This is a topic covered in my recent book, but the question comes up all the time.

In the early static days of the web, there was really little difference between one host and another. You uploaded a bunch of HTML pages and images (and later a CSS file or two) and the web host just worked. There wasn't a lot of analysis to do for the average small business site. One host was pretty much as good as another.

Now we're working with Joomla. And now, when it comes to hosting, everything has changed.

Recently, based on recommendations from Jen and myself, another web designer of note moved her hosting to Liquidweb. I'm sorry to say she had an agonizing period of adjustment. It was all about the dreaded file permissions and ownership.

In Mambo and J10, it was often necessary to set certain files and directories to be writable by anyone. Due to the way web servers have traditionally been set up, the only way a system like Joomla could upload files and modify the website's directory structure (when installing an extension for example) was by making the file system, even if only temporarily, writable by the whole world.

We were pleased to see the addition of the ftp layer in Joomla 1.5. It meant not having to open up the file system like this. But even in J15, certain 3rd party extensions require a directory here and there to be set world writable. It has recently come to my attention that some webhosts will shut down your account if any files or directories are set this way.

Recently, we've been dealing with some web hosting issues with our current company.  They've changed our tech support package on us, and they were bought out by another company -- all without one email communication to us. We found out after the fact.

The story has a happy ending, as we've found another great host, and we're in the process of moving our sites.

This isn't the first time in my web career that I've dealt with icky web hosts.  Some cardinal rules of finding the right web host: