Why Host.it chose Joomla 4 as its frontend

History Host is a Hosting service Provider born in Turin in 2001, known by the brands (joomlahost.it and dnshosting.it) before 2016. From 2006 to today, the front end of the public site, i.e. the site that shows the products and services, in short the "static" pages, was developed "by hand" with JavaServer Pages technology, usually indicated with the acronym JSP (also sometimes read as Java Scripting Preprocessor), in short, it is a web programming technology in Java. We had used this technology because at the time all our developers were Java only and therefore it was the "closest" language to them.

However, as the years passed and the need for an increasingly modern, fast, scalable front-end and above all one that could be modified by anyone on the Marketing Team, we stopped several times to think about how we could detach ourselves from this language, but above all how we could detach the front end from our back-end "monolith". And yes, to complicate things there was not only the rewriting of the front-end code, which could have been a walk in the park, but the front-end was one with the back-end. In short, meetings and meetings in which we all agree that it should be done, but no one decides to do it, because it is complex, complex and would require months of work. I even remember meetings in which the ENTIRE team kept telling me: "it's complicated, it can't be done". In 2021 at Host we said: "Of course it can be done, let's do it! And let's do it with Joomla 4!" The goals we set ourselves were:

decrease the time it takes for changes to public pages to go online

reduce the cost of developing public pages

increase page loading speed

increase coverage on the Google index

How to pursue them was all to be decided. As you know, Host.it has always been the main sponsor of the Italian Joomla community (joomla.it) but not only that, one of our Managers has for years been on the Board of Open Source Matters, Inc., the US company that holds control over the Joomla project on a global level. So, did it make sense to use another CMS? It would have been a slap in the face of coherence. The choice therefore fell on Joomla, but obviously not on version 3! It made sense to start development with the Joomla 4 Beta version and then release the project into production as soon as the release became stable.

The challenges Development of a natively optimized template Starting from scratch, we had the opportunity to design and develop a Joomla template that was already natively optimized. To do this, we got help from an expert in the sector, Marco Biagioni (https://storejextensions.org/) and, thanks to his now declared experience on how to improve the speed of a Joomla site, we managed to create a site that basically reached a Google PageSpeed ​​speed score of over 90 points. The project also saw the invaluable collaboration of Alessandro Chessari, an expert in creating customized templates for Joomla. The race to score 100 is practically useless, it can be done, but it would require giving up many things, tracking codes, types of images and buttons, etc... The advice we give to everyone is not to get stuck on 100, the important thing is to stay in the 80-90 range and to have a response time under 200ms and an overall page load under one second.

Page composition strategy, a module for every need. One of the most important temptations was to give in to the use of a template framework or a page builder that would allow us to create complex and truly customized layouts in a very short time with just a few clicks. This would certainly have shortened the development time of current and future pages, but this choice would have represented a sort of "vendor lock-in" and could have had significant repercussions on the overall performance of the site.

So we chose a "Core-First" approach, using one of the basic elements of Joomla: modules.

Marco and Alessandro then designed a series of customized modules that met our needs and faithfully followed the style of our original site. Among the customized modules we have:

A form for searching available domains

A form to calculate the price of a service based on the selected options/features

A form to show the reasons why you choose a certain service

And many other modules with a personalized style

This approach allowed us to reproduce our previous website exactly, despite the change in technology.

Furthermore, the use of modules facilitates the construction of new pages since it is possible to reuse the same module on different pages.

Choosing hosting to speed up Joomla Once the site was built, we obviously had to choose hosting for Joomla. The choice was forced: host.it - ​​the first and best hosting for Joomla! in Italy. In short, we played and sang it, but obviously we knew where we were going with it. We chose our flagship product: Host Cloud, which is a dedicated cloud hosting service. In practice it is a (virtual) server completely dedicated to just 1 website. In this way it is possible to truly guarantee CPU, RAM and disk and to be able to have an isolated and dedicated environment for our website. Within Host Cloud we have various technologies that have allowed us to speed up Joomla to its full potential:

LiteSpeed ​​Web Server with LSCache for front-end caching

Redis for backend caching

Thanks to Litespeed and the lscache plugin, we have therefore achieved the best possible response times as all pages are served from the RAM cache as static content.

Host.it - ​​Pre-Migration Host.it - ​​Post-Migration Security from hacker attacks Thanks to Cerbero technology we then secured the entire site, both from volumetric attacks (layer7) and from application attacks aimed at "breaking" Joomla. Today the security of a website is fundamental, it is not possible to neglect it or leave it to luck.

Conclusions Thanks to Joomla4 we have brought the Host.it front end to another level. Fast, scalable but above all extensible to meet all future integration needs. Today the Marketing Team is therefore autonomous in the management of public product pages, in writing articles on the BLOG and therefore thanks to Joomla 4 the entire Company is now more efficient without having to disturb the Developers for every change on the pages.