Question : Shitty hostings-404 and 503...

Hello!

I'm just curious why it happened...Its kinda my own fault that I tried to save money on hosting...
See...I have exactly the same web site on my home PC and on 2 hostings-one is a free one in the US and another one is a paid one (though they only charge 1$ a month, but for only 50 MB of space). The site's domain name on my home PC is slightly different. And I use Joomla!
So did some very minor changes on both my home PC and a british one (the one thats a paid one).
On my home PC, everything worked fine, but on british server I got a 404 error out of the blue!
After that I changed name servers at the registrar of the domain that I use for my site on hostings. And I switched it to US-based server (a free one). I made same changes there and everything worked OK. ie- no 404 error. But then there was a different problem. The site was SLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW...And on top of it I got a 503 error. I checked the server's load in my cPanel and it was an awful 13 (with 4 cpus)...No wonder...See...its about 4 am here, so its 9 pm EST...Prime time, so to speak...
So how I can save the time to get to a good hosting? Should I just stick ONLY to reputable ones...like Bluehost etc...?

P.S. I didn't want to reveal the truth...but the world should know its "heroes"...
British (paid one) hosting with 404 was euro-space.net and free US hosting with 503 was ATBHost.net

Answer : Shitty hostings-404 and 503...

The US-based server is obviously overloaded when it's slow and even gives 503 errors.  The 404 error might be a permission problem.

When looking for Joomla hosting, always ask if the hoster is specialized in this field.
Some questions to ask:
- Do you run php in CGI mode (SuPHP or PHPExec) ?
this is important for security reasons (all files are 644 or 755) and you don't have any permission problems.
- register_globals: OFF
- Which version of PHP do they have installed (at the minimum it should be PHP 5, prefered is php 5.2 or higher)
- Safe Mode: OFF

You can find a few hosting companies here:
http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?t=6856

Also, typ in Joomla Hosting in google and you get a lot of results.  Good luck !