Web Hosting Info Needed

Unless you are a large church and are going to use forums bandwidth should be a problem. Storage shouldn't either on most servers. 10 meg would do you for quite awhile for text. If you start uploading pictures of all the pot lucks you might want more Most packages are way bigger than that these days.

Go to http://www.godaddy.com and just snoop around. There are other servers around, so just for your own information. I and others here use godaddy, but you many have local services that are good as well.

Our public library has a service that is free to non-profits and minimal bucks for all others. Some counties, cities and states have big servers that they provide service for small fees as well so check around.

There have been some free offers on this board as well so don't jump into anything without snooping.

When you get to some specific needs ask away, there are several here that dabble in the art of wasting internet space :laugh:

Be sure you know how many email addresses you will need. Some servers have limited numbers, others have way too many to ever use.

 

We had VERY problematic service from godaddy. I would recommend globat.com, but as ex said snoop around. We use globat for both of our sites and have had no problems at all, and their customer service is MUCH better. (IMHO, of course) They also have a 1-year money back guarantee.

Here is the link:

http://globat.com/products/terabytepro.htm

 

I use Yahoo business services. They are very easy to use and allow for various formats. They are set up for wordpress, perl, php, mysql, java -- I can't remember what else. Those are the ones I use.

I've got several pages and have come no where near using my space or bandwidth.

 

I maintain all my sites at three locations for backup one server has threatened to close several times. (I have my main site, wife's poetry site and a class website for my High School class.)

http://www.open.org/~mrdsnts is the most active and oldest. Last month there were 16,891 requests for information and the bandwidth was 462.88 meg for the month. My files average around 30-40 k I'd guess. I do have all my stuff for download which accounts for some of the bandwidth. About 7000 of the hits were from search engines so actual users ran a tad under 10,000.

This has been up for a number of years (back when you had to code the pages yourself and there are many links to it on the web.

We had 150+ downloads and they average around a meg or under.

I'd guess with a church website you won't have anywhere near this much traffic unless you put a lot of resources etc. on or unless you have a large church with lots of information for people to come to see.


I've done some small church websites and few visits after the first few weeks. You can always watch your space needs and bandwidth, if you get close to going over the limits, just make some changes.

If you get a domain name when you begin, you can change servers twice a month and noone will ever know it - well cept you and all the headaches you'd get :smilewinkgrin:


I don't know how much space we use, I'd guess 40-50 meg with all the downloads. The downloads are 14 meg (they are all zipped).

Off to coffee and study for couple hours, if you have more questions I'll be on way to much later this morning.

 

Not meaning to hijack the thread, but along the same line...

What is involved in setting up a server at a church? Can a "regular" computer and a high-speed connection do that? If so, would it be worth the trouble?

Our church site gets less than 150 hits per month right now, and I'm not expecting it to increase much. But, I would like one day to put messages on line (mp3 to be downloaded??). What say ye, brethern (and sisteren)?

 

If you aren't incredibly limited financially, look at artistry marketing.

First-class customer service, good web pages. They're not dirt cheap, but they're good.

Huge advantage: you don't have to be an HTML or XML guru to run it. Saves you time, which is worth $$ in my book.

http://www.artistrymarketing.com/

OUR Website through artistry marketing...

 

PJLhosting.com

500megs storage, $50 a year.

 

I use http://ipower.com to host my Big Websites! :smilewinkgrin:

 

Here's a few packages:

10MB Disk Space
140MB Bandwidth
cPanel w/Fantastico
PHP5, MySQL5, Perl5, CGI
No-Ads
Free
http://www.minihost.org/signup.php?pn=MH-I

30MB Disk Space
420MB Bandwidth
cPanel w/Fantastico
PHP5, MySQL5, Perl5, CGI
No-Ads
Free
http://www.minihost.org/signup.php?pn=MH-II

50MB Disk Space
700MB Bandwidth
cPanel w/Fantastico
PHP5, MySQL5, Perl5, CGI
No-Ads
Free
http://www.minihost.org/signup.php?pn=MH-III

