Website Options for Nonprofits — Part 1: Big Picture

If your orga­ni­za­tion has a web pres­ence of some kind, which it prob­a­bly does, there’s a good chance you’re not com­pletely happy with some­thing about it. Maybe it’s too expen­sive. Maybe it’s too hard to update.

Maybe it’s just plain ugly.

If your orga­ni­za­tion doesn’t have a web pres­ence, there’s a good chance that makes you uncom­fort­able. It might also make peo­ple who con­sider sup­port­ing you uncomfortable.

Many options

The good news is that the last few years have given us an explo­sion of options for cre­at­ing a web presence.

The bad news is that explo­sions are uncom­fort­able. It’s hard to know what the options are and why you might choose them.

This three-part arti­cle will help.

• Part One cov­ers fun­da­men­tal con­cepts and con­sid­ers tra­di­tional web­site host­ing options.
• Part Two cov­ers options for cre­at­ing web pages using a tra­di­tional web edit­ing program.
• Part Three cov­ers cover tools that let you build a web­site using just your web browser.

What is a web page, really?

Glad you asked. This is a web page:

A web page is actu­ally one or more files that describe in cryp­tic text how the page should look. When you tell your browser to visit a page here’s what happens:

1. Your browser fig­ures out which com­puter on the Inter­net has that page.
2. Your browser asks that com­puter for the page.
3. The com­puter trans­mits one or more files to your browser.
4. Your browser mag­i­cally trans­forms the files into some­thing much more appeal­ing than a cryp­tic text document:

Though some­times it turns into some­thing that man­ages to be less appeal­ing than a cryp­tic text document:

This leads us to…

Two really impor­tant ques­tions for web­site owners

Whether you’re cre­at­ing or main­tain­ing a web­site, there are fun­da­men­tally two things you need to know.

• Which com­puter will the pages live on?
• How will we cre­ate and edit the cryp­tic text doc­u­ments that define the pages?

The rest of this three-part arti­cle will explore those ques­tions. The answer will depend on which of three options you use:

1. Host your own site
2. Use a web host­ing company
3. Host your site within another site

Option 1: Host your own site

Ques­tion 1: which com­puter will the pages live on?

It is absolutely pos­si­ble to plunk your web pages right on your desk­top com­puter, or on another com­puter your orga­ni­za­tion owns, open that com­puter up to the Inter­net, and let peo­ple visit your web­site right there on your own computer.

And if you do that, here’s what will likely hap­pen sooner or later:

Because by host­ing your own web­site you are (whether you mean to or not) tak­ing respon­si­bil­ity for that computer’s security.

The per­ils of self-hosting

Your com­puter will be avail­able to any nut-job on the Inter­net who finds it and decide to try hack­ing into it.

At that point you’d bet­ter hope you were expert enough to set up secu­rity cor­rectly, dili­gent enough to keep your com­puter and its web server soft­ware updated with all the lat­est secu­rity patches, and watch­ful enough to notice when some­one breaks in. If you screw that up, there’s a risk that peo­ple will hack into not only your web server, but every other com­puter con­nected to your web server.

Self-hosting isn’t always wrong. But it requires either a skilled IT depart­ment or a high tol­er­ance for risk.

So I’m not even going to answer Ques­tion 2 (how to cre­ate the pages) for self-hosting. Though if you insist on that route, you’ll cre­ate pages the same way as you would for the next option…

Option 2: Use a web host­ing company

Rather than tak­ing respon­si­bil­ity for main­tain­ing and secur­ing your own web server, with this option you pay some­one to han­dle the headaches.

Whether that “some­one” is your inter­net ser­vice provider or a sep­a­rate web host, this the most com­mon option for pro­fes­sional websites.

What do web hosts provide?

• All will give you a place where your web­site can live.
• Nearly all give you the option of host­ing your email there too, so you can send and receive email at yourname@yourgroup.org.
• Nearly all offer phone and/or email sup­port. (Some are even good at it.)
• Most offer cool extras, whether it’s tools for blog­ging, e-commerce, pic­ture gal­leries, or a heap of other things.
• Many offer an easy way to back up and restore your site in case of problems.
• Many offer “value-added ser­vices”, mean­ing you can pay them extra money to help you build your site or improve your search engine ranking.

