Joomla, jreviews, & SEF?

[jasonwyates]

Hi,

I have a site that runs on Joomla (1.0.15), and is dependent on a pretty big component, jreviews. I've also added a SEF tool, sh404sef.

The problem is, I'm on godaddy, and as I've added more and more to this site, I'm starting to see some of the limitations to the speed of their server.

you can see it here: http://www.onetoten.org/

I especially noticed it when I set up sh404sef. After editing my .htaccess file and getting everything to work, the speed of my site has taken quite a hit. I've only heard bad things about running big joomla sites on godaddy, so I'm looking around at other options.

My main concern is speed, concerning joomla and searchengine friendly URLs.. I know that they're the main culprit in my speed problem. I guess I'm looking for a little assurance that these work better here.

I was also wondering if anyone has firsthand experience with these specific apps, and if I have anything to worry about using too much memory/CPU.. I'm not expecting this site to become too huge, but I don't want to have to worry about expanding past the 10-15 users I have now, in my "beta" period.

Also, looking around, I have also seen an issue with ioncube. Aparently jreviews needs it to run, and I've seen conflicting reports on if it's available with HostGator. I honestly don't know what iconcube is, and was lucky that it worked on godaddy. Will I be ok here?

Finally, is it really that easy to transfer? I see on the homepage that you offer free transfers of Domains, FIles, Databases, and Scripts.. does that mean that you can just pick up everything I have working, and bring it over here, and get it running if there's any hiccups?

Thanks so much, I'm hoping to find a better host than I have now, so I can try to roll out my site as soon as possible.

[jakeruston]

If you're looking for a new host, I recommend HostGator (obviously).

[kmaw]

I have about 20 Joomla sites, each running that SEF component and I don't notice any issues.

Transfer from godaddy won't be seamless, per say, because you're not coming from a cPanel host. However, I think the transfer department has fairly good luck with transferring sites -- you don't see many complaints about such here in the forums.

www.jfao.on.ca if you'd like an example

[Quads]

I'm running J! on several sites in shared enviros.
All without a hitch.
www.pcpotato.com and www.diverscove.net are two examples.
Never an issue.

Moving should be as easy as signing up, installing J!, moving any specific files over with changes that you have made outside of the standard install, (php mods, footers, /images/stories/) plug ins, etc, and restoring your DB.

I do all of my development locally, snap an image of it, and push it to the HG server with ease.

[vpatron]

Hi Jason,

I've been pretty happy, too, with Hostgator. I had about 8 websites on a virtual private server on GoDaddy and man, it started running slower and slower. I think whoever I was sharing it with was hogging it up and GoDaddy was really no help.

I also had just one fairly extensive site on Hostgator just on their basic shared hosting, and man, I was happier with that cheap little Hostgator account than the GoDaddy virtual private server.

Anyway, I ended up going to a full dedicated server on Hostgator and I'm almost done moving my sites.

I did have several issues:
1) I was going from PHP4 to PHP5 and I had to make some minor changes in my .htaccess file. (php_value is no longer used)

2) I used cpanel transfer account to move my accounts myself. Was pretty straightforward but doesn't apply if you're using shared hosting.

3) The new Hostgator dedicated server runs differently. It uses suexec and runs the php scripts as the account user name instead of user "nobody". This broke the Joomla add-on extplorer and I had to reinstall that on a few sites. I tried chown and chmod to change owners and permissions, and it worked on some sites, but not on other sites. I just reinstalled on on the latter sites.

4) The DNS change has been a pain in the neck. My Outlook would pick up the old IP and try to get mail there, and then it would go to the new IP and get mail, and I was getting doubled up mail. A client had the same issue. I just had to hard code the IP into Outlook (instead of POP to mail.yourwebsite. com) until all the ISPs get their DNS records up to date. This is not a Hostgator issue, but thought I'd mention this so you might expect some excitement with regards to email.

The site that's always been on Hostgator is this:
www.landforsalearizona.com

Almost all the sites listed here have been moved to Hostgator:
www.nortapweb.com

By the way, Joomla 1.5 writes SEF URLs already, in a nice format than the Joomla 1.0 SEF, so I had not bothered buying more licenses for the Joomla SEFAdvance.

Good luck and hope that helps!

-Vince

[brad]

I don't use joomla but for what it's worth, i moved from godaddy to here and the difference in speed and performance was astronomical. generally i didn't have any complaints about their service but on occasion it was just really bad. one time it seemed like the server must have been under a DoS attack or something and I called support who told me the reason why only 25% of my site would load was because it was so popular (i get maybe 300-400 visitors a day).

i ultimately left godaddy cuz there was something i wanted to do with my site that I couldn't do with them (forgot what exactly) and found HG and long story short, i yielded a dramatic increase in performance. now i have only myself to blame for my SQL driven dynamic pages slowing me down.