Hosting costs

[David Gillaspey]

OK folks, I've seen some posts that mention free or donated hosting.

I'd like to get a better idea of what members (or the churches they serve) are actually paying for hosting. While I'm generally OK with naming actual products or companies on the forum, I think for this question I just want to focus on price, setup charges, amount of storage, and a few basic features. That is, leave out the name of the hosting company.

I'll start...

For Great Church Websites, I'm paying US$15.95 a month (billed in advance for three months at a time) for shared hosting; non-refundable setup fee of US$29.95. For this I get 2G (yes, gigs) of storage space, 65G monthly data transfer (like I'm EVER going to use that much capacity), PHP, 2 mySQL databases (though unlimited tables), two subdomains (I can operate three entirely different websites with my one account), free scripts, email, etc.

I have since upgraded to 3 mySQL databases and a static IP address (helps with search engine placement).

By comparison, my domain registrar of choice offers a basic plan for US$3.95 a month that offers .5G (500M) of storage space, 25G monthly data transfer, PHP, 1 mySQL database, etc.

Sincerely,

David Gillaspey
President
Great Church Websites

[wbcderek]

Mine is a different situation as we use an online CMS service.


500-page site
50 MB of storage
25 e-mail addresses
Domain name purchase for 1 year. Existing domain names can be transferred.
Hosting Included
Online Help Manual
E-z animated images library
Make changes to the site from any WindowsPC with Internet access and IE 5.5 or greater.
Tools


Profile Manager
Design Manager
Site Manager
Event Manager
Group Manager
People Manager
Request Manager
Poll Manager
Store Manager
Resource Manager
Discussion Manager
Content Panel Manager
Communication Manager
Pricing


Monthly: $69.95
Annually: $755.46 (includes 10% discount)
Setup Fee: $75.00

[mrbelfry]

My site is hosted for free by my brother who also attends the church. David sounds like he is getting a great deal (if I get the dollar to pound exchange right). My brother pays ?30 a month and gets a resellers account.

I often wondered if this would be a cheap way for a group of churches to get cheap, quality webspace at a low cost or potentially a profit?

[robin]

I must be getting a much better deal than I thought...The host for my site has different option plans that you can choose from. I chose the least expensive which gives me 1GB of storage space, 15GB monthly data transfer, 300 mailboxes with 30 mail forwards, own .cgi bin, site studio software, PHP BB 2 Forum Software, 3 domains, and 30 subdomains and a live 24 hours chat help. It also has 1 MySql Database and PHP. There is a whole list of things I can go through but I won't take the time to place them on here. There is no set-up fee at all. All this cost $5.95 a month, but if you pay for a full year, you get 3 months for free. There is also a 30 day money back guarantee. I also bought my domain name there which is $12.95 a year. There are more expensive plans there where you can get more data tranfer and more storage space if you choose to do so. But the plan I have now has way more than I will ever use.

I can give the hosting company if it is appropiate to do so.

[David Gillaspey]

Hi Robin,

Yes, that is a good deal.

You can begin to see now why I started this thread. There's a lot of competition for web hosting, and a church should be able to get a lot of features (includes tons of storage, useful for media files) for a very low price.

Derek's situation is different, as he stated, because his church is using a commercial CMS solution. The vendor is entitled to recover the cost of software development. However, to be blunt, I think his CMS/hosting plan ought to offer far more than 50MB of storage. Think about how inexpensive large capacity hard drives are these days. Why do so many web hosting companies still provide 50MB or less of storage?

However, hosting price ? low or high ? doesn't guarantee quality. I'm using my third web hosting company now. The first company experienced a corrupted hard drive on a server, losing all of my data and losing the data of all the other shared hosting customers using the same computer. (This was before I started Great Church Websites.) That wasn't the big problem for me, however, since I had an offsite backup of my site. The problem for me was that it took the company several days to admit to the problem. This was a Christian web hosting company, by the way.

After launching Great Church Websites, I originally was with hosting company No. 2. I experienced frequent, almost daily, service outages with this company, despite its 99.9% uptime guarantee. Since I was uploading files to my site several times a day, I was keenly aware of how often my website was down. The company treated outages with a ho-hum attitude. The correct attitude is: our (web hosting) clients are losing business when their site is down. Let's get the server back up ASAP. So in October 2004, I switched to my current hosting company, No. 3, with which I remain very pleased.

I provide these details to encourage church webmasters to monitor their hosting company and website. If you experience frequent service outages (that is, if your site is frequently down) take action! Switch to another hosting company. You're losing "business" ? potential converts to the Kingdom ? which has eternal impact.

Sincerely,

David Gillaspey
President
Great Church Websites

[zzyxxe]

Wow, I am getting ripped off. I pay $15.95 per month and only get 250Mb storage space and 2Gb data tranfer each month.

