Starting a Church Blog - Part 3

On Church Blog we are writing this series of articles to help churches get there own Church Blog and web ministry developed. We have talked about some of the free options in previous articles, now we are discussing the advantages of using a web host and WordPress for your Church Blog.  WordPress is easy to work with, it is free to use, and there have been hundreds of amazing plug-ins developed to help you really tailor your web ministry. There are also a lot of really amazing themes that have been developed, some free and some for sale, which can help give your Church Blog a unique and professional appearance. We discussed domain names in our last article. In this article we are going to talk about getting a web host.

When it comes to web hosting there are a lot of options available. I use Good News Domains for my web hosting needs. They have several good web hosting plans to choose from, and their customer service has always been top notch. The process for getting a web host starts like this. Go to Good News Domains at www.goodnewsdomains.com and then click on the Web Hosting tab. You will see the following screen:

On the bottom of the page are the three options for web hosting at Good News Domains. They have an economy plan, a deluxe plan, and a premium plan.

For most of you the Economy plan will work great. If you think you might start more than 10 Christian blogs in your web ministry, then go with the Deluxe plan. One of the advantages of a web host is that you can have multiple sites hosted without having to spend more money. The Economy plan would allow you to have up to 10 different blogs hosted. The Deluxe plan would let you have uo to 25 blogs and the Premium plan would let you have up to 50. This might be a good option if you hope to have people in your church start their own blogs as part of your ministry.  You could purchase one web hosting plan and then let people start their own Christian Blog for free, or you could split the cost by how many people start a blog and it would only be $3 or $4 dollars a year. Starting multiple blogs on a web host is done by utilizing sub-domains. Be sure to choose the linux version if you are going to be using WordPress for your blog. Speaking of WordPress, one of the reasons I use Good News Domains is that they include WordPress in their value applications and will even install it for you.

The process of getting WordPress installed is fairly simple and I have written a series of articles on how to create a blog at My Newbie Blog (www.mynewbieblog.com). You can check out the articles there if you need a little extra help. In our next article we will talk about picking a theme and installing some plug-ins.