl modules, we can usually enable them on request, that's part of our 7-day support.
Yes. Agora Cart is in our one-click installer alongside the rest of the 365i application catalogue. The installer creates the database, drops in the files, and gives you the admin login. From there you'll set up your catalogue, payment gateway, and shipping rules manually. The whole thing takes around 10 minutes for a fresh install. We can't help you write your product descriptions, but we can help you with everything technical.
In practice, no. The admin UI was designed for catalogues of a few hundred items at most. We've seen Agora Cart sites with around 1,500 SKUs and the admin starts to drag noticeably. If your catalogue is heading past 500 products, we'd steer you towards WooCommerce or PrestaShop instead. The cart database itself can handle far more, but day-to-day admin becomes painful. For very small stores under 200 products, Agora Cart still does its job.
We provide hosting-layer support 7 days a week including evenings, weekends, and bank holidays. That covers PHP versions, Perl modules, database access, SSL, email, DNS, backups, and migrations. We don't write Agora Cart custom code or rebuild theme files for you, that's development work. If you need development, we can refer you to our sister site 365iwebdesign.co.uk. The hosting platform is monitored 24/7 by our datacentre partner.
Yes, free of charge. Our free migration service covers Agora Cart along with the rest of our supported applications. Send us your existing host's FTP details and database export and we'll move the whole thing across, set up SSL, and test the checkout end-to-end before we cut DNS over. Most Agora Cart migrations take us a few working hours, sometimes more if the install has been heavily customised over the years.
Agora Cart itself doesn't store card numbers if you're using a hosted payment gateway like Stripe or PayPal, which is what we always recommend. PCI DSS compliance falls largely on the gateway in that setup. The application core is old enough that we suggest disabling any unused modules and keeping admin behind a strong password plus, ideally, IP restriction. Our hosting includes free SSL, daily backups, and basic WAF rules at the platform level.
Ready to Host Agora Cart?
Get started with Agora Cart on our fast UK web hosting. One-click installation, free SSL, and dedicated expert support included.