Building Church Websites with Drupal (First Steps)

Step 1: Getting a Domain Name

Simply put, the Internet is a massive network of connected computers, each of which has its own IP address.  For example, 216.239.51.99 is an IP address of a computer that runs Google's website.  The seemingly random numbers that make up IP addresses are difficult to remember for most of us.  As such, "domain names" are used to make websites easier for users to find.  It is much easier to remember "google.com" than "216.239.51.99".

If you want your own church website, you will need to have a unique domain name.  Since the Internet has become quite popular in recent times, many domain names are already taken.  As such, finding a good domain to represent your church may be more difficult than you think.  For example, if your church is named "First Southern Baptist Church" and you want to use "firstsouthern.org", you are out of luck, as it is already owned by someone else.  So, how do you know what domain names are available?  There are many sites where you can check domain availability.  The one I use most commonly is at the top of the GoDaddy homepage.

There are many things to consider when trying to find a good domain name, and they have been hashed over by many people.  Here is my two cents on the choice of a church domain name:

• Only use ".com" or ".org": In my opinion, ".com" is the best solution, as it is used by virtually all major organizations and corporations.  However, for churches the ".org" seems to be a viable option since it is commonly associated with non-profit organizations.  If you use other endings such as ".net" or ".us", users will have much more difficulty remembering your address.
• Keep it short: Long addresses are generally difficult to remember and give the visitor more opportunity to misspell something.  Keeping it somewhere in the neighborhood of ten characters is good, but exceptions can certainly be made if needed.
• Use all or part of your church name: Acronyms or random words will be extremely difficult for users to remember.
  

Once you have settled upon a domain name that is both acceptable and available, you have to purchase the rights to use this domain name.  This is done by purchasing the rights from a "domain registrar".  There are plenty of registrars to choose from.  One common one is GoDaddy.  You can find a list of popular registrars here.  Domain names are typically purchased on a yearly basis.  The cost is actually quite low.  Prices are often in the range of $10-20 per year.  Of all the expenses associated with creating your own website, this will likely be the lowest.

Step 2: Getting WebHosting

Now you hopefully have a great domain name for your church.  However, a domain name alone does your church no good.  You need a place to store your site's content so that visitors will have something to look at.  Essentially, you need an IP address for your domain name to point to (see above for explanation).  In the past many churches would attempt to store all of their website content on their own computers, for example in their own offices.  This might seem like the logical choice, but nowadays it is usually a very unwise decision.  Many companies specialize in storing your site's content on their computers and serving your content out to site visitors.  These companies are called "webhosts".

Essentially you pay a monthly fee to your webhost in exchange for them storing all of your site's files, information, photos, databases, etc.  While this might seem like a strange idea, it actually makes a lot of sense.  Webhosts typically have many high-speed internet connections, with souped-up computers that are well-suited for running websites.  Thanks to the scale of their resources, you can get realtively high performance at a low cost.

There is one major choice that you must make when deciding what type of webhosting to purchase for your church: "shared hosting" or a "dedicated server".  With shared hosting, your website is run on a computer (server) that also runs dozens of other websites simultaneously.  The performance of the server is separated among these sites, giving less than ideal performance.  Additionally, you can not configure the server's settings to your specific needs.  For almost every church site, I recommend shared hosting from a company like DreamHost.  For something like $10-20 per month, you get a large amount of storage and acceptable site speed.  However, if your site uses a large amount of video or will have thousands of regular visitors, then I would recommend going to a dedicated server.  With such a plan, your site runs on its own server, which you can configure to your needs.  The server's entire computing power is dedicated to your site, providing faster response and generally better performance.  Although the increased performance seems desirable, you should really know what you're doing before chosing a dedicated server plan.  These plans cost much more per month and should only be used when absolutely needed.  It is very unlikely that you should chose a dedicated server over a shared hosting situation.

Before purchasing a hosting plan, you should make sure that it meets a few minimum requirements for running a Drupal site.  First, they should provide servers with PHP 5.2 installed.  PHP is the programming language that Drupal is written in, and 5.2 is the latest and greatest version.  Many of Drupal's modules increasingly depend on functions that only exist in PHP 5.2.  Using older versions of PHP could greatly limit your site's capabilities in the future.  The second major requirement of a webhost is that they provide you with MySQL databases.  Although Drupal can technically use various database types to store its information, there is no doubt that MySQL is hands down the most supported.  Using another type of database at this point would give you many headaches in the future.  Both PHP 5.2 and MySQL are very common in good webhosting packages.  Additionally, you should look at how much storage space the host offers (e.g. for storing sermon audio, video, photos, etc.).   You should have near or more than ~100 GB of space on any reasonable hosting plan.  Many other factors (e.g. bandwidth) are important in chosing a host, but the aforementioned aspects are probably the most important.

Now You're Ready...

Now that you have a domain name and a web host, you are almost ready to go.  The host should provide you with directions on how to associate your domain name with your hosting plan.  Typically, it will take a few days at most for your new domain name to "propogate" around the Internet so that when a visitor types your domain name they are directed to your site.  Once this is done, you are ready to start setting up your Drupal site.  I will address the first steps to setting up your Drupal site in the next post.