My problem is that members of the church staff took so long setting up and learning how to use their e-mail accounts that they'd be disinclined to change again now :(

-Zzyxxe

[David Gillaspey]

All:

There are some websites out there that attempt to rate web hosting companies. Here's one I like:

http://www.upperhost.com/

Sincerely,

David Gillaspey
President
Great Church Websites

[JackWolfgang]

David--

You didn't mention who is hosting you.

The problem with hosting is the host might be hosting something you wouldn't agree with. Personally, I don't want to support a host that is willing to host pornography.

[David Gillaspey]

The problem with hosting is the host might be hosting something you wouldn't agree with. Personally, I don't want to support a host that is willing to host pornography.Well, then, you're pretty much limited to using so-called "Christian web hosters." As stated, I've used a Christian web hoster and was disappointed by the results.

But then, where do you draw the line with "something you wouldn't agree with." Some Protestants think Catholics are all going to hell. (I got an email from a pastor in England a few weeks ago wondering why I included Catholic churches in my database of well-designed church websites.) Are they then going to have to shop for a Christian web hosting company that refuses to host Catholic websites?

Many web hosting companies refuse to host adult sites not because of the moral issues involved, but because of the bandwidth issue. Porn sites eat up too much bandwidth.

Sincerely,

David Gillaspey
President
Great Church Websites

[sterrac]

I am hosted for free through the General Board of Global Ministries(GBGM). We get 5MB of storage, and after that things get hazy. I would love to get hosting from another source so I can try server side includes and fool aroung with mySQL, maybe even write a web aplication that allows the Pastor and some others the ability to update the web site themselves.

Shane Terracio
http://www.gbgm-umc.org/wurtemburg

[David Gillaspey]

I would love to get hosting from another source so I can try server side includes and fool aroung with mySQL, maybe even write a web aplication that allows the Pastor and some others the ability to update the web site themselves.http://www.gbgm-umc.org/wurtemburgHi Shane,

I know of one domain registrar that offers hosting for as little as $3.95 a month, which seems to me to be pretty reasonable. For this monthly fee, you get PHP, one mySQL database (which can contain many tables), 500MB disk space, 25G monthly data transfer, lots of email accounts, etc. Other plans are available (from the same company) for more money that add to these options.

If you're interested, I can email you the URL offline.

Sincerely,

David Gillaspey
President
Great Church Websites

[sterrac]

That would be great, I am certainly interested in exploring the options. Can you also recommend any books on php?

Shane Terracio

[generalhavok]

...so I can try server side includes and fool aroung with mySQL, maybe even write a web aplication that allows the Pastor and some others the ability to update the web site themselves.Shane: can you run php? I've been hosting a church with a calendar page that can be updated online with no knowledge of html. Let me know offline if you'd like the code.

[generalhavok]

My web space is free...sort of. I moderate a message board for a host, who's provided me with a reseller account for over 2 years. Because of this I run a small hosting service to go with my web design company. While the options offered by this host might not be the most impressive, the customer service is unparalleled in my experience.

While I would certainly entertain requests for hosting, I'd rather point most of you to this fine company: http://www.churchquest.com/. Each account I host has the following:

1GB storage
20GB monthly transfer
Unlimited email accounts (pop and webmail, forwarders, autoresponders, filtering, etc.)
Unlimited email aliases
Unlimited mailing lists
Built-in scripts (including shopping carts, polls, chat, search, blogs, CMS's, live help, forums, guestbooks, FAQs, image galleries, wiki, calendar, classifieds, and more)
Unlimited MySQL databases
Unlimited subdomains
Multiple stats packages
and more.

This only runs $8.95US ($6.95/mo when you pay for a year) with a 30-day money back guarantee. Yes, I consider this a commercial for this great company...and no, I wouldn't get anything but a good feeling if someone came from here and chose them as a host. They're good people, a good Christian host, and very helpful with almost anything you need. I've tried a number of hosts, and hope that I never have to switch again!

[David Gillaspey]

Yes, I consider this a commercial for this great company..That's fine.

My purpose for starting this thread was to make church webmasters more aware of what the current "standard" is for price vs. features, so no one gets gouged. It appears to me that one should be able to get 1G or more of hosting space for US$20 or less (even far less) ? with the possible exception of churches using proprietary CMS solutions. CMS vendors may very well have good reason for charging more, though I think any hosting package should provide at least a half gig of storage space regardless, given the low cost of mass storage these days.

For the US$20 or less, one ought to also get a number of features such as PHP and mySQL (with UNIX accounts anyway; some people may prefer Windows hosting packages for access to ASP programming), as well as email options.

Sincerely,

David Gillaspey
President
Great Church Websites

[Craig]

For the last few years we've been using the same web host without any major issues.

Specs.

800MB Storage
24GB Transfer/Mo.
100 Email
Unlimed forwarders
10 mail-list
PHP, SSI, shared SSL, own CGI, PERL
15 MySQL

Cost $100/Year

[Griffon2 6]

That would be great, I am certainly interested in exploring the options. Can you also recommend any books on php?

