One of the hardest choices is who to host your lovingly crafted Joomla site.
Whilst there are certain hosts that you should avoid at all costs (see ‘unlimited hosting’), professionals would be advised to skip the generic hosts and use a specialised hosting company instead
Joomla hosting requires a certain environment on the server and a host that is geared up to meeting these requirements is obviously a good thing. They will check that all the necessary components and versions meet the published specification by Joomla so that each Joomla installation is seamless.
Customer service
Regardless of how nice a generic hosting company might be, at heart they have only 2 major concerns
- keep the server running (regardless of performance).
- make sure you’re paying your bill on time.
While the second rule applies to every hosting company (although smaller hosting companies are likely to be more flexible on this), if you are having issues with your Joomla site, chances are you’re on your own for support (as they are not liable for your software).
A specialized host will be concerned with performance issues, and will have experts available to help fix your site or give you advice on how to improve performance.
Do your research
You wouldn’t take on a member of staff without checking them out, so take a few minutes to do the same for a prospective host. Have they had bad reviews? What sort of uptime* have they had?
Read through their support status pages, if they publish them publicly. I recently looked at http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/ from DreamHost, a large US webhost.I was quite surprised to see almost daily problems reported, and the length of time if took for some to be resolved: “The server is currently being restored via backups and could take a few days for this to complete.” * Are they sending the backups via carrier pigeon? The flippant style also grates – if this was my data, this sort of comment wouldn’t help me explain it to my boss:
Trusted Sources
The Joomla site has a section on hosting resources: http://resources.joomla.org/directory/support-services/hosting.html and there are many others across the web.
Unlimited hosting
It’s a promise we’ve all heard time and again. Web hosting companies are offering “unlimited” hosting for mere pennies a month.
The truth about “unlimited” hosting is that it is actually very limited. If you read the fine print on any unlimited contract, you’ll find that a variety of restrictions are placed on the account, including, in many cases, bans on providing streaming media, image hosting or other bandwidth/storage-intense activities.
“we do not support the use of our hosting services for personal file storage or back-up purposes and the use of your hosting account for that purpose is prohibited.”*. Because the limits are ‘soft’ limits it means the host can apply them at any time, without warning. http://randydeluxe.com/just-yappin/an-open-letter-to-bluehost/
In short, your use of the server is only “unlimited” as long as it doesn’t cause a problem and, if it does, you may find that your site goes dark.
Choosing a Host Summary
Even though choosing a specialized host is on average more expensive than a generic host, you will find the environment and support superior to the average hosting company. Of course this does not just apply to Joomla. 2020Media also supports content managements systems like Drupal and WordPress with the same fanatical attention to detail. Please Contact Us if you’d like to find out more.
