The Highway Forums General Discussion Open Forum Web Site Help

I'm helping to put together a web site for my church. The problem is we know very little about web hosters, development and implementation.

Does anyone know of any reputable web hosting companies that are Christian owned/Christian professing? Also, does anyone know of any Christian web site designers/developers who do this kind of work (preferably at a low cost)?

Any other ideas or suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks
David

I am in the same situation, working on http://rinconmountainpca.com/ just learn one thing at a time.

i found:
http://www.gospelcom.net/guide/index.php
especially their pages:
http://www.gospelcom.net/guide/resources/webmaster.php
this to be the best place to start.
followed by:
http://www.theoslogic.com/church_websites/

there are several places online to ask for specific answers i found:
http://www.christian-web-masters.com/forums/index.php?
to be the most helpful.

Even if you hire someone to do the website, it still has to be maintained. Web design, imho, is expensive and the money can better be spent buying a few key books for the church library and getting a few people together to write and maintain the site.

...

I used to maintain the website of my former church and we used Ministry Presence. It was extremely easy to use and to maintain. I was not involved in the financial end of things, so I have no idea how they compare price-wise with other web hosting that is targeted to churches, but for ease in use, I give it a big thumbs up!

http://www.ministrypresence.com/

I can understand, partly, how you might want to do business with a Christian-run web hosting company. But unless a non-Christian company is doing business in an under-handed manner, I see no reason to restrict yourself in this way.

Doing a quick search using resulted in this: Google search results.

For non-Christian web hosting, the choices are endless. Personally, I can recommend CIHost who constantly offers "Specials" which most always offer unbeatable pricing, web space and features. Their tech support is way above average compared to others I have had the misfortune to deal with.

At one time we used gospelcom.net to host The Highway. But after I discovered that their "theology" was a variance with what we hold to be true and that they seemed to have more of an interest in financial gain and conforming to the world, we could no longer in good conscience support them. They were also very inflexible about running your personal services, e.g., a forum like this one and they were not good about keeping some items updated, e.g., Perl, PHP, MySQL, etc.

I would add that we need to beware of the error of not trading with "the world". I would "ask no question for conscience sake" on this matter, as we are not responsible for what others do with money they receive from us for their services or goods. Even the ungodly have to make a living, and indeed, they are duty-bound to do so.

This is actually my pastor's request. But I do see your and Pilgrim's points. We all do business with many businesses that are not Christian. In fact, it would be extremely difficult if not impossible to only conduct business with Christian owned companies.

However, all things being equal, shouldn't we favor a Christian owned business when given the opportunity?

Absolutely!! But pray tell where on this earth all things are equal? <img src="/forum/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" /> Rarely if ever are you going to find, e.g., 2 or more ISP's who offer identical features, space, and pricing, etc. Unless a company is known to be less than scrupulous or deals in illegal practices, etc., I think being called to be a good steward would dictate that we should at least consider getting the most "bang for the buck". <img src="/forum/images/graemlins/scratchchin.gif" alt="" />