As a charity or other non profit organisation, it’s vital that you have to get the absolute most out of every single penny you spend, particularly when you’re dealing with a limited budget.
This applies to starting your website too, where if you’re to make the right kind of impact on online audiences, you need the same kind of attractive, reliable and interactive web presence used by top, for-profit brands, all without the kind of thousand dollar plus budgets those brands invested in their websites.
The good news, is that when it comes to finding a reliable place to host your new website, there are several options out there which provide services tailor made to suit organisations like yours.
To help you find the right one for you, here’s our brief guide to the best web hosting plans for nonprofits and charities.
Bluehost
Though it’s easy to get a basic free hosting package if you look around, you’ll find that most of these plans aren’t exactly what they first seem.
In most cases, these ‘free hosting’ plans normally come with a very limited amount of storage and bandwidth, not to mention plastering their own advertisements on your site and restricting the use of your own .com domain name.
It’s for this reason that we love Bluehost’s commitment to providing free hosting for nonprofits.
As one of the biggest hosting companies in the world, Bluehost have a reputation for excellent service and reliable servers, and are used by some of the biggest brands and charitable organisations in the world.
To apply for free hosting with Bluehost, you first need to register with their partner, grassroots.org and claim your free hosting code.
Hostgator
Another top hosting company providing free hosting to nonprofits, HostGator’s approach is to award a select number of organisations with their Hostgator.com technology grant for non profits.
First launched at the end of the last decade, the grant provides nonprofits with one year of free hosting, including 1,000 GB of space and as much bandwidth as you could need. In our experience, we’ve found that most of the nonprofits we’ve spoken to say this more than sufficient to meet the demands of their website.
Though the grant does only last for a year, you can reapply at the end of each year and often find you’ll be accepted again providing you continue to meet their criteria.
iPage
One of the most popular and reliable companies on the net, iPage frequently ranks at the top of comparison charts created by hosting experts such as Best Web Hosting Now. This is all thanks to its low cost, high performance packages which include unlimited storage and bandwidth as well as free website building tools for around £2 or $2 per month.
This makes them an attractive proposition for non profits who haven’t been able to get their hands on a free hosting plan from another top name provider.
Electric Embers
The only hosting provider on our list created exclusive for nonprofits, cooperative movements and “others contributing to the common good,” Electric Embers are a full web service worker coop that not only do hosting, but also provide support for email and other online functions.
In terms of hosting though, you can get a low cost shared hosting plan which includes 500MB disk space and 5GB or a small Virtual Private Server with 1GB storage, 10GB bandwidth and multiple extras for a fraction of the cost that you’d pay elsewhere.
Though these might only be suitable if your nonprofit website is on the smaller side, Electric Embers is still worth taking a look.