Choose Your Host with An Eye for the Future
by Brandon Jubar
There are plenty of "free" Web hosts out there, and a few
have focused on the religious market. The forced banner ads that
these portals plop onto your pages are carefully screened and are
usually for religious products and services. This, in and of
itself, is not necessarily bad.
Actually, the bad part creeps up on you as your Parish begins to
put more emphasis upon electronic ministry. In the beginning,
you go with the free service with the idea that you can't spend a
great deal of money on something that you know very little about.
Free Web hosting (and the idiot-proof Web site design templates that
they make you use) seems like a great idea! No cost or
experience required! (Gotcha!)
Below is the scenario that concerns me:
The Free Hosting Fiasco
Your Parish builds a Web site through FreeReligiousHosting.com
(fictitious as of this writing), which provides a small amount of
storage and a handful of other "value added" services.
Eventually, the site becomes popular and you begin identifying
different things that you would like to do with your site.
You have also discovered that the URL you have been given (www.freereligioushosting.com/churches/yourstate/yourparish/)
is far too long. People can't remember it and printing it on business
cards and Parish correspondence is cumbersome (to say the least).
Thus, you decide to register YourParish.org as your domain name.
Speaking of business cards, you've also decided that everyone on
the Parish staff should have their own email address with your Parish
Web site as the mailto site. Isn't it more professional to
have staffmember@yourparish.org , rather than staffmember@aol.com
?
UNFORTUNATELY...
...the amount of storage that your Web Hosting provides for free is
not adequate to handle the things you are planning. Furthermore,
the templates you must use to build the site do not accommodate the
functionality you are hoping to include. In order to continue
with your plans, you will have to upgrade to one of the
"paid" hosting plans which, in addition to including more
storage, allows you to build your site using any tools you wish and
upload changes via FTP.
Then, when you go to assign your IP address to your domain name,
you discover that your Web Host requires that domain names be transferred
to their registry service... for an additional fee.
Just when you think you're ready to proceed, you find out that
there are a number of additional fees around POP 3 email accounts,
set-up of the accounts, email redirects, autoresponders, etc.
Yet in spite of all these additional fees, you have already
traveled far down the road with this Web Host. The headaches
involved with switching to a new Web Host just seem to be too great,
so you simply pay the fees and plow ahead.
What has happened in the scenario above is that your Parish was
"hooked" by the free service. As your needs
increased though, the costs begin to grow dramatically. In the
end, your Parish ends up paying top dollar for Web hosting when, in
the beginning, saving money had been a major criteria.
Web Hosting: A Commodity?
Web hosting is becoming very competitive today. In fact, it
is close to becoming a commodity. It won't be long before a $15
or $20 per month hosting plan will include huge amounts of storage,
tons of true value-added services, gobs of POP 3 email accounts and
excellent support and customer service.
Question: Why, then, would a Parish pay $24.95 a month for
moderate storage and very little else?
Answer: Because people naturally fear change. Once they
are using a particular Web host, unless something goes drastically
wrong, they will tend to remain with that host.
Our suggestion is that, before you jump in with a "free"
hosting company, you do a little research. Assume that your
needs will increase over time. What do the
"paid" hosting plans from your free hosting provider look
like? How do they compare to other hosting companies' plans?
What type of bells and whistles come with the different plans?
Remember that just because you don't feel something is important right
now, it doesn't mean that it won't be important a year from now!
Here are a couple places for you to research Web Hosts:
HostSearch has an excellent database of hosting companies.
Their search engine allows you to search by cost, storage space,
platform and several other criteria.
http://www.hostsearch.com/
Then check out their Host Reviews:
http://www.hostsearch.com/reviews.asp
Another excellent place to do your research is HostIndex,
which provides a searchable database as well as a plethora of
information regarding all things host-related:
http://www.hostindex.com/
Good luck to you in your quest! And keep in mind... if you've
already started done the "free-hosting" path, it is never to
late to switch. Unless you are tied to your host's online
site-building tools and templates, changing to a different Web host is
not as difficult as it may appear. But that is a topic for
another day...
Peace,
Brandon Jubar
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