Best Joomla Hosting Providers
Joomla is one of the most popular and powerful CMS. It is used by thousands of websites including popular sites like Linux.com, Unrig.org, Harvard University, MTV Greece, and many others. Joomla is mainly used for online shops, forums and community websites, however many choose to use Joomla for their blog or company website.
What to Expect from a Joomla Host?
Joomla runs best on linux web servers that support PHP and MySQL. Being a powerful software does require special attention regarding server optimization. There are many hosting providers that offer PHP and MySQL database hosting, but that does not mean that the server is compatible with Joomla. The current version of the software (3.4) requires PHP 5.3+ and MySQL 4.0+ and some other php extensions. If this is not covered, you can say goodbye to your plan to make your site with Joomla.
The ideal hosting plan for Joomla:
- optimized server that offers all the necessary features that Joomla requires
- one click Joomla installation possibility to website
- support team that can help you with Joomla related issues
- Joomla tutorials that will help you customize your website
- tools to make your Joomla website faster and easier to build
The content management system you choose for your company’s website will affect your business. The failure or the success of your website highly depends on the reliability of the CMS you chose. Joomla is one of the most popular content management system, which has proven its reliability over the years. Joomla is open source and free to use. It is a powerful application that is used by hundreds of thousands of websites world-wide. The CMS is great for those who are just starting out, and also for advanced users and webmasters.
7 Best Joomla Web Hosting Companies
Below you will find a list of best Joomla hosting providers we recommend:
1. HostGator
Are you looking for a business website or a personal website hosting plan? If your answer is yes, then HostGator is the right choice for you. This powerful Joomla web hosting provider will help you achieve all your website needs and provide you with the right confidence in knowing that you have indeed partnered with the most reliable and secure hosting platform on the market today.
Apparently, HostGator boasts for being one of the easiest web hosting providers you can think of and remains fully committed to providing you with the best hosting solutions today. Why is the case? HostGator’s website builder prides itself in providing you with an incredible and convenient drag-and-drop web building experience. At the same time, this platform allows you to choose from a wide range of themes and pre-built sections in a bid to create your own amazing site.
Also, HostGator can assist you when it comes to transferring your existing content from your current host and help you configure it for optimum performance on your new platform. Apart from the content transfer, HostGator can as well help you transfer your domain registration without much of a hassle so you may manage your online portfolio from one convenient location of your choice. Other factors that make HostGator be one of the best Joomla web hosting providers is its guarantee to you of a 24/7 support, 45-day money-back guarantee and 99.9 % uptime.
2. BlueHost
Why should you choose BlueHost as one of the best Joomla web hosting provider for you? Probably, your answer should start by stating clearly that this platform provides a complete hosting solution that will assure you of great performance, functionality and reliability to power your project. Additionally, BlueHost gives you the best platform to host your Joomla site in a more convenient way.
This platform will provide you with a secure and complete Joomla hosting solution for your website in general. Most importantly, it is easy to use, a fact that coincidentally relates well with the Joomla’s popularity world-over as an open source CMS tool that comes complete with its simple but functional interface.
Given that Joomla is scalable, using it on BlueHost means that your site will grow as you progress along thanks to its functionality and the advanced features that come with it. On top of that, you will not need to learn all the tiresome intricate of HTML but you will only have to manage your content while Joomla takes great care of the coding on your behalf. With the 24/7 customer support and 99.9% uptime, BlueHost is an ideal Joomla web hosting provider for you.
3. InMotion Hosting
InMotion Hosting comes in handy to enable you to enjoy the best Joomla hosting essentials on the market today. Starting with its free SSD drives, InMotion will provide your site with solid-state drives for faster writing and reading speeds. This includes an amazing uptime for faster delivery of the content right from your blog online store, web site or custom built application.
Your experience with InMotion Hosting will not be the same again when using it as your Joomla web hosting provider. This means that you will have your website transferred from the previous host to the new servers absolutely free of charge and without downtime. This is quite advantageous to you in any way you can think of.
As if that is not all you can expect from InMotion Hosting platform, there is still more to come. Actually, this web hosting service provider is leading in the industry with its 90-day money-back guarantee. This way, you can spend your money buying the hosting services with full confidence knowing that your full satisfaction is guaranteed and all your hosting needs are fully covered.
Still on what InMotion provides, you will also have the privilege of having a free backup of your data in order to protect it. While other competitors charge for this service, InMotion will provide it for you free of charge when you purchase Joomla hosting. Other ways you can benefit from InMotion Hosting include pre-installation of Joomla, vulnerability prevention(through suPHP Security), easy to use in three-step wizard by Google Apps integration, SSH Access for working faster and finally choosing your data center through Max Speed Zone.