100MB Disk Space
1400MB Bandwidth
cPanel w/Fantastico AND Reseller Priviledges
PHP5, MySQL5, Perl5, CGI
No-Ads
$1.99/month
http://www.minihost.org/signup.php?pn=MH-IV

300MB Disk Space
4200MB Bandwidth
cPanel w/Fantastico AND Reseller Priviledges
PHP5, MySQL5, Perl5, CGI
No-Ads
$2.99/month
http://www.minihost.org/signup.php?pn=MH-V

500MB Disk Space
7000MB Bandwidth
cPanel w/Fantastico AND Reseller Priviledges
PHP5, MySQL5, Perl5, CGI
No-Ads
$3.99/month
http://www.minihost.org/signup.php?pn=MH-VI

What you are looking for depends on what you plan to make available, and how many visitors you expect to have. Will you be hosting sermons? Music? MP3's will take up a lot of disk space, and depending on the number of visitors, lots of bandwidth.

The best tactic for most web hosts is to convince their potential clients to pay for the biggest plan- because it's guaranteed you are paying a higher price, and highly unlikely you will use all the bandwidth and disk space.

The smartest thing a customer can do is look for a reliable host that offers a variety of hosting packages. Don't just look at how much space or bandwidth they offer, since most hosts oversell anyway. Looking at only disk space and bandwidth is like shopping for fast cars by looking at how high the speedometer goes to.

If you decide to pay for hosting: Ask for uptime statistics. Ask for average CPU load. See if you can talk to people who are using the service to ask them how pleased they are. Ask for a download speed test to see how fast the server transfers to your area. Ping the servers IP to check latency. Do research before you put files on a server. There are tons of unreliable hosts out there.

Check to see what they support. Do you get a control panel? Do you need PHP? ASP? MSSQL? MySQL? Do they give you enough of what you need? Etc...

Go with the smallest (yes, smallest) plan that they offer. This will save you a load of cash every month because you won't be paying for something you don't need. You can always upgrade easily if you pay by month.

Avoid yearly signups until you've been with the host for a few months. They are usually cheaper than monthly billing, but the longer the commitment, the more risk you are taking. Also, avoid a host that offers a domain with their hosting. Many many hosts will not allow you to transfer your domain to another host if you decide to leave them. It's almost a scam, but there are many cheap hosts that still do this. If they do offer a domain, ask if they allow you to transfer that domain after you leave them.

Good luck.

 

I just got a server for the media center and it was about $1300. Programming has to be loaded on it. It does have to be maintained (maintenanced?). Maybe one of your church members has the skills to do that.

 

http://umn.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/appserv/appserv-win32-2.5.7.exe

Install AppServ will turn just about any Windows PC into an Apache server with PHP, MySQL, and a few other spiffy features. I've run AppServ on a Pentium II 350MHz computer before and it ran nice and smooth. You could probably get it to run fine on a slower system.


http://www.no-ip.com/services/managed_dns/free_dynamic_dns.html

Couple that with No-IP and you will have a complete server with a free easy-to-remember address. There's also easy ways to add domains to your do-it-yourself server.

Pros: It's free. You manage the server so you know whats on it. You can customize it however you would like. It's more secure than IIS5, and an easier solution for most beginners than Apache on Linux. It can be a fun project for geeks.

Cons: It's slow (visitors can download at the maximum speed of your upload which is usually considerably slower than your download), so it's not a good solution if you get too many visitors or are hosting larger files or more graphic intensive sites. Definately not good for hosting audio unless you have an impressive upload speed. You have to keep the server up and running 24x7. It's not practical since hosting is relatively cheap (and free if you know where to look ). Also, make sure you open port 80 on your router/firewall, and make sure your host permits things to run on port 80- many block it.

 

Bill, I'd suggest checking out The GraceNet. They are the oldest Christian hosting service in existence, and have been at it a long time, longer than any other, on the 'Net. 'Sides that, a couple of my friends from Bible College have it as their ministry. Sorry, I'm not computer adept enough to give you a link. But just type that in a search, and it will come up. BTW, you want the one around Atlanta, not on the West Coast, for the Atlanta one is the Christian Service.

Ed