Sample Joomla site

[joelleach]

Our web site is currently hosted at GoDaddy, which is fine for a static site, but we are thinking about moving to Joomla. That is extremely slow on GoDaddy, but I've heard good things about Joomla hosting on HostGator. Anyone want to share a URL of their Joomla site on HostGator so I can judge performance for myself?

Thanks,

Joel

[joelleach]

Forgot to mention, I'm only interested in the shared hosting plans, not VPS or dedicated, so please only share links to Joomla on shared plans.

Thanks,

Joel

[eLIANT]

www.myshenandoah.org is on my reseller (shared) account.

[wesslayneb]

If you want you can go to vantagewebservices.com and create a free account and test joomla your self.

(This will be hosted on a hostgator server.)

[wesslayneb]

^ Just to make sure you know the link i gave you will allow you to install Joomla on a server that has the same configuration as the servers that hostgators shared accounts are on.

[Ulatan]

Joomla works fine on Shared (Baby or Business). I personally used it to host a few joomla sites. However once you reach that 25 processor limit, and inode limit, it's time to upgrade to Dedi!

As a somewhat joomla developer, I can give you some tips on using Joomla on hostgator.

1) Multiple static subdomains. ex. static.domain.com images.domain.com This will allow more simultaneous downloads increasing performance by a bit. You could do this on the same server by just creating a subdomain and pointing it to public_html, or you could order another shared hosting plan and put the static content on that. (find a plugin called CDN for Joomla)

2) Optimize every piece of script, and change transparent png files to gif. I recommend using JCH Optimize, or you can manually do it yourself by using a web service to compress CSS/JS files.

3) Create daily cpanel backups using cronjobs, and if you google around you can find a script.

4) Do not have too many plugins, and components enabled. try to keep it simple, and minimize the load.

[joelleach]

Wow! What a night & day performance difference compared to GoDaddy. I think we'll be moving our hosting here. I was holding out for Windows hosting, but that's not a necessity. We are a small business, and we don't get thousands of hits per day, so I doubt we'll be stressing the system. But every click we do get counts, so it needs to be responsive.

Email looks like a different story. We have 10 employees, so it looks like we'll run into HostGator email limits pretty quick (30 checks/hour). GoDaddy has no such limits. It's too bad we can't move the whole package to HostGator, unless I am misunderstanding the limits? Any suggestions on email? I'll probably check out GMail and HotMail before trying paid solutions, provided they can use our domain name.



Joel

[joelleach]

In my testing this morning, HostGator download speeds are also slower than GoDaddy. I'm not sure if that is true across the board. HostGator is by no means slow with speeds up to 1 mbit, but GoDaddy gets 3-4 mbit, and we do host some large files for our clients to download. So, I've decided to take the easy road and keep GoDaddy for email and static large files, and add on HostGator for our main Joomla site. Between the two, it looks like we'll have what we need.

Thanks,

Joel

[wesslayneb]

I use all of my email needs personal, business, and everything in between. Plus all of my clients and I know that atleast a few of them use the emails like I do. I have yet to have any issues with the email messaging limit. I really don't even watch it cause i don not believe I will ever hit it. And the issue with the Download speed may be due to a high traffic volume or a bandwidth issue on HostGators part or possibly yours. But I have used many hosts and i really cant tell a difference between the download speeds. Although I do not (although I have in the past) host large files on my server very often.