So you’ve done some honest-to-goodness research and arrived at a decision: your Church must have a website of its own. That’s awesome, but before you proceed, it’s important that you first know your available options.
Generally speaking, there are four types of web hosts that you can choose from:
Shared Hosting
This is the most popular choice among churches mainly due to its cheap price and user-friendliness, plus its various packages for unlimited bandwidth and storage. The low cost is attributed to the fact that up to thousands of websites could be hosted from just one server.
VPS Hosting
With VPS hosting, you have your own part of the server, typically with your own dedicated CPU, storage and memory. You may even have your own operating system with root level access for full control. Many websites will be hosted on the same server as well but still much fewer than with shared hosting, and your resources will be yours exclusively.
Dedicated Hosting
As the term indicates, dedicated hosting gives you an entire server for your sole use, which means too that you make all the decisions yourself, like what programs to install and all.
Cloud Hosting
Cloud systems include several servers within a server/network architecture where everything works as one unified system.
Here, you will not be paying for a part of a server or even a dedicated server, but rather for the use of resources such as CPU, bandwidth, etc. This type of web hosting is highly appreciated for its cost-effectiveness – you only pay for what you actually use. However, as your website and its needs grow, so will the cost of cloud hosting.
Email Hosting
As you set up web hosting, it’s important to decide how you would like your church’s email to be hosted. You have the option to use your website’s host itself or to rely on a dedicated email host. Set up with call for technical expertise, but after that, you only have to enjoy the benefit of a robust email system.
The Right Choice
If you’re asking which web host type is the best for your church, it all depends on a variety of factors, including your needs and budget, your available resources and so on. Don’t be in a hurry when making that choice. And don’t be tempted by insanely and unbelievably cheap offers. Always remember that you get what you spend for. That risk is just too much to take.