Hosted Church is an affordable website and hosting service designed especially for churches, ministries and small organizations. It combines website tools, managed hosting, security, backups and support in one service.

No. Hosted Church is designed to make managing a website approachable even if you’ve never edited a website before.

Yes. Hosted Church was specifically designed to make professional websites more accessible to small and medium-sized churches, and we’ve expanded our capacity to include ministries, authors and small businesses.

Hosted Church website tools can support your routine church content such as sermons, events, staff information, ministries and other pages.

Yes. Hosted Church themes and designs are created and adapted to work across phones, tablets and desktop computers.

Yes. Hosting is part of the Hosted Church service, along with features such as website backups, security tools and performance optimization.

Hosted Church includes backups and recovery tools, along with support resources and people to help resolve problems.

Hosted Church is a ministry of TAB Media Group, publisher of The Alabama Baptist, The Baptist Paper and The Kids Edition. For more than 180 years, TAB Media Group has served churches and individuals by creating trusted content and resources that deliver truth with compassion. Hosted Church extends that mission by helping churches, ministries and organizations build and maintain an effective online presence.

Hosted Church offers several plans beginning with an Essential plan at $75 annually. Monthly Basic and Premium options are also available.

Choose a plan online and fill out the onboarding form or contact Hosted Church for help determining which option best fits your organization.

Basically, you (the church or organization) choose a online giving platform — such as tithe.ly or givethree65 through TBFA — and create an account through them. Once you have an account through them, then we can embed a giving code into your website. The online giving platforms make it really simple, and any online gifts go from the online giving platform to your bank account. Hosted Church wouldn’t be connected with that in any way other than making sure the platform is embedded within your website, which keeps your finances cleaner.

It depends on what online platform you use for the online giving. For instance, if you were to use Tithe.ly, they have a package option for churches that requires no monthly fee to use their platform and integrate it to your website, but they do charge a small fee per transaction they process. However, in this package, churches can also enable the “Cover the Fees” option, which would allow givers to increase their gift enough to cover the processing fees.

A lot of online giving platforms now offer a similar option, and you’d just want to check out the processing fees to see if there’s a big difference from one to the other. For tithe.ly, you can see the pricing structure, individual transaction fees and how much you’d pay in processing fees here: https://get.tithe.ly/pricing.

In case it’s a helpful reference, a good rule of thumb is that for the amount of money given through the online platform, there will be an additional 2.3% cost in processing fees. For example, if your church members gave $125,000 through your online giving platform, you would wind up paying $2,875 out of that total in processing fees. That’s where the “Cover the Fees” options are really helpful, but generally speaking the monetary gift is much greater than the expense of the processing fees.

Premium Plugins means that we have special access to fancy tools that automate things like sermon uploads and just make their site look more professional than someone else’s. For instance, we have a special YouTube streamer on the homepage of LaFayette Heights’ site that always shows the most recent livestream. Or like the countdown ticker on Bethlehem Assoc’s homepage. If they created their own website independently, they would have to pay extra for every cool feature. Whereas with us, we take that expense on.

The social connect is the ability to put buttons on pages or posts that makes it easy for people to share a sermon or blog post on their own social media. For instance, this site for author Chip Warren is in process, and if you click on any of his posts to see the full article, you’ll see the share buttons at the bottom of each page.