Host Wars: Who to Use for Your Church Site

Before anything is designed. Before the blog is set up. Before ANYTHING happens you have to choose a company to host your church site. Well what does that mean?

Web hosts are companies that provide space on a server owned or leased for use by clients, as well as providing Internet connectivity, typically in a data center. Basically they are like a digital storage unit that you pay a small monthly fee for to house your church site.

There are literally only two hosting companies that I recommend on a consistent basis. One is Bluehost and the other is Media Temple. I will give you reasons for both, but before I do, can I save you some trouble as well? Don’t use GoDaddy…it’s a pain. I know it has a big name and it is good for domains (your website’s name) but for hosting and building it’s really just junk in my opinion. Thank me later for saving you a lot of confusion…

Bluehost

• Their service, reliability and usability is the best.
• Bluehost has worked hard to make their Control Panel easier to use. This is where you will work on some backend stuff. It’s also where you go if you somehow break your church site. So the fact that it is simple to navigate means a ton to us ministry types that are new to this!
• Bluehost has partnered with MOJO Marketplace to make installing WordPress a breeze. Once you are hosting you can set up a WordPress blog in all of two minutes!
• They also offer courteous and professional 24 hour in-house technical support for your hosting account 7 days of the week all year long. No lie, I love that I can chat with a bluehost technician at any time. Their help center is awesome.
• For $4.95 a month you can host unlimited websites, email accounts and domains; all on one account. Bluehost uses custom built servers, this provides the most stable and reliable hosting environment. That means if you have a personal ministry site, a church site, and even sites for various sub ministries they can all be hosted for the same price on the same plan. Elsewhere you have to pay for a seperate hosting plan for each site.

Media Temple

• Their services are really easy to use.
• MT doesn’t have Control Panel…so don’t break your church site unless you know how to use something call File Transfer Protocol. But they do have the BEST email set up. This quick addition adds credibility to any ministry.
• Dedicated WordPress hosting. For $22 a month you can have dedicated hosting for up to three wordpress sites.
• They provide up to 20 GB of storage on their servers for WordPress users.
• Their help center is on point! Our church’s site had to be transferred from another company to MT and their help peoples walked us through the whole thing and then some.

So, who’s the winner?

Ultimately it is up to you to pick your own host, but I have hosted sites on both of these platforms and for the beginner that is going to be working on their own church site (and possibly breaking it a few times in the process) my vote is Bluehost. My favorite feature is that it uses C-Panel to manage the back end of your website and with one or two youtube videos you can quickly learn how to navigate it.

    

Do you use someone else to host? Let us know in the comments.