During the course of the last 5 years I’ve had the opportunity to work on a number of different Joomla & WordPress web hosting providers. These were basically “shared hosting accounts” the customers had purchased. The attraction of a shared hosting account is basically the low cost. For anywhere from $5.99 to $19.95 per monthly you can host your website, get email capability and a host of other features. It really can be a great deal.

There a number of issues though that I have seen come up with the different providers. Paying $4.95 per month for your website hosting may seem like a great deal but it all goes down the drain if your site is constantly having problems.

Here are a few of the issues I’ve encountered in the past dealing with some of the cheaper web hosting services:

1) Slow sever response times.

I see this a lot with the really cheap hosting service plans. Unless you are running your Joomla installation with a good caching component, the Joomla CMS is constantly querying the database to retrieve the content and present the web pages. All these queries start to add up especially if the other customers running on your shared hosting server are doing the same thing. The database bogs down a bit and your site response time goes way up. I’ve seen this a lot with Godaddy’s really cheap web hosting plans. The response time for the web sites at times is terrible.

2) Mis-configured servers for running Joomla.

The Joomla WCMS needs certain processes and software running on the web server to run optimally. For the most part most of the web host providers handle this well. They either are running the correct processes or they have something similar running that will work as a workaround. Some though have their own particular web server configurations that will have you pulling your hair out trying to get Joomla to work. One of these is Yahoo Small Business hosting. At the time of this writing without going into all the technical jargon I wouldn’t advise running your Joomla installation on Yahoo Small Business hosting. There are so many thing you have to tweak on your Joomla install to get it to run securely it isn’t for the beginner to tackle.

For the most part if you choose a web provider that offers the Linux platform with Cpanel access in the hosting plan you are safe and will probably be able to run your Joomla installation optimally.

3) Poor technical support.

This is the number one killer to keeping your website up and running optimally.

In the computer word you will eventually have problems with your website in some form. The ability to access trained technical support staff quickly and efficiently is a number one concern.  Notice I said ‘trained technical support staff’ and not just customer support. We’ve all been through the nightmare of reporting a problem to either a web company, our phone company, etc.,  and gettind a general support person on the phone. They usually have zero technical knowledge and often are just offering triage to your problem until a technical person picks up the support ticket. This can be infuriating as it becomes apparent the person has no clue how to solve your issue nor can they state affirmatively when t will be looked at by someone that does. I can  get around this as I usually know exactly what the problem is but don’t have any access to the web server to make the change myself, Web server admin access is not something you are given with your shared hosting plan. You have to contact the web host for their administrators to fix it. A few hosting providers have put me immediately through to the server admins to get the problem resolved. Most will not do this. They will simple pacify you as much as they can and then tell you your support ticket will be looked at shortly.  In a way you really can’t blame them. When you are only paying $5.95 per month for your hosting plan you can’t expect $100 per hour service. I did though find a very responsive Joomla web hosting provider that I recommend.

Who Do I recommend?

Potential clients often ask me for recommendations on which web hosting provider they should use. I’ve worked on or had accounts with most of them from Godaddy, 1&1, Siteground, Net Firms, Dreamhost, Blacknight, Host Gator, etc., and the the one I recommend for my client is Rochen Host. They have the absolute best support I’ve seen in the industry. This is just my opinion but it is based on countless calls to different support centers. Whenever I needed a server change or special configuration they were ultra responsive. It is a very professional company to deal with and they will bend over backwards to give you the proper support.

Let me start out my Rochenhost review by saying that Rochenhost will not be for everyone. Where most top hosting providers try to lure you with promises of unlimited bandwidth and more gigabytes of disk space then you will ever use, Rochenhost provides a different path for web success.

Their formula? Expertly tuned servers, complete backup protection and experienced customer/technical support.

I’ve been touting Host Gator for the last few years as my web hosting choice. This all changed when I gave Rochenhost a try after hearing great things about them form the Joomla community. Hey this company even hosts the official joomla.org website!

Rochenhost vs. Host Gator

Let me say now that I have nothing bad to say about Host Gator through my experience with them. I host many websites with them as well as have a reseller account for a number of my sites. I think they provide fantastic value for any business.

Where Rochenhost outshines them is in the overall attention to detail in their offerings. When should you give Rochenhost a consideration?

You should consider Rochenhost when you have websites that are earning money for you! Any website that is earning money should be moved to a Rochenhost account if for no other reason than for the ‘Rochen Vault‘ service which is a part of every plan.

If you can’t afford to wake up one morning and find out that your site is gone and you haven’t practiced a solid backup strategy you need the ‘Rochen Vault‘.

To quote the Rochen website:

at Rochen, backups are one of the single most important services we offer along with solid performance and no nonsense technical support..

Amen.

Solid performance may be an understatement with Rochenhost.

I recently transferred a clients websites form Netfirms to her new account at Rochen.

At one point both sites were live so I did a speed test to compare them. They were the exact same Joomla 1.5.12 site with a lot of video on the home page that would start automatically.

The site running on Netfirms took 3.92 seconds to load. The same site running at Rochen loaded in .052 seconds!

Add to this the fact that working in the administration backend of Joomla can be a slow painful process on most webhost. With Rochen you’ll fly from screen to screen and doing maintenance work actually becomes enjoyed it is so fast.

The only downside if their is any is that the web plan at Rochen have much less space allotments than all other providers.

That is why I say that you should use this provider for your websites that earn money. The Rochenhost service is the creme de la creme for running a Joomla  or WordPress website (any anything less database intensive).

I highly recommend them as your first choice to host your business websites.