Joomla can be regarded as one of the most widely used content management systems on the web, downloaded by millions of webmasters for setting up different kinds of websites featuring different sizes. Due to this circumstance, almost all the web hosts claim that they offer the 100% compatible Joomla hosting service, coming with great quality at an affordable price. Is it true? Of course not.
In the following, we’d like to tell you how to pick up the real quality Joomla hosting by checking some necessary requirements. Note that never believe the promises of your web hosts, but review their services carefully to figure out whether they can meet their words.
Joomla Compatibility
This is the first thing you need to take into account. If your selected web host fails to fulfill the 100% Joomla compatibility, your may face lots of running issues of your site.
According to the official site of Joomla.org, the minimum requirements of Joomla software are PHP with the version higher than 5.3, MySQL with the version higher than 5.1 and Apache with the version higher than 2.x. Note that these requirements are better for Joomla 3. If you use some lower versions, the requirements can be downgraded.
Hosting Price
After making sure that your hosting package is absolutely Joomla compatible, you should pay attention to the prices. Generally, the web hosting charge is around $10/mo. Thus, if your web host charges you more than $15 each month, you’d better not to choose it. After all, you can even purchase a VPS hosting with this level of charge.
On the contrary, we do not recommend you to choose some extremely cheap or even free solutions, for these hosting packages are generally full of scams and frauds. Personally thinking, from $4/mo to $7/mo can be viewed as a moderate price range for Joomla hosting.
In fact, there are still some large and famous Joomla hosts that offer quality Joomla hosting at an affordable price. Therefore, if you really want some cheap options due to your limited budgets, but do not want to compromise the hosting quality, you can refer to this award page to find the cost-effective Joomla web hosting.
Hosting Features
Now, let’s move to the third aspect - hosting features. This aspect does not require you to think too many, as you only need to figure out whether the hosting package offers the following things.
· Sufficient allocation of disk spaces and monthly data transfer. Do not believe the so-called unlimited hosting, but to ask their pre-sales support staffs to know the exact allocation.
· Easy-to-use control panel such as cPanel and vDeck. 1-click Joomla installer such as Fantastico and Softaculous.
· Free beneficial extras such as domain name, content delivery network, advertising credits, regular backup service and many more.
· Long period for money back or refunding.
Hosting Performance
This is the most important aspect when evaluating the quality of Joomla hosting, for it directly affects the running speed and uptime rate of your website.
Generally, the hosting performance of a web hosting package is influenced by the web servers and data centers used by the web hosts. Therefore, if a hosting company uses the DELL servers or other solid brands with a high level of specification, and locates these servers at multiple data centers featuring the security system and 24/7 monitoring, it can undoubtedly offer a quality service with a good performance.
However, checking the real information of these two aspects is hard. Some of the web hosts even fail to list their server information on the official website. Therefore, to figure out the hosting performance, the best way is to check the real customer feedbacks about this aspect. Or, you can refer to the professional hosting review sites that are exclusive to Joomla such as BestHostingForJoomla, checking how webmasters and professionals view the Joomla hosting offered by some web hosts.
Technical Support
This is the last respect that is always ignored by newbies. In fact, no one can guarantee that he would never meet some emergency hosting issues. In this case, a responsive and professional technical support is necessary.
To check this factor, you need to begin with the contact channels. Whether you can contact support people via email, live chat and phone? Whether the support team is available all the times? These are your two questions.
Then, you can have a try on your own. Raise a question and look for resolutions. If the support people can give a clear and professional response within the shortest time, then this web host does well on this aspect.