Picking out a web-host is probably one of the most difficult tasks that a web-developer has, mostly because it’s difficult to determine what level of customer service they will provide after you are a customer. Eventually I settled upon Arvixe, because the reviews that I read online were much more positive than what other companies had. Most companies have pretty mixed reviews; even Arvixe has a few bad reviews floating online.

The best way to scope out a host ahead of time is to type “CompanyName Sucks” on Google. You can also read reviews and see if the host bothered to respond and offer to help customers that had bad experiences. You definitely want a high ratio of good reviews to bad reviews, but you’re still taking a bit of a guess as to whether or not the host will be any good.

I’ve been using Arvixe to power my two high traffic sites, AmericanConsumerNews.com and AmericanBankingNews.com for about 5 months now. The two sites together easily get 150,000 unique visitors per month and Arvixe’s servers handle the load just fine, even on the cheap shared hosting plan that they offer.

I’ve ran into two situations where’s I’ve needed customer support from Arvixe. The first time, AmericanBankingNews.com had 19,000 unique visitors in a day. The WordPress-based site had a couple of plug-ins that were misbehaving and sucked up the entirety of the server’s CPU. As a result, Arvixe shut the site down, sent me an email and told me why they did what they did and what plug-ins I needed to remove to prevent the problem. After taking the action that they suggested, they were more than happy to re-enable the site and the problem disappeared.

The second time I dealt with Arvixe’s customer service team was last week when the server that powers my ASP.NET websites went down. Apparently there was a hardware malfunction and the server had to be taken off-line. Arvixe had full-backup and replaced the server within a few hours. The company also had to take the server down early on a Sunday morning to do a file system check.  As the file system check took place, Arvixe provided hour by hour updates to let me know when my sites would be back up. The company even provided a 2-month credit because of the down-time that really wasn’t their fault to begin with.

I’ve been really impressed with Arvixe’s customer support so far, so, keep up the good work guys!

Essentially, they’ll give you an image of a virtual machine that contains the web-server software, as well as the server-side software you are testing. Everything will be pre-configured and ready to go. You’ll download a copy of the virtual machine, get it running with VirtualBox, and you’re good to go. Some of the virtual machines do cost money, but fortunately for us, the image for Joomla is free for download from Joomla.org.

Normally, I’d post a walk through of going through the process of installing the software and getting it up and going, but the folks at Joomla.org have already done that for us:

Run Joomla in 5 min with JumpBox and VirtualBox from Sean Tierney on Vimeo.

Here’s how to build a Joomla testing environment on Windows:

(1) Download a copy of WAMP

The first thing you’ll need to do is get a copy of WAMP. This stands for “Windows Apache MySQL and PHP”. It essentially provides a set of web-development framework that combines all of the tools that you need for creating a PHP test-bed in a Windows environment. Since Joomla is based on PHP, WAMP is a perfect solution to run Joomla on top of. You can download the installation files from WampServer.com

(2) Install WAMP

You should have a copy of “WampServer2.0h.exe” on your system. Double click the file to open it. Work your way through the installation by clicking next and I agree as many times as you need. It’s okay to leave the installation directory to “C:\WAMP” unless you have a specific desire to move it anywhere else. If you have the Windows Firewall running on your system, you’ll receive a notice that it’s trying to access the web. You’ll want to make sure it’s “unblocked” otherwise it’s likely that your WAMP install will not function properly.

You will also be asked about SMTP information. Unless you have a specific need to do anything that involves sending emails from your web-server, it’s safe to leave those blank. If you are developing contact forms or somethign that would require credentials, you can get those from your internet service provider.

(3) Take WAMP for a Test Drive

After installing WAMP, you have the option to start it up automatically. You can do this or launch WAMP from the start menu. You should be able to left-click on the WAMP icon in the system tray. You’ll get different options  to turn WAMP on and off as well as access various database and web-server management tools. For now, we just want to click on LocalHost to make sure the web-server is running properly. If all is well, you’ll see a page that says “WAMPServer” that has a white-background.

