Web Hosting for Churches and Ministries

Sermon recordings and the storage question

Churches get caught out by this more than anything else, so here it is plainly. Audio costs little to host, and video costs a lot. A 45 minute sermon saved as a spoken word MP3 is around 20MB, which means a year of weekly sermons adds up to about 1GB. Any plan holds that with ease.

Record the same sermon as 720p video and that one file is 500MB to 1GB. A few months of them will fill even the largest plan we sell, and each person who watches pulls the whole file over the network again.

What most churches settle on, and what we suggest, is to upload video to YouTube or Facebook, where hosting and bandwidth are free, and embed the player on your own website. People still watch on your page, your archive is still easy to browse, and your hosting only serves the page around the video. If you want a sermon library people can download, keep the audio on your site, as it is small enough to cause no problems.

Looking after the site without a technical team

A volunteer usually builds the church website, and within a couple of years someone else usually takes it over. Three choices, all made at the very beginning, make that handover easy.

• Put the domain in the church's name, not a member's. It is a familiar story: whoever set it all up has moved on, and the domain sits in their personal account. Make the church the registrant, with the church office address on the record, from the first day.
• Give the account an address on your own domain. Use something like [email protected] that the next person in the role can be handed, not a private Gmail address that leaves with its owner.
• Remember that backups happen automatically. Each site is backed up every day and the copies are kept for seven days, so a volunteer trying things out cannot cause lasting damage. That safety net is why it is sensible to let a willing helper learn on it.

Questions from Churches