I have been playing with a php CMS site for someone that I am ready to deploy but am running into a couple problems that I assume to be hosting related. I have been developing and playing with it localy and deploying to a hosting environment friendly towards this specific CMS (joomla). I have recently been trying to deploy to a client's hosting and have been running in to some trouble. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I have been in contact with the clients hosting and have had them set up a mysql DB for me and enable php. Simple php was working but joomla was not able to create the config files it needed to run on this hosting. Therefore I havnt been able to successfully deploy my work. While playing around with some simple php pages I have started getting http 500 errors and now cant seem to get anywhere. This is a smaller hosting company that seems willing to work with me but I dont really know what i need to ask from them to get me working. My questions to you webmaster geniuses would be as follows:

Given the situation I have described, is there anything specifically i should do to get my joomla/php site running on this hosting?

What specifically should I ask my current hosting providers to do to help me get working?

Thanks