Why Your Small Church Website Needs Web Hosting
Web hosting is a physical space on a server somewhere that holds all your church website files and folder. For every website online, all the different words, images, and other files that combine to create the website are taking up space on a server . In most cases, those servers are owned and maintained by web hosting companies such as Hostgator, Metropolitanhost, Go-daddy, and many more.
Small Churches typically rent space on these servers in order to have a website that’s accessible to anyone online. In some ways, it’s a lot like the money you spend to rent space for a storefront or office, except much cheaper. While, as someone surfing the web, you’re not generally aware of web hosting, you can trust that every website you visit is hosted somewhere. It’s a necessary, if often invisible, part of having a website.
That makes choosing your web hosting provider and plan one of the most important first steps you need to take when you’re working on launching a website for your small Church.
Typical Cost of Small Church Web Hosting
The cost of web hosting for a small Church varies based on your particular needs and features. If your audience is fairly small, then you don’t need to worry much now about potential upgrade costs—assuming you won’t be selling products through your website—you can plan on a basic shared hosting plan with C-panel that costs in the range of $2-99$ a month.
If you’re planning on learning how to build an ecommerce website (which means you’ll sell products and take payments through the website) then you’ll need some additional features that bump your starting rates up to around $29-99.99$ a month.
And if your small Church website starts to see a lot of traffic after you launch, you may end up needing to upgrade down the line to a cloud hosting plan, which generally costs in the range of $5-$50. In rare cases, if your site gets extremely popular, you may even need to go for a VPS hosting plan, which costs $59-$299 per month or a dedicated server which starts at around $339 a month.
Top 10 Things to Look for in Web Hosting for Small Church
- Security
- Uptime
- Speed
- Ease of use
- Customer service
- eCommerce options
- Backup features
- SEO tools
- Website builder
- Affordability
The Different Types of Web Hosting for Small Churches
- Shared hosting – This is the most affordable web hosting option. With this kind of plan, your website will share a server with a number of other websites. It’s often the best option for small Churches that don’t expect to have a lot of traffic to start out and don’t have a ton of money to spend. You may find if you start with shared hosting that you’ll need to upgrade down the line to another hosting option when you start to see more traffic.
- Cloud hosting – This is still a reasonably affordable option, but one that provides more storage and server space due to moving your hosting to the cloud. It allows for more flexibility for your website to grow in real time, so if you expect to see big growth soon after launching, it may be a better option than shared hosting.
- VPS – With a VPS, your website still shares a server, but with far fewer sites. You have a lot more of the server space to yourself and, as a result, can handle much higher amounts of traffic without worrying about crashing or slowing down. It costs more than shared or cloud hosting, but makes sense for small Church websites that get a high number of regular visitors.
- Dedicated server – For most small Churches, a dedicated server would be overkill. But if your website gets extremely popular and you find you need some heavy-duty hosting power, then this option may become worth it. Like it sounds, with this type of plan you’d have a server all to yourself so don’t have to worry about running out of storage or traffic spikes slowing you down.
Choosing Web Hosting Sites for a Small Churches
Finding the web hosting plan which suite your church needs is an important step to getting your Church website published online. Making the right choice now can make it easier for you to get your site set up and keep it working well for years to come. Don’t let all the information about web hosting services out there overwhelm you, here is a list of the top 10 hosting providers in the market.
