4 Tips For Finding a Joomla Host

This guide is meant to be a quick and easy way to help you find the best Joomla hosts. There are just a few tips that should help you when you make your decision.

First, lets talk about Joomla. Joomla is a CMS (Content Management System) which means it helps people organize their website without knowing much HTML or CSS.

When you host a Joomla site it’s good to have a certain set of criteria that you are looking for. Thats what this guide is going to help to do; give you a set of criteria that helps most people find the right host.

1. Speed & Reliability

A web hosting study recently found that customers prefer speed and uptime over several other factors. You can read the full web hosting study here.

Good speed is important because search engines take page load times into consideration. This means it may be ranked higher for faster speed. Also, it’s been shown that people will leave pages that take to long to load.

2. Price

Simply put, you get what you pay for. Usually most hosting plans are structured a little differently for marketing purpose in order to highlight some of their specials.

Features like unlimited space, bandwidth, email accounts, domains hosted, FTP accounts, and others. It’s important which features you find most important for your site so you do not pay for something you do not need. Only need 1 email? Then go with a host who offers you more bandwidth or speed, for example.

3. Research

Finding an excellent Joomla host is all about spending the time understanding why one is better than another one. Reading reviews about the hosting companies will help you shape the opinion you have of a company before you buy a plan from them.

Many sites let other users review the host which helps get a well rounded opinion. At the same time you need to trust the site that is posting the reviews in the first place. Make sure they seem honest and trustworthy.

4. Scripts, Access and Control Panel

Some scripts are required by Joomla. We’ll cover some real quick. PHP, MySQL, Apache, Nginx, or Microsoft IIS. Make sure they are all running the latest versions. Most companies will say can host Joomla, but do not run the latest versions of the scripts. This can be problematic but usually is fixable when an error comes up.

The ability to change the .htaccess file from inside of Joomla can be helpful if you have an extension like sh404SEF used to rewrite URLs or customize 404 pages.

There is one really great control panel out their most hosts use called, cPanel. Most shared hosting plans use it or a variation of it.

Conclusion

These four tips will hopefully make your search for a Joomla hosting company a little easier. Remember researching is key. Talk to the sales people, ask tough questions and try to figure out exactly what you need so you can tell them. Hope you find these tidbits of information helpful.