The two most popular hosting companies are without a doubt Hostgator and GoDaddy. Each of them offers affordable web hosting plans with Joomla support. But how well do these two web hosts perform when it comes to Joomla hosting?

While building a social network in Joomla is not necessarily easy, it can be great fun. As one of the most popular open source content managements systems around, Joomla boast a huge number of extensions that can help you build a social network, and many of these are interesting to play with.

In the past few years, forums have emerged as an excellent tool for knowledge and resource-sharing in the Internet. However, there are a lot of forums out there that have never gone past the startup stage – their community didn’t grow and no new threads were made.

A growing community of members more needs and demands. To retain your members’ interest in your vBulletin forum, you have to optimize it for maximum performance. If a user visits your community and finds that it’s overloaded with graphics and has a slow loading time, you bet that he/she won’t stick around for long and most probably won’t come back.

Any kind of forum software is server-intensive, especially if the forum houses a large community. Optimizing vBulletin can be helpful for busy forums or for those hosted on a shared server. If the following are done, your forums will definitely be faster and server load would be decreased.

With the release of Joomla 1.7 the team behind the open source CMS has announced a new development lifecycle for its popular platform.

Changing your vBulletin title tag seems minor yet it plays a huge role in search-optimizing your forum. This is because major engines like Google and Yahoo look closely at a webpage’s title tag, among other considerations, to determine what that page is all about.

Remember that optimizing what your visitors are viewing can make all the difference in the world. A few changes in your HTML code can shave several seconds off your pages’ loading time. With the impatient nature of Internet users, a mere 1 to 2 seconds slower may mean hundreds of visitors that won’t give your vBulletin forum a chance.

As one of the best forum extensions for Joomla, Kunena is free and fully integrated. There are many free extensions available for Kunena, all of which help make it a more feature-rich forum extension.