4. GreenGeeks
GreenGeeks is an all-inclusive secure, fast and reliable Joomla hosting service provider. It doesn’t matter whether you are tech savvy, a veteran Joomla website developer or just a Joomla beginner, GreenGeeks will give you everything necessary for your Joomla website. These include an unlimited web space and data transfer, free Joomla migration, access to free Joomla optimized servers, free enhanced security for your data, 99.9% service uptime, free one-click Joomla install, free domain name registration and transfer, free blazing fast SSD-RAID-10 storage, 24/7 customer support and 30-day money-back guarantee.
When it comes to Joomla web hosting, GreenGeeks is faster, scalable and eco-friendly. This web hosting provider is fully engineered to perform optimally while being environmentally friendly. On the other hand, this platform lets you have the best hosting experience, in speed technology, security and down-to-earth technical support to keep you going on with your online activities.
Even though GreenGeeks is just a single platform, the best part of this web hosting provider is that it has multiple hosting options for you to choose from. This way, all your hosting requirements will fit well in this platform. That is the reason why GreenGeeks is regarded as the best Joomla web hosting provider you can always count on and feel good about it.
5. A2Hosting
If you are looking for a Joomla web hosting provider with a reputation for providing rock-solid and blazing fast web servers, A2 Hosting should be your ultimate choice. As your hosting solution, A2 Hosting is well-known for specializing in hosting for web developers. Despite that allegation, you will still get the best performance and reliable Joomla hosting using A2 Hosting platform.
A2 Hosting is a shared web hosting provider with its shared hosting plans being faster than other competitors in the industry. Besides, this web hosting provider offers 24/7/365 customer support for subscribers, unlimited resources, ultra-reliable servers and free migration for your website. Among the shared features you will come across the following; PHP, Python, PERL, Node.JS, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Apache, FTP/SFTP access to the server environment, free SSH access and shared SSL certificate.
Every shared plan on this platform come with a standard free SSD storage for quality performance. Also, A2 Hosting provides an impressive speed for the website and a solid uptime. Regardless of which hosting option you settle for, you will have 3 different plans with each coming with an SSD storage and unmetered bandwidth. But the higher level plans have additional features with every plan coming with standards such as auto-installers and databases.
6. FastComet
FastComet provides you with the optimal Joomla web hosting experience possible. This platform comes with a free domain whereby every Joomla hosting plan has a free domain name. In case you have a free domain, then you may get a free transfer to FastComet without any problem whatsoever. Either way, there will be no need to have your domain name renewed again. Everything will be renewed on your behalf and free of charge provided that you have your Joomla website hosted by FastComet.
FastComet assures you of Joomla SSD hosting that will give you 300 % optimum performance. This performance comes about by decreasing the random access time down to 0.1 milliseconds for files and database. Additionally, FastComet helps distribute your Joomla website content to reach your target audience while speeding up your website using its free CloudFlare CDN.
The cPanel powered hosting, however, is the most popular as well as powerful website hosting control panel for effective point and click management of your Joomla site. Other additional features that come with FastComet include free weekly and daily Joomla Backups to safeguard your data, 24/7/365 Joomla customer support, fixed prices and 45 days money-back guarantee.
7. SiteGround
SiteGround is a fast and secure web hosting provider for a successful business and personal websites. This platform lets you migrate or build your website and launch it easily and quickly. For your web transfer, SiteGround helps you achieve this feat using its dedicated and knowledgeable migration experts or through an automated migration.
Most significantly, SiteGround comes with its web hosting essentials that are crafted primarily for easy management of your website. To achieve this goal, this platform will ensure that you get an ultra-fast site that will enable you to enjoy the best and super-fast website performance thanks to its servers that run on PHP 7 and SSD disks servers. In addition to that, you will get static caching with free CDN services that will boost your site’s performance.
SiteGround has a reputation for its top-notch security which manages websites at application and server levels. The hosting provider offers a free Let’s Encrypt-SSL to keep your data safe by providing daily backups. Furthermore, you will be able to easily manage your website especially if it is built on the popular CMS such as Joomla, WordPress and many others. You can get started right from the SiteGround customer area and cPanel control both of which are readily packed with tools that will save your effort and time. Other services that this web hosting provider is known for include domain management and reliable email services.
Is Joomla Easy To Use?
As a user, this is the main question that comes into my mind before using a software: is it easy to use? I don’t want to spend much time for figuring out how to use it. I want to get started with it right away.
The great news is that Joomla is very straight forward. It is fact that requires some time to learn Joomla, especially if you never used a content management system before.
What is Joomla exactly used for? Here is couple of website examples that you can make with Joomla:
- Small business and corporate sites
- eCommerce sites and online shops
- Hotel reservation and booking sites
- News portals and community sites / forums
Joomla is also easy to extend. The core installation allows you to add pages, contact forms, change templates, create menus and customize the layout of pages with modules. However you can extend the functionality of the core by adding extensions (modules, plugins, components).
