There are many thousands of web hosting companies, most of which provide hosting that is suitable for running a Joomla website. How can you narrow down your choice to a company that will provide the best service for your site? There are various things to take into consideration...

Essential Features

The first and most important requirement of course, is that the configuration provided is capable of running Joomla. The minimum requirements for running Joomla are:

PHP (ostensibly you can use PHP4, but it is highly recommended to use PHP5)
MySQL 3.23 or higher (MySQL 5 recommended)

That is basically it - as long as those 2 work ok, Joomla will most likely run ok too. However, it is also highly recommended to use:

Apache 1.3 or higher (Apache 2 recommended)

It is possible to run Joomla on IIS (Microsoft's web server for Windows) rather than Apache, but some people do experience problems with that configuration (if not with Joomla itself, possibly with Joomla extensions). Apache will run on both Windows and Unix/Linux systems, but Linux is much more popular (for website hosting), and is also usually cheaper.

So when meeting the basic requirements to run Joomla, an ideal web host will provide:

Linux Operating System
Apache 2
PHP 5
MySQL 5

Support

Once you have identified the essential technical specifications of your ideal hosting account, probably the next most important factor is the level, quality, and speed of the support service. If you experience problems with your site (and most sites do experience problems from time to time), you need to be able to get help fast.

Some hosting companies offer 24/7 support, however this is not always as great as it sounds. It is not unknown for support requests to take more than 24 hours to get a response, even with a supposedly 24/7 helpdesk. Sales enquiries tend to get answered very quickly and are often dealt with by a separate department, so the only real way to check the speed of technical support is to try it out - but that means signing up for an account first! This might be ok if they offer a money back guarantee or limited commitment (eg. 1 month), but make sure you try out the technical support as early as possible - even if you don't really need any help.

Do you really need 24/7 technical support though? Whilst your hosting company should certainly provide 24/7 monitoring, and have technicians available to address emergencies affecting the availability of the server at all hours, technical support for day-to-day matters can usually be catered for quite adequately during business hours. So it is generally not worth paying extra for 24/7 support unless you really are going to require help with uploading a file at 2am (or whatever), as long as the hosting company has arrangements in place for 24/7 monitoring and will deal with server problems swiftly at all hours.

If the company publishes a service level agreement (SLA) or something similar, they might commit to answering support tickets within a given amount of time, so that is worth checking. It is also worth looking for reviews from the company's existing customers, or asking for recommendations from anyone you might know with a website. You might be able to find independent information about the company on a comparison site. This might also contain information about the performance of the company's servers - see this example of Netshine's own hosting service: http://www.webhostingstuff.com/company/NetshineHosting.html. Be aware though that many web hosting comparison sites that feature the 'top x hosting companies' are biased towards the companies that pay them for featured listings rather than those that get better customer reviews.

For Joomla websites, you can really narrow down the number of providers you are willing to consider by checking which ones provide technical support for Joomla - most hosting companies will not support the Joomla content management system itself, only the server configuration and control panel they provide.

Security

How secure your website will be from crackers depends not only on the server configuration, but also on the scripts and software you upload to your account. So no matter how secure the hosting configuration is, you also bear some responsibility for ensuring that you keep your software (not only Joomla, but any other scripts or addons you might have installed) up-to-date, and only acquiring such software from reputable sources.

Still there are some simple configuration settings that will greatly improve the security of a hosting account, such as ensuring PHP is configured with register_globals and allow_url_fopen off. You should also check to make sure that your hosting company will automatically upgrade the server software (operating system, control panel, PHP, etc.) as soon as security patches are published. For more information about security, see our articles on website security and Joomla security.

Hardware and Performance

It is also important to know the company's policies with regard to server load. The number of websites that can reasonably be hosted on a single server depends on the specification of the server. Some companies cram as many sites as they can onto each server, thus overloading it - and causing your site to run more slowly. This can be especially problematic if you need to upload or download large numbers of files (eg. when setting up or copying your site from another machine).

A 'rule of thumb' that is sometimes used is that a single processor can handle up to 200 average small business websites. If a server has 2 processors, it might therefore be expected to handle up to 400 sites. Of course, a small, static HTML site will not make as many demands on the server as a larger, database-driven site (such as a Joomla site), so the only real way of managing the server load is to monitor it regularly. We like to ensure that our average server load generally remains at around half the capacity of the processors, to allow for peaks in traffic.

It can be useful to check whether the hosting company is just a reseller for another company. If so, it is likely that they will not have root access to their servers - meaning that they may not have full control over the server, and there is also a higher probability that the server will be overloaded (this is a common problem with reseller accounts). Still, reselling is not always a bad thing, as smaller hosting companies tend to offer a more personal, attentive service, and at least they have another level of support that they can escalate problems to, or verify information with.

