sayaFuqaha

We, the admins of Joomla-My have been monitoring the Malaysian Joomla! Community since the day of its birth on the internet. I found out that relatively significant number of users there are still in the dark with regard to choosing a good webhost for their website. It should be noted that these users are making their first ever live website and relatively inexperienced with web development. Soon after, I created a forum category meant solely for users to write a review of their past & present webhost so that we as a community can help each other. What I wrote hereafter is a recollection of experience and thoughts that might help some of you in deciding your new webhost.

*be prepared to read. This post is rather lengthy. 

*Keep in mind that I wrote this in conjunction with a contest that is organized by my current webhost, yet I tried as much as possible not to be biased and will give you a 100% (okay, 99% perhaps) frank review of what I think about them.

 

Let the story begin. First webhost

I bought my first webhosting package back in 2004, when I started to run a Mambo-based (the origin of Joomla!) website. The site is now powered by Joomla! – as I mentioned in my previous post. Back then, a basic 1Gb space with 5Gb bandwidth costs RM199, but the domain was cheap, RM 35. The package was sufficient to my needs and I almost thought that I would stay with the webhost for a long time. Boy I was wrong.

A year later, I noticed something amiss with the server that hosted that particular website when several installations of the usual stuff (components/modules/mambots/template) failed. The errors led to inaccessible PHP /tmp/ directory and failure to move necessary files. A php.ini check revealed a nasty surprise. The server ran on Safe Mode which hindered Mambo to run at its full capability. I tried emailing the technical support to ask them to turn off the Safe Mode. But they insisted that it was needed for security purposes. I was flabbergasted.

Apart from this main problem, another frustration was caused by the lack of DOXML in their PHP configuration. This plugin is needed when you install a (cool) flash photo gallery called Expose4. Another email to the tech support bared no fruit as they suggested me to move to a dedicated server.