If you know PHP, you can also modify the template or customize existing modules. Because the software is open source, you have full access to the PHP files. Joomla uses object oriented programming, which makes even easier to work with it.
Here are some of the main features of Joomla core:
- User management
- Article and image upload
- Quick contact form
- Polls and blogs
- SEO configuration
- Page cache and Gzip
- WYSIWG editor
Pros and Cons of Joomla CMS
Joomla is a great CMS, however there are some pros and cons, which are important when selecting Joomla for your website
Pros of Joomla
- It is an open-source for a handful of extensions to manage your web site
- Flexible content and structure
- Not too developer-oriented whereby you don’t need to be a professional to use it
- Joomla comes with the best interface for managing a sizeable number of articles
- It offers free video tutorials
- Joomla has a lightweight PHP framework
- Availability of the core functionality to monetize your site with ads
Cons of Joomla
- Joomla is slightly complex compared to WordPress
- Compatibility issues due to frequent updates
- Security concern due to vulnerable extensions
How to Choose the Best Joomla Hosting Service
There are literally hundreds or maybe thousands of hosting companies who offer Joomla hosting. It is really hard to determine who the best Joomla hosting provider is, but there are certainly hosting companies that offer reliable hosting service and great support for Joomla. Check the above mentioned three hosting firms.
If you prefer other hosting providers, the first step to determine if the company support Joomla is to check their server configuration. Joomla requires PHP, MySQL, Apache to run. In addition it would be great to have other features such as phpMyAdmin, mod_rewrite enabled to be able to activate search engine friendly URLs, Gzip and .htaccess.
The operating system of the server is also important if you are going to build your site with Joomla 1.5 or 2.5 versions. If building a new site, I highly recommend using the latest stable version of Joomla. The 3.x version is not OS dependent. It works great on Linux and Windows as well, while the older versions are only compatible with Linux system.
The core Joomla does not require much disk space. Uploading images, videos and articles to your site can quickly increase the size of your site. Installing extensions to your Joomla system will also increase the size of your website. Make sure you choose a hosting plan that offers enough disk space as well bandwidth for your website.
There are other aspects as well when choosing web hosting for Joomla. Here are a few to consider:
- Joomla oriented technical support (if possible 24/7 support) – general web hosting support is not enough, look for a hosting provider who is able to help you out with Joomla related problems as well
- Joomla compatible servers – besides PHP, MySQL there are other features that are needed to run your Joomla site smoothly. Some extensions might require Cron Jobs, suPHP or other features; check if your provider offers these.
- Server work load – you should know that Joomla requires a good amount of server resources to run at a good performance. Some companies might limit your account because your site is using too much CPU or RAM. Check prior with the hosting firm to see what is the maximum allowed server usage for the hosting plan you are going to pick.
Expensive vs Cheap Joomla Hosting
I know that people always want the best Joomla hosting. Most of us believe that something that is cheap can’t be the best. Often we go with the most expensive because we think the service and the performance of that host will be the best. From experience I can tell, that this statement is not always true. In fact, choosing a reliable host with great support will work better than choosing an expensive service with poor or no support at all.
I highly suggest to read customer and expert reviews to find out which host to choose for your website. Some companies might be the best for a group of Joomla users, but would not work for others. Choose a hosting provider that fits you and your project the best.
It is preferred to go with a Joomla hosting provider that offers multiple hosting plans. At the start you can choose a shared plan. As your website grows and the traffic increases, you will need a VPS or dedicated server. If your Joomla site outgrows your current hosting plan, you want a quick and easy upgrade option. Choose a hosting company that has upgrade options.
Always Read Joomla Hosting Reviews
I always suggest reading reviews before buying any service. Do your research and gather information from multiple sources. Do not rely only on one person’s opinion. Here at WebHostingMedia, our experts tries out different hosting service and test their support, performance, uptime, reliability and security. To determine if a host is good for hosting Joomla, we actually install and host a Joomla site on their server. We also seek for customer reviews and publish these on our website. As you can tell, we do publish both positive and negative reviews.
So, if you are looking to purchase a reliable, trustworthy Joomla host for your site, check out the hosting firms that we already tested and mentioned at the top of the page. You can also Google for Joomla hosting providers, but make sure you do your homework and don’t miss out on anything. Good luck!
Conclusion
Joomla has come a long way to deliver a very powerful, well maintained and high-volume capable CMS web hosting platform. Just take drastic measures for your website by signing up with the above expert-recommended web hosts to find out for yourself why Joomla is a better choice of a service provider that brings complex web site projects together.