When it comes to church websites, web hosting is a crucial thing. Church web hosting is important, because churches with a quality web presence need consistent up time, security, and ready customer service. Good church websites aren’t just those with snazzy graphics and smart navigation. Behind every good church website is a good web hosting company. What does this have to do with you and your church website?
What Makes for a Good Christian Web Hosting Company
As we roll out this revolutionary new church website product, the world of church websites is about to change. We’re really good at making websites (just wait and see), but we need a way to get those good church websites hosted.
That is why Sharefaith has partnered with the California-based Christian web hosting company, Truepath. Truepath is a leading Christian web hosting company that provides exceptional hosting and support to thousands of ministries. Here’s why Truepath is the best choice for hosting your church website.
- Truepath is an affordable web hosting company. It may seem a bit cheap to put money as number one, but there’s a reason for this. Some of the best web hosting companies have little to distinguish themselves from the next company other than their price. Healthy competition in web hosting has created a buyer’s marketplace for the large part. For churches, the cost of web hosting is important. Don’t expect to weasel some free web hosting service, though. Web hosting is an integral part of a good church website, and you should expect to pay a fair price that will get you quality service.
- Truepath is a Christian web hosting company. Why is it important to find a Christian web hosting company? First, you want a company that is best suited to serve the specific needs of churches and Christian ministries. Second, you want a Christian web host, because such a hosting service will refuse to host pornographic or malicious content. Finally, you can rest assured that you are contributing to a business that is serving the church at large. Yes, the Christian web hosting company may be a for-profit business, but it is part of an overall attempt to give churches, Christians, and Christian ministries a tool for expanding God’s kingdom.
- Truepath offers a variety of service levels. Few church websites stay the same over the life of the church. Thus, you should find a church website hosting company that is flexible in their service levels. For example, you may start out at a low rate such as $5 dollars per month (a great price offered by Truepath), for several gigabytes of storage and ten email accounts. As your staff grows and as you enhance your church website, you may need to move up to the next level of service, which is a couple dollars more per month, etc.
- Truepath offers exceptional web hosting support. Just about every web hosting company says that they have good customer support. Don’t believe it until you test it. If “customer service” means waiting on the phone for four hours listening to tinny music, you might as well forget it. True customer support means talking to a real person to get your real problems some real solutions. Test the customer service of a company, call the customer service hotline and have some questions to ask them about their service. Just the process of getting to speak with someone will give you an accurate gauge of the company’s customer service.
- Truepath offers web hosting combined with domain purchasing. Creating a church website can be a pretty intimidating process. Often, the getting started part is the hardest part, since it means purchasing a domain, finding a web hosting service, selecting a template, and other things that you don’t understand. For this reason, you must find a web hosting company that provides a one-stop-shop for your website needs. A Christian web host that provides domain registration is rare, but they do exist. Registering your domain through the same corporation that hosts your website will make things a whole lot simpler.
- Truepath offers hundreds of email accounts (make that thousands). Having a church website is a great thing, but you should also have church email accounts for your church staffers. Some web hosting companies provide email accounts along with their web hosting service. That’s ideal. You would rather have an email address like Pastordave@MyChurch.org, rather than 139servingJesusDailyPastorDaveMan_009@juno.com. Trust me.
- Truepath supports multimedia. As a church, you’ll probably want to host multimedia. Putting your sermons online, whether in video or audio format, is a great idea. Truepath provides you with this option.
- Truepath is reliable and honest. This point should be a given for a Christian web hosting company. Reliability is what any web hosting company should be all about. Truepath features the following qualities, which are the gold-standard in a web hosting company’s reliability:
- Redundant power. In the case of power outages, there are a variety of ways to keep power running so your website will remain online.
- Redundant network equipment. In the event of any failure of the network support hardware, there are backups to keep things stable and running at optimal levels
- Redundant climate control. Network hardware needs to maintain an optimal ambient temperature to keep functioning properly, thus requiring web hosting companies to protect their climate control systems with a backup power alternative in case of outages or failure of the existing climate control
- Redundant fiber entrances. A web hosting companies needs more than just one access point to the valuable line of information transmission. A fiber entrance is kind of like the pipe through which the information flows. A good web hosting company has several of these, in case one goes out, gets vandalized, or malfunctions for some reason.
- Redundant tier one backbones. A tier 1 network is the “backbone of the Internet.” Tier 1 networks are the source of all the information that comes through the Internet. Tier 1 backbones are companies with rock-solid reliability. A good web hosting company maintains multiple connections with tier 1 networks in order to maintain the utmost reliability and as close to zero downtime as possible.
This is a long list. Admittedly, it’s also a list that proposes the highest standards in web hosting. Thankfully, there are web-hosting companies that score high in each category. Just a few. Maybe just one. Maybe just Truepath.
If there was ever a time to remain or become a Sharefaith member, it is now!