100% compatible WordPress and Joomla! hosting
The selection of a web hosting provider for your website is important, especially if you have traffic-heavy websites. Or if you hope that your website will grow into a traffic-heavy website. All serious webmasters have such desire.
What can happen if you create a successful website and host it on unreliable hosting provider
There’s a situation that almost every webmaster experienced once. You got a nice idea about a new website. You develop it, upload in on your hosting space, invest some time and money in marketing. Suddenly, it becomes popular! You never thought you would have so many visitors! You are happy and focused on enhancing your website! You don’t even think about your web hosting provider because you remember that they promised “unlimited” traffic, “unlimited” space, “unlimited” this and “unlimited” that. Sobering will happen at the worst possible moment.
You would receive an email from your web hosting provider that your website takes too much of the server’s resources and that your account is has been taken down temporarily!
You will need to think as fast as possible, to look for another provider, to reserve more money for better hosting package, to get used with new hosting provider, to move all files, to setup everything on the new server… It usually takes days. Your site would be unavailable all this time. Your visitors/clients will be disappointed. They will go to the competition’s courtyard. Your Google positions will go down! Oh yes, you will be anxious… This is the end of the story! Not the end of the world, you would get away somehow, with more or less damage. Could it be avoided?
About to run WordPress, Joomla or other CMS site? You need 100% compatible host!
The most popular CMS today are based on PHP and MySQL. Fortunately, almost all web hosting providers includes that, but it’s not enough!
I am not expert for server administration, but I can feel whether my Joomla! or WordPress based site works slow or fast. So, you need a hosting provider with a fast MySQL server because CMS makes many database requests each minute. Otherwise, your website will be opening slower which will frustrate your visitor/clients and you.
The next thing that can make headaches to you are permissions. Usually, WordPress and Joomla sites are hosted on Linux servers. Such servers have very restrictive limitations about who can access or write which file and directory on the system. Joomla and WordPress require all site files to be writable by HTTP server (usually it’s Apache), otherwise they don’t work properly. According to our support forums, this is the most common problem. It’s not solvable easily and it usually repeats over time. From my experience, if your hosting provider uses cPanel for server management, you won’t have any problems with permissions. So, you should consider the cPanel based hosts.
SEF (search friendly) URLs can be produced by all popular CMS platforms. This is where another problem may happen! To allow such option, there are several server settings that must be fulfiled. Many hosting providers know that and set their servers accordingly, but not all. So, you must be sure that SEF URLs produced by Joomla, WordPress, Drupal or similar CMS will work out of the box.
There are several more things, but I think the above problems are the most common and could be the most frustrating.
Recommendation
If you have WordPress or Joomla site, and if you’d like your web pages to open fast and to avoid all problems I mentioned above, I recommend HostGator.com. For less than $4 per month (if you host one site), you would get web space on a reliable and fast server including unbeatable support. Even the starting plan can be enough in most cases. But, if you are successful and made a website that grows, the HostGator’s support will be happy help you to upgrade your hosting space or even to move your site to the virtual private server or dedicated server. No downtime! No stress!
At the first place, we are giving this recommendation because we used HostGator.com for our own needs. We hosted small and big websites there. And we have always been impressed with the performances and support. All our sites are based on CMS (Joomla, WordPress, Drupal), therefore we can confirm that HostGator.com is 100% compatible with them.
Installation of WordPress, Joomla or similar software is easy with Fantastico!
HostGator.com offers cPanel based hosting. Inside cPanel, there’s a module called Fantastico (not available in all cPanel based hosts). It allows you to install WordPress, Joomla or similar software on your server easily and with only a couple of mouse clicks! We have written instructions how to install Joomla through cPanel and Fantastico. Procedure for installation of WordPress is similar.