Hosting & Maintenance
Choosing Hosting for a Joomla 6 Site
Hosting comparisons usually turn into arguments about disk space and traffic allowances, neither of which matters for a normal site. What matters is the PHP version, whether you can reach the server properly, and what happens when…
The hard requirement
Joomla 6 requires PHP 8.3 or newer. The CLI tooling checks this before doing anything and refuses to run on older versions.
Two things to verify with a prospective host, and they are not the same question. First, that 8.3 or newer is available. Second, that you can select the version, per site, from the control panel — a host that offers a modern PHP but pins your account to whatever they installed years ago is a host you will be fighting during the next upgrade.
Check the CLI version too. Web and command line frequently differ, and Joomla's console tooling and any cron jobs use the command-line one.
Extensions that need to be there
Beyond the PHP version, the ones a real site depends on:
mysqliorpdo_mysql— the database connection.gdorimagick— thumbnails and any image processing.zip— extension installation and updates. Without it the installer cannot unpack anything.intl— locale-aware formatting.curl— update checks, and anything that talks to an external service.mbstring,xml,json— assumed everywhere.
Also check memory_limit and max_execution_time. Installing a large extension or running an update on a site with 128 MB and a 30-second limit fails halfway, which is a far worse state than failing at the start.
What actually separates hosts
The specification is the easy part. These are the questions that decide whether you will be comfortable in a year.
SSH access. Not optional for anything serious. Restoring a backup, running the Joomla console, importing a database or checking a log over FTP is an ordeal. If SSH costs extra, budget for it.
Backups you can restore yourself. "We take daily backups" is worth nothing until you know how long a restore takes, whether you can trigger it, and whether you can download the archive. Ask specifically. Keep your own backups regardless.
Where the site lives. Physical location affects latency for your visitors and determines which law applies to the data. If your audience is in one region, host there.
How they handle a compromise. Some hosts suspend the account and leave you to it. Some quarantine files and tell you which. It is an unpleasant question to ask a salesperson and an extremely useful answer to have.
Shared, VPS or managed
Shared hosting is fine for a small site, with two caveats: you share the server's resources with neighbours you cannot see, and you cannot change the PHP configuration beyond what the panel exposes.
A VPS gives you control and hands you responsibility for updates, TLS certificates and the firewall. Take it if someone will actually do that work — an unpatched VPS is worse than shared hosting, not better.
Managed Joomla hosting sits in between and is worth it mainly for the operational parts: staging copies, one-click restores, sensible defaults. Verify what "managed updates" means before relying on it — an automatic core update applied to a site with an incompatible extension is not a service.
Test before committing
Install Joomla on a trial account and look at System → System Information. It reports the PHP version, the loaded extensions, the directory permissions and the PHP settings in one place — and it will tell you more in two minutes than any feature comparison.