As Joomla! becomes more and more popular many of the hosting comapnies now offer hosting solutions designed for running your Joomla! CMS which range from Share Hosting to VPS and dedicated hosting.

When choosing a web hosting company do your research and read the reviews by visiting the hosting forums like webhostingtalk forum or review web sites. Create a check list based on what you need now and in the future from your hosting company. Dont fall for the sales pitch on the hosting companies web site or fall into the trap of signing up to a 1 year contract with a provider because they offer unlimited bandwidth, 99% uptime and lots more which all sounds great but in reality its not. The facts are no host has a 99% uptime and you will never make use of the unlimited bandwidth plus if you use to much resource on the shared server your account could be suspended and you may be aksed to move to a vps hosting package or dedicated server solution.

Shared Hosting

Shared hosting is basically where you are sharing a web server with a number of other sites. This is a popular choice as it offers good value for money about 90 dollars per year plus you get all the functionality needed to run your Joomla CMS. Most shared packages offer sufficent disk space, bandwidth and resources to run a basic web site. The down side to shared hosting is you are sharing the resources with other sites for example CPU, memory, disk space, MYSQL and apache resources. If you plan to setup a small personal or business site then the shared package could be for you but if you start to get alot of traffic which in turn will use more server resources then consider a VPS or dedicated hosting solutions. 

VPS Hosting

VPS hosting is where a single server is splitt into multiple virtual servers. This practice of partitioning a single server so that it appears as multiple servers is common practice. This type of solution will cost you more than a shared hosting package but you get more control, functionality and resources. For example you have root access, control over the apache and mysql services or install what ever software you like. VPS is a good choice if you want a stable environment which has the resources to handle more traffic.

Dedicated Hosting

Basically dedicated hosting is where you get your own server. If you are serious about your web site and expect it to be very popular then the dedicated server solution is for you. It is more expensive compared to the shared or vps hosting solution but you get alot more for your money. The benifits of dedicated hosting provides you with complete control over the server including the ability to install your own applications, reboot the server plus dedicated hardware resources including cpu, hard drive and memory.