By Wayne Epperson
This article appeared in the December 2005 issue of Web Host Industry Review magazine. Click here to subscribe for free.
January 3, 2006 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — A mission statement describes the ideological mindset of business leadership, conveying a business’s most high-minded efforts at posturing and performance. In many cases it can also serve as means of broadly defining the market niche a company intends to serve.
In the case of the particular segment of Web hosting providers that has chosen to occupy what it considers the Christian territory in the technology business, the mission statement can also illustrate a certain ideological or ethical “who” and “why.” Consider these examples:
“To offer a safe hosting environment for individuals and organizations, partnering with them in honoring Christ and Christian values while assisting them in fulfilling their ministry objectives.”
- GraceNet.com“To provide the Church with cost effective Web services.”
- ChurchQuest.com“To provide Christ-centered Web hosting in a user-friendly environment.”
- Truepath.comThese mission statements describe a specialized scope that sets Christian Web hosts apart from Web hosting providers in general. While the services they deliver may be similar technologically to those of more typically secular hosts, players in this niche market seek to separate themselves by proudly associating their beliefs with the services their businesses provide.
While catering to a very specific segment of society may limit the pool of potential customers, these hosts aren’t afraid of losing business by professing their faith. They believe there’s potential growth from the customers who share their values and will want to join their ranks.
Industry analysts have yet to identify a Christian-oriented market space for study concerning growth projections. But the growth at GraceNet.com may demonstrate the potential for growth in this niche market. The 11-year-old company, which owner Buzz Nofal says was the first Christian host on the Internet and one of the oldest of any hosts, has enjoyed slow but steady customer growth of about 25 percent a year for the past three years. And he says the market holds a healthy potential for continued growth.
“It seems this trend will continue,” says Nofal, “as we find the percentage of churches and ministries without any Web site at all is at about 70 percent.”
GraceNet’s customer base consists of about 40 percent churches, 30 percent ministries, and the remaining 30 percent split between Christian owned businesses and personal sites.
The company has expanded its services to include both UNIX and Windows-based hosting, along with e-commerce capabilities, search engine submission, site design services, streaming media and dedicated servers.
Nofal says his company’s most effective marketing efforts have been with search engine placement, and with pay-per-click advertising prior to that. More importantly, he says, more than half of the company’s new business comes through referrals ? one of the advantages of approaching a customer base that shares a set of values.
“It is very common to find churches, ministries and Christian owned businesses that want to affiliate with a host that holds the same overall values as they do,” says Nofal. “Often we are chosen, not because a secular host is bad in any way, but rather because the client feels more secure in a Christian environment.”
Gil Vidals says his motivation for founding Truepath.com, began in 1997 when he was a member of Tripod.com, one of the first personal publishing communities on the Internet. Among the variety of groups and sub-cultures represented on Tripod was an enormous Christian community presence.
“I thought the Christian community didn’t really seem to be excited to be next to another community that might be representing values that they were not in agreement with,” he says. “So I thought, what if there was a group that was just for Christians.”
He founded Truepath.com and set up free personal Web pages similar to those found on Tripod, growing quickly to 65,000 users. He later abandoned that approach in favor of a hosting model that attracts mainly churches, ministries and Christian individuals who share the church’s attitude and mentality.
The company, which now offers an array of hosting plans, restructured its pricing a few months ago to be more competitive and is launching a reseller program that it expects will be key to expansion. Truepath is also planning a program for customers who want to start their own hosting businesses and have Truepath provide their bandwidth.
With a bachelor’s degree in computer science and an MBA in international business, Vidals was director of international sales for a software company before founding Truepath. Most of Truepath’s growth can be credited to word-of-mouth marketing, with a heavy emphasis on search engine optimization. He recently put together a plan to do more marketing via email newsletters and other traditional means.
Troy Leaver and his wife Amy founded ChurchQuest.com three and a half years ago. He had served as an airborne Russian linguist in the US Air Force and then spent 15 years in technology consulting, primarily as a contract software developer, before launching the Web hosting company. She was a schoolteacher before the first of the couple’s three children was born. She now oversees ChurchQuest’s billing department and home-schools their three children.
“The primary motivation behind the establishment of ChurchQuest.com was the combination of my background in technology and my faith,” he says. “I felt compelled to somehow put my skills to use in service to the church.”
ChurchQuest doesn’t track the size or type of its customers, but Leaver estimates his customer base is comprised of about 60 percent churches, 20 percent ministries, charities, missionaries or Christian schools and 10 percent each of businesses and individuals.
Revenue has doubled over the past 12 months and the company intends to grow slowly with a projected annual growth rate of 25 percent.
The company is one of the few Christian Web hosts to offer both Web site hosting and streaming media services at a price affordable to any size congregation or ministry, he says.It provides a free online site builder for those inexperienced with HTML, and offers a newsletter manager and email marketing product to enable churches and ministries to communicate effectively online. Plans call for the addition of dedicated servers and an upgrade to the company’s site builder.
When ChurchQuest was getting started, Leaver used pay-per-click marketing with Overture.com, Kanoodle.com, SearchFeed.com and FindWhat.com for initial exposure. Over the past year, ChurchQuest has been completely passive in its marketing strategy. Its philosophy is that revenue is secondary to, and a direct result of, the strength of its service.
The unique position of a Christian-focused Web host is that those customers who would be inclined to use a Christian host tend to seek out just that. Customers are drawn to ChurchQuest by word of mouth or by natural search engine results, assisted by in-house search engine optimization.
And the payoff for those customers is that it is very unlikely a Christian Web host has set out to serve that particular small-market niche as a crass cash-grab. As his business continues to grow, Leaver sees the operation of ChurchQuest as something of a higher calling.
“The Internet,” he says, “like many tools technology has given us, can be used for good or evil. We encourage the church to use it for good, to spread God’s word, and provide some counterweight to the glut of depravity out there.”
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