What Your Team Should Know About Nonprofit Web Hosting

Picture this: your organization’s GivingTuesday campaign is finally live. Your supporters visit your site in droves, donations begin to roll in, and members of your marketing team are sharing the campaign link wherever they can. But all of a sudden, your donation page times out, your form won’t load, and people who were excited to give to your organization are now staring at a frozen screen or spinning wheel.

The right infrastructure can help keep your site online during traffic spikes while protecting donors’ and beneficiaries’ sensitive data. In this guide, we’ll cover key aspects of nonprofit web hosting so your team can make technology decisions that align with your organization’s capacity and goals.

Nonprofit Web Hosting: The Basics

Your web host is the physical server or online service that serves your website when a user requests it. You put a lot of effort into creating your site; now, when someone types your URL or follows a link, your web host is responsible for the technology that delivers the page they requested. Website hosts come in all different shapes and sizes, differentiated by the underlying technology. 

Assuming you’re starting with a common CMS (such as WordPress), there are three main types of hosts to consider:

• Shared hosts like Bluehost and Dreamhost are the most common option for nonprofits. They serve your website from a bigger server that hosts many other websites at the same time. They’re usually the cheapest option and often require you to access your server through a web-based dashboard or control panel.
• Virtual website hosts, such as Amazon AWS or DigitalOcean, also referred to as cloud servers, offer a virtual private server that’s all yours, with direct access to your server’s low-level setup options. There’s no CMS control panel, so you need to understand server fundamentals to do this safely. Virtual hosts offer a range of capacities, from tiny and cheap to enormous and costly. Virtual private servers are an evolution of dedicated servers, which provided a similar service on a single physical machine.
• Specialty hosts, such as WP Engine or Pantheon, are designed to provide specialized environments for common CMS platforms. They provide developer tools and more sophisticated CMS-focused control panel options than shared hosts, but usually at a higher price. They offer more options for a non-technical administrator than a virtual website host, but don’t provide direct access to the full range of server configuration options, which can be a good thing if you’re not fluent in server plumbing.

If you don’t yet feel confident in choosing a host for your organization’s website, discuss these options with your technical staff or a nonprofit technology consultant who understands your setup and needs.

Beyond the Basics: Security and Support

You’ll need to choose between a shared host, a virtual host, or a specialty host. How do you decide? There are two interconnected issues to consider. 

1. Security Issues

Your website needs more than physical hardware and some bandwidth. It needs routine security updates to keep up with newly discovered security vulnerabilities and the increasing pace of live exploits. At any time, any piece of software responsible for serving your website (your CMS itself, a plugin or extension, or even the underlying database or server operating system) could have an urgent vulnerability. That vulnerability needs to be identified and patched. Then, if the fix causes any problems, those problems need to be fixed so they don’t impact your users. 

2. Traffic Volume Issues

Your site also needs to handle traffic surges, bot swarms, and other malicious attacks. A traffic surge might be from a big fundraising campaign or a media mention, but it’s more commonly due to a swarm of bots falling in love with your site’s search feature and endlessly crawling it, or to a DDoS attack or a brute-force hacking attempt targeting your site. When all else fails, your site needs disaster recovery tools, including verified backups. This will ensure you can restore it no matter what happens to it—essential to retaining your donors’ trust. 

Unmanaged vs. Managed Nonprofit Web Hosting

How do the three different types of hosts address security, traffic surges, and disaster recovery? Most virtual servers are completely unmanaged and leave you to handle all of that on your own. Some shared hosts offer control panel options that allow you to enable automatic updates and/or provide limited options when you’re on the receiving end of a traffic surge, but they’re often largely unmanaged as well, and you’re working through a support queue that can be limited in what it can do to help when your site is under attack. 

Specialty hosts offer some level of managed hosting, which may include tools to automatically apply core CMS updates, and they often provide additional tools for caching or other defenses against traffic surges. They usually have more robust options than a shared host, but their support is usually at arm’s length from your website’s internals; that is, they won’t get under the hood of your site and fix problems for you.

Finally, full-service managed hosting or concierge hosting involves a trusted provider who manages every aspect of your security, disaster response, and traffic mitigation strategy, and is fully hands-on with your website, including detailed testing and bug fixing after updates. With full-service managed hosting, your role as a site owner is simply to report a problem, not to fix it. Giant Rabbit recommends looking for full-service managed hosting that operates as a service layer over a hardware provider, offering concierge services on top of the bare-metal server resources of a virtual host.

Considering Your Nonprofit’s Server Needs 

How do you decide between your options? Consider your specific concerns: 

• How intensive are your nonprofit’s server needs? 
• Does your website mostly consist of pages that are the same every time they’re requested? 
• Or, do users log in? 
• Is your site an application that responds to each user request with a different version of the page? 

Sites with logged-in users and dynamic pages often require more processing power, while sites with less frequently updated content can often take advantage of caching and get by with a smaller server. 

If your site stores constituent data or hosts your donation forms, you are responsible for keeping your constituents’ information secure through a robust cybersecurity strategy. That means paying special attention to the following: 

• Rapid security updates
• Encrypting data at rest
• Following good security practices site-wide, such as two-factor authentication for logged-in users 

Next, how many users access your site at the same time? The more users hitting your site all at once, the more they strain your server.

Finally, how critical or costly is downtime? If your site is mostly informational, a bit of downtime might not be a big deal. On the other hand, if your site processes donations in real time during the busy year-end giving season, downtime can be costly and affect your online fundraising efforts. If your site is providing real-time public safety information, downtime could be dangerous.

When Managed Hosting Makes Sense

The more intensive your uptime needs and the more complex your site, the more you’ll want to explore managed hosts, which tend to be more costly but offer more support, or consider a full-service managed host that can proactively maintain your site and provide personalized support that’s tailored to your specific needs. Costs vary widely, and sometimes a smaller full-service managed hosting provider can provide more hands-on support at a reasonable cost than the higher tiers of larger specialty hosts. 

If you’re unsure about what your organization needs, work with your managed hosting provider or website maintenance consultant to determine the right option for your nonprofit. For an organization managing a large volume of data and handling high traffic, multiple servers could be the right choice, but a single server is likely enough for a team working with a limited budget on a site that rarely experiences uptime issues.

Working With a Nonprofit Managed Hosting Provider

To ensure your infrastructure is secure and in good hands during your busiest fundraising seasons, consider partnering with a team of nonprofit managed hosting experts. Look for a provider who will take a hands-on approach to understanding your setup, creating a right-sized solution that fits your needs, and allowing you to control your own cloud account.

The right technology partner will understand that, as a nonprofit, your organization has different priorities and likely a smaller budget than a typical business. They can help your website stay secure without pushing you toward infrastructure that exceeds your needs. If you need help with more than just cloud hosting, seek a partner who can offer broader technology support.

From safeguarding sensitive information to keeping your site online during traffic surges, reliable hosting managed by a knowledgeable technology partner can give your nonprofit’s team peace of mind and enable you to focus more on your mission rather than monitoring uptime. Review your current hosting in your next technology audit to see where your setup is working well and where you might need more support.