Importance of hosting

This last week I've really learned the importance of planning for growth when choosing a web host, especially with a church site.

On the Greenview site, we had a modest 500Mb of hard disk storage and 1Gb of data transfer.

However, having spent the last week populating our sermon back catalogue from this year, we are now using 750Mb of hard disk and in 3 days alone shifted some 2Gb of data.

When we initially looked at our visitor stats from the old site, we chose a hosting package that would exceed a bit what we had before (we were hoping that the new site would get used) but the addition of the audio back catalogue (or sticky content) has really pulled in the visitors.

I think what also helps is that each time a sermon is uploaded, we now post to Twitter and Facebook simultaneously which gets the content in front of a greater audience. As things stand, we're definitely going to need more hard disk storage and bandwidth.

Ideally, I'd love us to be providing access to every sermon delivered at Greenview because you never know who may stumble across it. As things stand just now I'm looking at a new host or perhaps even some way to integrate Amazon's S3 service with the ExpressionEngine uploads - now that would be cool.