Tools we use:

Hosting

If your website is your car, then the host is the garage where it is housed. All your files, databases, media, err'thing...it's all on your host's servers. It's like a garage for your site! Hosting is an often overlooked, but extremely important component of a healthy website. You 'get what you pay for' when it comes to hosting more than ANY other area of manning a WordPress site.

My #1 Picks

Faithmade

Visit Faithmade

Faithmade isn't just hosting. Faithmade's church website builder creates a "move in ready" website to help you create engagement and next steps where it counts without overwhelming you or your team.

Our goal is for churches to have a website so straightforward that even a lead pastor with a million other things to do can create the kind of site they actually want in an hour and spend less than 20 minutes a week on their website going forward.

Flywheel

Get Flywheel

FlyWheel is the gold standard of managed WordPress hosting. Unlike the two previous options FlyWheel manages most of the tedious tasks of using a WordPress site for you. If I only had one site for my church, this is hands down what I'd choose. I placed the others before this because you can have multiple WP installs without it really affecting your price. The prices for Flywheel below are for one installation. It gets pricey after that!

  • Built exclusively for WordPress. That's all they do!
  • Impressive load times with zero configuration on the site. It's stupid fast.
  • Built in management. They handle SSL, backups, caching, updates and more for you.
  • The most simple and intuitive dashboard I've ever worked with.

 

Price: $15 - $74 a month (I'd spring for the middle $30 tier).

Siteground

Get Siteground

I have used Siteground for a lot of my church websites. In fact, I had most of my sites on SG before moving to Sierra. I was content at Siteground for the support alone, but Sierra enticed me by being easier to manage for my needs on the backend and I saved a few bucks a month. Even so, Siteground has a solid history of reliability.

  • Dedicated WordPress hosting (if you choose it).
  • Ridiculously amazing support. SG has the best support I've ever worked with in hosting.
  • Built in caching. I use WP Rocket but their built in caching handled most of what I needed.
  • Free CDN.

Price: Starts at $5 a month but I'd definitely at least hit up the $10 monthly tier.

Don't Use These

Knowing what NOT to use is sometimes as important as know what TO use. Being that hosting is foundational important to a healthy, fast site I want to suggest some players to stay away from. There are other hosts that I'd suggest staying away from, but I promised in this 'Tools I Use' section I'd only discuss tools I have experience with.

Bluehost

I started with Bluehost years ago. Their service, support and security went down the drain when they were bought out a few years back. If you have a site on Bluehost I suggest moving to one of the hosts listed above quickly.

People that are still propping up Bluehost are doing it for the $65+ affiliate fee they get every time someone signs up. I couldn't do ya like that though! I quit recommending them within six months of their buy out.

GoDaddy

GoDaddy is only good for one thing: domains. Every experience I've had with GoDaddy hosting has been frustrating. Their support on the hosting side is meh at best.

Much of what they call features are sugar coated restrictions. I've seen GoDaddy sites suddenly blacklist plugins causing a site to malfunction. Some of them are servers heavy so they just convince you they aren't good. #eyeroll