Shane TerracioI recommend anything from Wrox (http://www.wrox.com/WileyCDA/) and the For Dummies (http://www.dummies.com/WileyCDA/) series. I have used both and have had great results. Try a search on Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/subst/home/home.html/) for what you want and they usually offer great prices. They usually have plenty of reviews on the books.

[McDLT]

I pay about $250 Canadian for 2 years of hosting. They have several packages available, but I choose the middle one. I didn't think we could use the extra things at this moment. As it stands, I'm still not using all from the hosting. http://www.canaca.com

This is some of what I'm getting:

Web Hosting Plans
20 GB Storage Space
400 GB Bandwidth Traffic
CGI Bin, Static IP Address
Unlimited number of E-mail Accounts (and Web e-mail), with Autoresponders, Mail Forwarders, Mailing Lists
FTP Access (and Anonymous), SSH Access
SCRIPT LANGUAGES: Perl 5.6.1, FrontPage 2000 / 2002, PHP
5 MYSQL 3.23 Databases, PhpMyAdmin
OSCommerce, Shopping Cart OSCommerce
PHPNuke, PHPBB2
25 Sub-Domains
Protected Directories
Blog

[David Gillaspey]

Hi Dawn,

Thanks for joining the forum, and for your post.

<< 20 GB Storage Space >>

Wow, that's a LOT of storage. But, considering the cost of mass storage these days (low), it seems quite reasonable to me for a hosting company to offer this amount of space.

Do you have a lot of media files? I guess my question is, to what extent are you actually using that amount of storage? Just curious.

Sincerely,

David Gillaspey
President
Great Church Websites

[McDLT]

Let's just say that I would love to use more media but it's harder to convince them to do it. We are not using our web hosting to it's fullest potential. We've had the service for almost a year and I'm still asking for the messages to be put on mp3. We have the capabilities of doing it, but convincing and training the sound people are another story. Right now, I only put up the powerpoints, because I do them.

I'm trying to get the youth a little more involved and can't believe how difficult that is too.

Sorry for the little rant.

[David Gillaspey]

Sorry for the little rant.That's OK.

Sincerely,

David Gillaspey
President
Great Church Websites

[NathanSmith]

I know you said not to name names right away, but I've found Dreamhost.com to be very good. TextDrive.com is also very good, but a bit more pricey (and they don't hold your hand like Dreamhost does).

[carrot]

I recently moved hosting companies because I found an excellent company that provided far greater value. I have paid 2yrs up-front to get a price of $15.95/month for the following:
Storage: 7680 MB
Bandwidth: 192 GB
MySQL databases: Unlimited
Email accounts: 3000

But importantly for me:
15 fully hosted domains that share the above features.

This allows me to host multiple sites for ministry without having to pay for features not required for small sites, but having all the features I want for bigger sites.

[Danny Carlton]

I don't have a church web site, but wanted to offer a little more depth to the discussion as well as clarify some terminology. "Your own server" would mean your stuff is the only stuff on the server. A hosting account simply means you pay to place stuff on a server and are limited to a specific amount of disk space and bandwidth.

I have my own server I lease from a very large server farm down in Dallas. In have 70G diskspace and 1700G bandwidth a month. I do a little bit of hosting, but due to the drain on the CPU I'm moving as many of my hositng accounts off as I can. I'm running 40+ sites of my own off the server which keeps it pretty busy. They charge me $169 a month for the server.

I used to have a reseller account at another company. There I got 20G disk space and 175G bandwidth for about $35 a month. The reseller account allowed me to offer hosting to others, which I did and manage to get enough to cover the cost.

Before that I went through a series of simple hosting plans at various hosts, that typically provided anywhere from 10M to 100M diskspace and a reasonable amount of bandwidth for from $5 to $10 a month.

I also manage a homeschool auction site for a fairly well known homeschool magazine. They pay me a monthly fee to oversee the site (which I developed for them) and answer questions from users. Since 'm experienced in PHP and mySQL I've been able to both modify the scripting to sut their purpose as well as catch bugs in the scripting and fix them.

All in all I'm fairly appalled at how much some of these companies charge churches for their web sites. I just saw some company that charges $4,000 for a site not that dissimilar to what I did for a previous church for free.

At the same time I see many churches going the other extreme and handing off their web site to whoever they think might know a little bit about computers, or even worse--a committee. (what to kill your church web site quickly, put a committee in charge of it)

The typical church web site shouldn't cost more than $5 to $10 a month in hosting fees, a little more if you're providing audio and video, but not that much more.

Development and management are another matter and that expense is always a contentious one between those who don't want to pay much, and those who want to earn a living. Developing a typical church web site would take a designer about 3 days, so figure how much that person's time is worth for that expense (more if they are really talented). Having a member do it for free would be a great plus, but then when's the last time your church had a member fix the plumbing, who wasn't an actual plumber?

Maintaining a web site depends on how automated the site is. If it's got some easy to use interfaces for the church staff to update the info, then there should be little technical maintenance. But that kind of interface take effort to build, so add about a week to the development time. But a week of developement v. several days a month for the tech guy adding stuff manually makes the interface a better deal.