Web Hosting for Churches in Kenya

Sermons, livestreams and the disk space nobody warns you about

This is the one thing that catches churches out, so it is worth being plain about it. Audio is cheap to host and video is not. A 45 minute sermon saved as a spoken word MP3 comes to roughly 20MB, so a full year of weekly sermons is about 1GB. That sits comfortably on any plan.

The same sermon as a 720p video is 500MB to 1GB on its own. Upload a few months of those and you will fill the largest plan we sell, and every person who watches one pulls that file across the network again.

The answer most churches land on, and the one we recommend, is to put video on YouTube or Facebook where hosting and bandwidth cost you nothing, then embed the player on your own site. Visitors see it on your page, your archive stays browsable, and your hosting only carries the page around it. Keep the audio on your site if you want a downloadable sermon library, because audio is small enough to be no trouble at all.

Running a church site when nobody on the team is technical

Most church websites in Kenya are built by a volunteer, and most are inherited by someone else within a couple of years. Three things make that handover painless, and all three are decided at the start.

• Register the domain in the church name, not a member name. It is the single most common problem we are asked to untangle: the person who set everything up has moved, and the domain is on their personal account. Put the church as the registrant and the church office address on the record from day one.
• Use an address on your own domain for the account. Something like [email protected], which the next person in the role can be given access to, rather than a private Gmail that leaves with its owner.
• Know that the backups are automatic. Every site is backed up daily and kept for seven days, so a volunteer experimenting with the site cannot do permanent damage. That safety net is what makes it reasonable to let a willing helper learn on it.

Church Hosting FAQ