(4) Download Joomla

To run a local copy of Joomla on our Windows/Joomla testbed, we’ll need to download the latest version from Joomla.org’s download page. You’ll want to download version 1.5 unles you have a specific reason to run Joomla 1.0. Be sure to get the “1.5.x Full Package” file.

(5) Extra Joomla to Your Website’s Root Directory

If you haven’t done anything special with your WAMP server, the root directory of your web-server should be located at “C:\wamp\www” on your system. First, delete the existing “index.php” file that’s sitting there then extract all of the Joomla files there.

(6) Setup a Database for Joomla to Run in

Left click your WAMP icon in the system tray then choose the phpMyAdmin option. This is a piece of software that lets you manage the database component of the WAMP stack. We need to setup a database for our local copy of Joomla to use. On the first screen you see, you’ll have the option of creating a database.

This is a screenshot of me creating a database called “JoomlaDB”

This is all you should need to do with phpMyAdmin for the setup process. Since it’s a local machine, we’ll just use the “root” login for our MySQL Server. If this was a production environment, you would want to create separate account to access your database.

(7) Run the Joomla Setup

After getting your files extracted, visit your local web-server by pointing your browser to http://localhost/ or by using the link in the WAMP  tray-icon and going to your “LocalHost” option. At this point, you’ll be at the standard Joomla setup process. The first three steps are straight forward, the only “hard” part is setting up the database. When you hit step three, use “Localhost” for the database server “root” for the mysql user, and leave the password blank. For the name of your database, enter in the name of the database you created in the previous step. In my example, I used “JoomlaDB” as my database name. You won’t need a database password since we’re developing locally.

For step four of the installation, it’s okay to not enable the FTP layer since we are developing locally. On step five, you’ll need to pick out a name for your site, and create an administrative account. It’s probably a good idea to install the sample data package so that you have a base website to develop from.

If your install is successful, you should see a screen like this:

(8) Delete Joomla’s “Installation” Directory

After finishing the Joomla install, you’ll need to go back to your “C:\WAMP\WWWROOT\” directory (or wherever you have it located) and delete the folder called “Installation” before using Joomla.

(9) Pat Yourself on the Back

After deleting the installation directory, browse to http://localhost/ again and if your install was successful, you should see a screen like this:

You now have everything you need to do to begin playing around with Joomla on your local machine. You can browse to http://localhost/administrator/ and login with the credentials you made during setup to get into the back-end of Joomla.

(10) Get Developing!

Once you get your Windows Joomla testing environment setup, start developing some modules, components, mambots, and the like. Here are some resources to help you get started with Joomla Development

• The Official Joomla Developer Site
• A quick Joomla component development introduction (Trashfactor)
• Creating a Custom Joomla Module (JoomlaTutorials.com)

I had been looking for a few days and looking at different solutions online, then eventually I found my self on a site called HostMonk that will take a look at your specific web-hosting needs and then come up with a list of providers, pricepoints and reviews for plans that meet your specifications. I searched for a Windows platform, for under $50.00 a month, offering at least 256 MB of “guaranteed” ram, and found 4-5 companies that had good products that would meet the wants that I had. I -almost- went with 1&1 because they offered free MySQL databases to go with your VPS, but then just before I ordered, I looked for reviews, and what I found wasn’t pretty.

At that point, I decided to go with the second choice, which was Solar VPS. They had a deal running where you could get an unmanaged Windows Server 03 VPS for $22.50 per month, and the reviews were all very positive. It’s half off of their retail price, so I’m very happy with what I’m going to get for the price. They give you 3 unique IP addresses, 384 MB guaranteed memory, 35 GB Storage and 300 GB bandwidth per month. The sales guy I chatted with said they should have it setup by the morning, so I’m looking forward to trying it out.

I’m going to use it for a few client sites that I have sticking around from my consulting days and use it for a few personal projects as well. I was hoping for a Windows Server 2008 VPS, but so far there aren’t a ton of options, so I might have to wait a year or so until I can find one I like.