Thought I would put a quick post together about the differences between a good hosting company (many of the ones reviewed on this site) and a GREAT hosting company (just a few and our top picks)
It is true most hosting large hosting companies that have been around more than five years are good hosting ones. Meaning they will keep your site up most of the time, your site will have acceptable page load times, the price will be reasonable support will respond in an acceptable amount of time meaning for 24 hours and your life will be pretty okay
Now the difference is when you host with a great company they will respond instantly have a built-in Control panel features for common settings make it easy to encrypt your website and charge about the same price as all the other hosting companies
I recently was made aware of how much better cloud access is over other good hosting companies I had been hosting site five for quite a few years maybe seven or eight and have been gradually moving to cloud access I decided to update a site and keep it at site five and quickly ran into a few roadblocks that cloud access made seamless
Support for Current Versions of PHP
First roadblock at site five was PHP seven it was a Joomla! 3.sick site and PHP seven compatible so I thought I would upgrade site five PHP seven I found a link in their knowledge base and how to update the access file I updated the HT access file and it broke my site so then I had to open a support ticket gave them all the information a couple times only to learn that site five does not support PHP seven on their shared hosting servers PHP seven has been around for quite a while and I would expect it to be available
Steps to change PHP Versions
If this is been done at cloud access I could've easily selected the drop-down button selected one of five different versions of PHP including PHP seven click save and my Joomla! site would now be PHP seven at site five I defined how to manually update some settings and then learn that they do not support PHP seven this was instant one of how spoiled of how good caught access is
SSL certificates
At site five the only way to get an SSL certificate was to purchase it from them or from a third party provide them the information needed and then they would can figure it on the site for me
At cloud access I have the ability to click a button to enable a free let's encrypt SSL certificate and have it added to the site and functioning within a matter of minutes
Tech Support
Since I've been working with sci-fi I had several questions and needed help from there to support tax at site five I felt I was getting more entry-level the E at site five the easier questions were more difficult for the chat operators to answer and on a few occasions I felt I knew more about the issue then their tech support dead
Support@cloud access I feel their technicians know the answers can get it fixed and provide additional details so that I better understand situation in some cases a chat or support email support ticket becomes involved and then my phone rings and his cloud access calling me to make the ticket support resolution go easier in my book getting a call from support is fantastic it just shows me the support level of cloud access is head and shoulders above site five and other common hosting companies
Joomla Knowlege
At site five when it comes to Joomla! I definitely know more than their technicians and I am troubleshooting most of the odd issues myself
Add cloud access I am in good hands with other Joomla! experts they are often willing to help me troubleshoot Joomla! specific issuesAnd stay with me until we find resolutions
This is just another example Howe of the difference between a good hosting company and a great hosting company
Conclusion
Well this article ended up being longer than I orginally expected, hopefully you found this helpful. This was not meant to put down the Site5, HostGator, and 1&1 hosting companies of the world, it is meant to show you that a few hosting companies are truely better than others. By better I mean it makes your life easier, complex tasks become easier and you have better support all for the same price and sometimes the price is lower.
Also wanted to mention that their are other great Joomla Hosting companies like SiteGround, it is just that I happened to be working with CloudAccess when I decided to write this article.
