What is the Best Hosting for Joomla?

This is a question we are often asked. What is the best hosting company for Joomla websites? We have tried at least half a dozen, and what we have found is there are certain criteria that you must consider when making a decision. Unfortunately we cannot say we have found one company that is aces at everything, but we have found several that have come really close.

We do not have a server where we provide hosting for our customers. Instead set up their own hosting accounts with a service. In this way our customers have dominion over their website. Since we aren’t the hosts, we have tried many companies to find the best fit for Joomla optimization as well as customer service.

When choosing a host for Joomla, you cannot just choose anybody. Hosting requires a certain set of parameters in order for the Joomla site to run properly. This is why it is important to choose a company that specializes in optimizing their servers to host Joomla sites.

What do we think?

Here is our assessment of companies the we have used. This assessment is based on actual experience with these companies. Please don’t be upset if we’ve left your company off the list. If you’re not on the list, it’s because we haven’t tried you yet. Email us, and we’ll be happy to give it a go. In the chart below we’ve graded some of the services provided to give you an idea of how well they perform. In cases where there really isn’t a measure of service (i.e. unlimited bandwidth), we just wrote yes/no.

What host do we use?

If you’re wondering what host this blog is on, it’s hosted on Siteground. Our company website, Landau Design, is hosted on Interactive Online. Although lately we’ve been considering moving our company site to Hostgator because they seem to have to best combination of what we need, and we have seen no down time since we started using them.

What host do you use for your Joomla site, and how do you like them?

Free Webinar: What is Joomla & Why Should I Care?

If you are planning on building a new website, or rebuilding an old one, you should research developing your site with Joomla. This power open-source content management system offers many benefits to the development process, and makes it a cinch for non-technical users to keep updated.

Dynamic websites are the vogue, and keeping your site current is critical. Building your site in a content management system like Joomla gives you the control over your site. No more do you have spend thousands of dollars each year having a developer make updates. Now you have the reins, and you decide who will make changes.

On Tuesday, January 26 at 11 am PST, Join us for this FREE Joomla webinar and we will share with you why we decided to specialize in Joomla development. We will cover:

• What is a content management system and why it’s a great tool for managing a website
• What is Joomla
• How Joomla works to create a dynamic content site
• How Joomla can be extended to provide complex functionality without corresponding development costs.

This webinar is FREE, so register now and join us for an hour and learn about the hippest tools in the web world today. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us at info@landaudesign.com.

High Profile Sites Show How Well Joomla Performs

Many clients wonder how something given away for free could possible be worthwhile. Fortunately, the addage “you get what you pay for” does not apply when it comes to Joomla. It is open source software and free to whomever wishes to download (although they do appreciate donations for their efforts), but Joomla is a very robust and powerful tool for managing your web content. 

Website performance is dictated by many things, including:

• the amount of traffic you get
• the server the site resides on
• how well the site is optimized for performance
• the speed of the user’s computer processor and/or internet connection
  

Even on the best of servers, a very high-traffic site may experience some performance issues. A person’s Internet connection can also influence performance, so the same site may perform differently on different computers. A Joomla site will perform very well if it has been built and optimized for performance.

Big Companies Relying on Joomla
I have pulled some higher-traffic sites that use Joomla so you could see who else might be relying on its capabilities:

• Cable & Wireless
• IHOP (International House of Pancakes) 
• Harvard Graduate School of Arts & Sciences 
• Outdoor Photographer 
• Oklahoma State University 
• Central Texas Regional Mobility Authority 
• City of Boulder, Colorado 
• Olympus, Australia
• Roland, Edirol
• Samuel L. Jackson official website 
• The Guggenheim Museum  
• Aixam 
• Mitsubushi Motors Poland 
• Association of Yale Alumni 
• Century21 
• PSComputing
  

You can see a whole directory of Joomla sites by visiting the Joomla Community Showcase at Joomla.org.

Joomla Branded the Most Popular CMS

At Landau Design we find Joomla to be an easy and effective tool for creating and maintaining websites. We’ve been using it for years, but recent surveys have shown that its popularity has gained increasing market share. Joomla, Wordpress and Drupal are considered the “big 3″ applications used to build websites. While Joomla and Drupal are true CMS (content management system) platforms, Wordpress is actually a blogging platform that is evolving to something like a CMS.

Don’t take our word for it…
Recently many CMS-watch entities have been releasing reports and surveys on the platforms used for creation of CMS-managed websites. CMS Wire put out a 20-page report that shows Joomla is the most popular CMS on the market.

In June 2009 saw the 10 millionth download of Joomla from Joomla.org, and it is estimated over 50 million sites worldwide are built using the platform.

And in 2007, 2008 and 2009 Joomla won awards from Packt Publishing’s CMS Awards. The 2009 CMS Awards is in progress, and Joomla is once again in the running for another trophy.

The great news about being popular
With all the hype about Joomla’s popularity, it bolsters the community and brings in new users. That means that Joomla isn’t going away, and with a thriving development community, it’s only going to get better. Joomla 1.6 beta has been released, so in 2010 we can look forward to an even easier and more effective Joomla platform.

What are the Advantages of Using Joomla?

Since we build most of our sites in Joomla, we are often asked what the advantages are to a Joomla-driven site. Here are the reasons we feel Joomla is the optimum solution for our clients:

Sites are built faster
We actually tried an experiment where we built a site in Joomla and then built the same site in HTML. It was a 28-page site with an image gallery, guestbook and static content. The HTML site took nearly twice as long to build as the Joomla site. Joomla is quicker and easier to implement than a traditional HTML site.

Client can update quickly and easily
With traditional HTML sites the owner of the site either has to know HTML or Dreamweaver (or similar editor) in order to update their content. Often with HTML sites there is an update cycle where the owner contacts the developer to request changes, then they have to wait for the developer to fit it into their production schedule. With Joomla, most of the content can be updated by somebody familiar with a program like Microsoft Word. This makes for quicker and easier updating of content.

Advanced functionality without development costs
There are over 4,500 plug-ins for Joomla that add additional functionality to the core program. Many of these plug-ins include complext functionality that would cost thousands of dollars to develop for an HTML site. For example, for an online calendar we use JEvents. We can install the calendar, set up categories, input a few events and set up an upcoming events sidebar in about an hour. To have this integrated into an HTML site would probably require 6-8 hours of a developers time. Joomla saves time and money!

Popular platform
Joomla is quickly becoming the most popular CMS available. Developers and designers are learning more and about how to utilize the platform, and companies are proud to share that their site was built with this open-source CMS. It’s become easy to find developers to help you add-on to your Joomla site, and the popularity means more and more extensions are being developed to increase possible functionality. The best thing is, Joomla is not a fad. It has a long history and continues to evolve as the support community around it continues to grow.

What do you think are the advantages of Joomla?
Share with us in the comment section about why you think Joomla is a great choice for web development.