99,000 bot­tles of web host on the wall

There are lit­er­ally thou­sands of com­pa­nies that want to host your site. Some are big, some are small. Some are local, some are inter­na­tional. But most impor­tant: some are good, some are bad.

How to choose?

Rec­om­men­da­tions from peo­ple you know

First choice: see if some­one you know is happy with their web host. That kind of advice is worth a lot.

Rec­om­men­da­tions from some­one you don’t nec­es­sar­ily know (aka, me)

Fail­ing that, I can make a few rec­om­men­da­tions based on my own expe­ri­ence and a good bit of research. (None of these groups give me any­thing for men­tion­ing them.)

• InMo­tion Host­ing. I’ve used them myself and they gen­er­ally do well.
• Host­Ga­tor and ICD­Soft. I haven’t used them myself, but have seen enough pos­i­tive com­ments to believe they’re worth trying.
• DreamHost. This is a com­mon host among non­prof­its because it’s a full-service web host­ing com­pany that offers free host­ing for non­prof­its. Sound too good to be true? Here’s the catch: based on reviews I’ve seen and com­ments I’ve heard, peo­ple have been get­ting less happy with DreamHost over the last 2–3 years. I’ve heard of per­for­mance prob­lems among other things. So one the one hand, an anec­do­tal word of cau­tion. And on the other, free is free.

Rec­om­men­da­tions from sites that rec­om­mend things

Finally, there are also many (many, many) sites out there that promise to tell you which hosts are good. Some pro­vide their own edi­to­ri­als, some gather opin­ions from hosts’ cus­tomers, some do both.

The prob­lem is, most of them aren’t at all trans­par­ent about their meth­ods, and most accept adver­tis­ing money from the web hosts they review. All seem ter­ri­bly sus­cep­ti­ble to manip­u­la­tion by unscrupu­lous web hosts, who can pre­tend to be end users and then vote for them­selves or against competitors.

I’ve tried to extract use­ful infor­ma­tion by doing meta-analysis across half a dozen such sites and fil­ter­ing for data quality—for exam­ple, look­ing for sta­tis­ti­cal clues of pos­si­ble manip­u­la­tion. But that’s tedious work and takes hours.

So it can’t hurt to visit web host review sites, but view their reports with a jaun­diced eye.

Here are some review sites that I’ve found more use­ful than the oth­ers (maybe, caveat emp­tor, grain of salt, mumble-mumble, etc.):

Sites with User Reviews

• Best Host Ratings
• Web Host­ing Geeks
• Web Host­ing Jury
• Web Host­ing Reviews
• Web Host­ing Search

Other Sites

• Upper Host: bills itself as offer­ing “Non-Profit Host­ing Reviews”. They don’t seem to be an actual not-for-profit orga­ni­za­tion, but they do claim to steer clear of accept­ing money from the peo­ple they’re review­ing, which is very unusual for web host review sites.
• Bet­ter Busi­ness Bureau: won’t tell you any­thing about the qual­ity of their host­ing, but may give you a warn­ing if a host has annoyed the heck out of a lot of customers

Com­ing up next…

Part Two of this arti­cle will dis­cuss tools and options for cre­at­ing web pages if you’re using a web host­ing com­pany or (insert the sound of nails on a black­board) host­ing your site on your own server.

Part Three will look at some more recent addi­tions to the web host­ing fold: alter­na­tives that will let you cre­ate a rea­son­able web­site with lit­tle or no tech­ni­cal knowl­edge, and some­times for free.

See you then.

Other Resources

• Tips for Design­ing (or Redesign­ing) a Non­profit Web Site
  Tech­Soup (June 2009)
• A Nonprofit’s Guide to Build­ing Sim­ple, Low-Cost Web­sites
  Tech­Soup (July 2009)
• HOW TO: Run Your Busi­ness Online with $10 and a Google Account
  Mash­able (Sep­tem­ber 2010)
• 5 Fun­da­men­tal Steps to Deploy­ing a Web­site
  Six Revi­sions (Octo­ber 2010)