Overselling

A related issue is that of 'overselling'. This is where a company assigns more disk space and/or bandwidth per hosting account than the server those accounts are on can actually provide. This is because the vast majority of sites will not use up anywhere near the amount of disk space or bandwidth allocated to the account, so even if one or two sites do use up all of their quota, the server can cope because most accounts are only using a tiny fraction of theirs. Of course, if everybody decided to use all of their quota, the disk would fill up, and the server might crash - but in reality, not everyone will use up all their quota.

Overselling is a very common practise (my estimate is that more than 99% of hosting companies do it), and is sometimes criticised, however, as long as the server is managed properly, overselling does not really cause any problems. For most hosting companies, it is seen as necessary - otherwise they cannot compete with other companies that oversell (as they would have to severely restrict the disk space and bandwidth allowances per account). As long as the servers are monitored, and accounts are moved to a different server if they start taking up too much space or bandwidth, overselling can work out ok (as long as the company can meet their quota commitments if required), but you might want to check up on the company's policies in this regard before you sign up for an account.

Perhaps less ethical than general overselling, is another common practise of offering what is impossible to provide. For example, many hosting companies advertise 'unlimited bandwidth' or even 'unlimited disk space'. However there is always a limit to how much disk space or bandwidth a hosting service can provide, so whilst it might be 'unmetered', it is misleading and perhaps a little unethical to claim to offer unlimited resources - that is something that cannot be provided.

Location

The geographic location of the server your site will be hosted on can have a significant impact on how it is viewed by search engines, as well as how responsive the site is to your target audience. For example, if your company is based in the UK, and has a predominantly UK target market, hosting on a UK server will improve your position in many search engines for searches made in the UK (most notably of course, Google).

The server will also perform better than if it were housed in another country, as there will not be the same latency while the signal travels through various ISPs between your computer and the server. You might have to pay a little extra for hosting in your own country, but is is usually worth it (hosting in the US is typically cheaper than hosting in the UK).

As well as knowing which country the server is located in, the physical housing of the server is also important. For maximum reliability, the server should be housed in a secure data centre (not a spare bedroom!). Custom built data centres usually have various levels of redundancy and backup facilities to reduce the risk of your site going down or losing data.

Features

There are a number of additional features (beyond the basic requirements for running Joomla) to look out for when selecting a hosting company for a Joomla website. Here are the features we would not be without:

A good control panel. In our opinion, the best web hosting control panel currently available is cPanel . It offers a huge range of features, is very intuitive, and the user interface is designed in such a way that most things can be accessed very quickly, without having to navigate through various levels of hierarchy. Another popular control panel is Plesk , which looks nice, and has some good features, but is rather slow and cumbersome to use, and not as intuitive as cPanel. cPanel is more expensive than Plesk though, so you might have to pay a bit extra for it.

mod_rewrite. This is an Apache module that allows URLs (web page addresses) to be re-written. This is especially useful if you want search engine friendly (SEF) URLs for your website's pages. Even though Joomla 1.5 no longer requires mod_rewrite for the most basic form of SEF URLs, more sophisticated solutions (eg. third party components that provide keyword rich page addresses) will benefit from using mod_rewrite to convert the SEF URLs into ones that can be understood by Joomla. mod_rewrite also has many other uses, and you may well find that sooner or later you need to use it (or you install a component or other script that relies on it).

suPHP. This is an exceptionally useful tool for allowing PHP scripts to be run under the username of the hosting account. This eliminates virutally all file and folder permissions problems, as by default (ie. without suPHP), PHP scripts run under a separate username and must be made world writable before you can edit them yourself (eg. using an FTP client). suPHP saves an awful lot of headaches and makes it much easier to administer a Joomla site.

mod_security. Another Apache module, this time a type of firewall to intercept many common hacking attempts and deny access to hackers. While no substitute for good quality software, it may help prevent your site being hacked through old or amateur Joomla components.

Statistics. It is useful to know how well your site is performing, which pages get the most hits, where your visitors are coming from (both geographically, and in terms of which website referred them to yours), which search terms were used to locate your site, and how your site traffic changes over time. You can use third party services such as Google analytics, but it is also good to have a decent stats package as part of your hosting account. A very popular and comprehensive statistics application is awStats ('Advanced Web Statistics'). This gives a detailed breakdown of your site's visitors and trends. Another common stats package is Webalizer, which gives you some graphical feedback, but is not quite as detailed as awStats.

Extras

Does the company offer a free domain name with your account? Do they allow you to host more than one website on a single account? Will they pre-install Joomla for you? Do they backup your site for you automatically every day or week? Do they provide a discount if you pay annually instead of monthly? If you can't decide between two providers, sometimes these little 'extras' can make all the difference.

Netshine Software provides reliable Joomla hosting in the UK and in the US.