Maybe you're not going to hire Passive Ninja. That's fine. You're the kind of person who wants to learn how to use Joomla, Drupal, or WordPress on your own. You can do it. You might wish you hadn't bothered after the time commitment, but it's a wonderful skill to learn, and you're likely saving money over the hosted website builders, especially if you go on to have several websites or host a few for friends and family. Assuming you're not going to hire us anyhow, we'll let you in on a trick of the trade: don't believe most of the online reviews of hosting companies. Most of them are written by the companies themselves, or at least someone trying to make money off of the review. This review is based on years of experience, and the most I can get out of you signing up is a free month, so it's not a big deal to me, especially since I'm happy to pay for good hosting.
The truth is that I've gone through a half-dozen hosts, and I've rescued clients from a dozen more. Siteground is just the best I've come across, and that's why my clients' sites are all hosted there. My own sites are taking up space on other hosting plans for which I prepaid because I didn't really know better at the time. It's a little like the carpenter who comes home to a house that's half-finished because he's been working on houses all day. But you don't have to be that guy. If you are just getting into hosting your own sites or those of your clients, stop looking around, and head on over to Siteground.
Page load speeds aren't a huge deal to me, but I like to load my Siteground sites just to see how fast they appear. This website, for example, would be at least twice as fast over there. The company is knowledgeable about Joomla, which is not the case for any other host I've had. In fact, I don't think most of those hosts even knew much about WordPress. Joomla sites on Siteground are more secure, too, since they have this hackguard thing. And they have a better backup policy than most other hosts, so even if you lose one round to the hackers, you've got a shot to get back in the fight.
Sure, I've had a few issues, like Joomla installations defaulting to PHP 5.3 rather than the higher version I need. Or when I bought a domain name and then was told I had to use another one because I was migrating sites. It was a salesman not knowing how the technical side of things got done. Frustrating, but not a huge deal, especially since my other host had just taken an entire month to migrate the same number of sites that I got onto Siteground in a day.
There are some tools I have yet to try and others I'm a little scared to try, but if you're serious about Joomla, you've got to just pay the extra money to get on Siteground or else pay for it in frustration.