E.B. Writers of Dallas

Wayne Epperson | Web Hosting Monthly
November 2005

Mission statements are the ideological mindset of business leadership, conveying a high-minded intent of posturing and performance. In many cases, they also can serve as a benchmark to broadly define niche markets.

In the case of the Christian Web hosting market space, mission statements tell the whole story of the “who” and “why” of the providers. Consider these three 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.”
- The 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.com

Those three mission statements embody the specialized scope that sets Christian Web hosts apart from other providers. While the services they deliver may rival those of secular hosts, players in this niche market stand out from competitors by proudly bearing witness to their beliefs on their Web sites for all to see.

Not only are they unafraid of losing business for professing their religion, they believe there’s growth to be had from the pool of potential customers who share their values and will want to join their ranks. This despite the fact that industry analysts haven’t identified the Christian-oriented market space for study concerning growth projections.

What has been happening at Atlanta-based GraceNet.com underscores the potential growth for 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 steady customer growth of about 25 percent a year for the past three years. And the market holds a healthy potential for continued growth.

“It seems this trend will continue as we find the percentage of churches and ministries without any Web site at all is at about 70 percent,” Nofal says.

The GraceNet customer base consists of about 40 percent churches, 30 percent ministries, and the remaining 30 percent split between Christian owned businesses and personal sites.

Its services have been expanded to include both UNIX and Windows-based hosting, as well as e-commerce capabilities, search engine submission, site design services, streaming media and dedicated servers.

“It was very common to find churches, ministries and Christian owned businesses that wanted to affiliate with a host that held the same overall values as they did. 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,” Nofal says.

The most effective marketing has been done with search engine placement and early on with pay per click. More than half of all new signups are referral business.

Gil Vidals says his motivation for founding Truepath.com of Escondido, Calif., goes back to 1997 when he was a member of Tripod.com, one of the first personal publishing communities on the Internet. Among the various sub-groups and sub-cultures represented on Tripod was an enormous presence of the Christian community.

“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. So, I thought, what if there was a group that was just for Christians,” Vidals says.

With that idea, he founded Truepath.com and set up free personal Web pages similar to Tripod and quickly grew 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 a Christ-centered attitude and mentality.

The company, which offers an array of hosting plans, restructured its pricing a few months ago to be more competitive and is launching a reseller program that is expected to be key to expansion. There also will be an upgrade path for customers who want to start their own hosting business with Truepath providing 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 the growth of Truepath can be traced to what he calls guerilla marketing, with a heavy emphasis on search engine optimization. He recently put together a plan to do more marketing via e-mail newsletters and other traditional means.

Troy Leaver and his wife Amy founded ChurchQuest.com in Cordova, Tenn., three and a half years ago.

He served as an airborne Russian linguist in the U.S. Air Force and then for 15 years was in technology consulting, primarily as a contract software developer, before launching the Web hosting company. His wife 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. I felt compelled to somehow put my skills to use in service to the church,” Leaver says.

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 in the business and individual categories.

Revenue has doubled over the past 12 months and the company intends to grow slowly and projects a 25 percent annual growth rate.

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 also offers a low-cost, feature rich newsletter manager/​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 site builder.

When the company 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 one where revenue is secondary to, and a direct result of, the strength of its service.

Customers are drawn to ChurchQuest by word of mouth or by natural search engine results, assisted by in-house search engine optimization.

As his business continues to grow, Leaver sees ChurchQuest’s mission as being one of a higher calling.

“The Internet, 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,” Leaver says.