Where is your church website hosted?

[dewknight]

Hi,

I'm currently working on a relaunch of my web hosting company for churches. I wanted to see where your church website is currently hosted so that I can gather some information. I'm interested in seeing where you host your website, and why you chose them. Are there any specific features that made you choose your current web host?

This is not an advertisement, I want to gather data so that I can offer competitive plans for churches. I am also asking many of the local churches in my area.

Also, do you think you would consider a web host designed specifically for churches or Christians?

[katanna]

We went with Elexio.com. We wanted a CMS (Content Management System) and decided on Elexio. We are not 100% satisfied with them, but it gets the job done.

http://argyleumc.org/

For an example of the CMS, click on "Download Sermons" at the bottom of the page. That flash player was developed entirely by them. All I have to do is upload files and create new sermons, and they appear. Pretty nifty.

Matthew

[[Director] Joseph B]

I have all my sites hosted on readyhosting.com
They are a flat rate $99.00 per year, have a nice package and if you register as a reseller you get 50% off.

[riafekim]

We use Dreamhost. They are free for non-profits.

http://wiki.dreamhost.com/index.php/Non-profit_Discount

[forty31]

We use dreamhost as well. Easily installed Wordpress on it and use it as our CMS.
www.madisonparkchurch.com

[wutwuzdat]

Does anyone know what the limits (storage/bandwidth etc) are for the free DreamHost account?

[dewknight]

I believe the dreamhost plan is unlimited disk space and bandwidth. The only downside is if you aren't a registered 501c(3), then you wouldn't be able to get an account. Many smaller churches aren't registered due to the fees, and the fact that it isn't required to be registered as a church. It does open up the possibility for receiving grants though, which is good.

Thank you all for the information so far. It will definitely help.

An additional question: Do you like being able to change your website yourself, as well as having to install everything yourself, or do you prefer a pre-built CMS where you can just publish and upload data?

[dmerchen]

Dreamhost is indeed unlimited in all respects. However it is still a shared hosting environment which has its own set of limitations. That being said, the folks at DreamHost are awesome as far as I can tell. I spend a great deal of time with them discussing potentially using them as a location for origin pull for some CDN services, or a pseudo version utilizing lighttpd streaming. In this respect they are a great choice for non-profits, particularly those with multimedia needs.

[LeAnn B]

I have a reseller account at Hostgator.

[greg4god]

Curious, does anyone here host them on their own server?

When I was doing the site for a church, had it hosted on my plan with my own sites at pair Networks (www.pair.com, been with them for 13 years now). When I left that church, I moved their site over to www.3ix.com, for a "casual" site, where uptime isn't critical (never had much of a problem, but for the price, have to keep expectations down). It is $1/month, and the only issue I found with them was make sure you change your default password, which at least used to be a generated 8 digit number, (yeah, no change it, within a few months find added iframes on your pages).

Myself since I'm in the industry (web development), I just code myself. I also now run my own servers here from home (which led to me asking the first question).

-Greg

[blonborg]

I host ours on 1and1.

I've been using them at home for a number of years and have been satisfied. I do the software installs, maintenance, and backups.

bill

[Arlin]

We use the free dreamhost plan. Very happy with it. It is unlimited, but I think if you go overboard it will get their attention.
Right now I just code it manually (with the free NVU wysiwyg editor) with a little php thrown in.
But, I am working on a new Drupal site that will be hosted there.

As mentioned, it is a shared host, so Drupal performance is not stellar, but for starters at least it is acceptable. I hope after I get the site done, I can tune it (enable cache etc.) to speed it up.