For open source web designers, a solid hosting platform can often times make the difference between a cumbersome, vulnerable, sloth site or a nimble, secure, snappy web presence.

Up until recently our choices have been very limited, if you client was set on a particular hosting plan you would try to make it work on that.  If the budget afforded it, you would try to get out of a shared plan and into a VPS or dedicated server so you can tweak the environment for Joomla!

The problem is, when you jump to VPS or Dedicated... you get all the headaches of being responsible for that level of configuration and support... all of a sudden a shared hosting plan looks really nice again.

I think this is where cloud hosting solutions can come to the rescue.  At a very basic level, some cloud hosting packages are just a big bucket of space that you have to figure out how to shape into something usable... that is intimidating and expensive.

That is where a solution like cloudaccess.net comes into play. It's like wordpress.com , but for Joomla!  Imagine, a cloud based hosting platform customized just for Joomla!, with automatic security updates for the core software always in place!  It sounds like a dream, I will be testing this out an a new build out over the next month and write up a full review of my findings.