Best Joomla Hosting

Are you looking to build a blog or a website? Joomla is a popular alternative to WordPress and is a good, competitive open-source platform. That being said, it does not work perfectly with all hosting providers. 

The best hosts for Joomla offer you a simple or automatic installation of the platform, with servers that are perfectly optimized. They will also give you a decent amount of disk space allowance and bandwidth. If you can find a hosting provider with experience and expertise in Joomla on their support team, that is even better.

We have picked some of the best hosts for Joomla, selecting ones that offer the benefits that we mentioned above: good bandwidth, reasonable disk space allowance and expertise, as well as straightforward or even automatic installation.

What is Joomla?

If you have got this far and are wondering what on earth Joomla is, let us explain. It is a CMS (content management system). Essentially, this is software that helps users create, manage, and modify content on a website without the need for in-depth technical knowledge. Basically, you do not need a degree in coding to make a website or a blog. 

One of the most popular ones that you may have heard of is WordPress. Joomla is a very viable alternative to WordPress. It is free, simple to use and very customizable, giving you full control over your site. Whether you are managing an e-commerce site, a blog or company intranet, Joomla can handle it.

A little bit about Joomla

The CMS was launched way back in 2005 as part of the now obsolete Mambo CMS. New releases of the software happen every six months, keeping it up to date with all the latest features and upgrades. It is open-source software, which relies on developers regularly contributing to its maintenance and growth, and under the GNU General Public License, it can be freely distributed. 

Which is better: WordPress or Joomla?

It is quite difficult to compare the two platforms, as they are both built for different purposes. WordPress is traditionally a blog platform, while Joomla is meant to serve portal-like websites. While they both now can do both, the differences between them remain. Joomla is based on a traditional ‘model, view, controller’, (MVC) format. This supports the interfaces and controls that the user sees. Joomla can also be enhanced with extensions – there are more than 8000 in their official directory! Of course, there are many more unofficial ones floating around the world wide web.

There are five different types of extension:

  • Languages
  • Templates
  • Plugins
  • Modules
  • Components

Languages: As you would expect, Joomla language extensions deal with translations and everything else to do with the general language of the site. These are particularly important for multi-lingual and international websites.

Templates: While experienced web designers can use coding to build the site to their specifications, templates make the design much easier for technical novices. 

Plugins: Joomla plugins are different from WordPress plugins in that they work as an executor of events.

Modules: Modules are lightweight and flexible extensions used for page rendering. These modules are often “boxes” arranged around a component on a typical page.

Components: These are the functions responsible for creating large areas of the web page. This means that they are larger than other extensions.

How to install Joomla

Joomla is designed to work with Linux, Apache, PHP and MySQL, so a Linux server is the best option. However, Windows can still be used. 

The recommended specifications for Joomla are:

  • PHP 5.4+ recommended / 5.3.10 required
  • My SQL 5.1+
  • Apache 2.x or IIS 7

To have a smooth and trouble-free experience with Joomla, you do need a host that can support it, and that understands it. They also need to be using a compatible version of PHP. For the most, it is something that they include in their hosting plans. 

However, as we said above, having someone with experience in it is a bonus. It installs slightly differently from WordPress. It is available as a script that allows you to install it on your site easily and quickly. 

To use Joomla, you can use a quick 90-minute trial or a hosted 90-day trial account to get started for free.

90 Minute Test Drive

The online test drives give you a 90-minute anonymous demo so you can have a look behind the scenes and make sure it is right for you. It won’t hold any of your info, and you can check out the control panel access. 

90 day hosted trial

If you want to explore the platform in more detail, the hosted version of Joomla is free for 90 days. If you want your data to be held at the end of the trial period, you can sign up for a hosting account with Siteground. However, most VPS and shared hosting plans give you access to a cPanel control panel. While not many hosts will advertise that they accommodate Joomla, it can be done with pretty much any of them.

There are also plenty of forums and support sites for Joomla to help you understand the features and get the very best out of it.

To summarise, the benefits of using Joomla include:

  • Open-Source Infrastructure – It is regularly contributed to by developers using PHP
  • Simple and Easy Installation – One-click software such as Softaculous make it as easy to install as WordPress
  • Works across various platforms: While Linux is recommended, it works on all platforms
  • Dedicated Community – There are plenty of forums and developers ready to help you and continually improve the software
  • Powerful Extensions – Extensions enhance the usability and functions of the platform
  • Scalability – Joomla can handle high traffic as well as supporting lower numbers