We have a campus that is becoming a church plant in January. They are strongly considering RockRMS for their ChMS. They are trying to decide between using one of the preferred hosting providers that offers installatiin, hosting, and support of RockRMS or using a host that supports the needed requirements of RockRMS and doing it themselves to save money.
For those smaller churches using RockRMS, what are your recommendations? This campus runs 250-300 weekly to give you a size consideration.
The more I read I’m leaning towards recommending one of the preferred hosted providers so they can get support if needed. I will be around to support the campus somewhat after it becomes a church plant but the overall goal is for them to have a solution that they can handle on their own if need be.
Not sure of the details yet but we’ll be looking into hosting on azure using the $5000/year tech soup credits. I would think they could have a partner help set it up and maintain. I haven’t dove into this yet but that’s just what I think we might do
Elvanto is great for churches with limited IT and the cost will be less than using a hosted Rock provider especially for smaller churches.
My church uses elvanto and the built in capabilities for the cost are impressive.
Since you mentioned church plant, on a side note if you will be offering any kind of staff or guest internet ChurchDNS is free 6 months for church plants.
Brad, having someone there to help when you’re not around for this church plant is a great idea. We’ve been asking this question re: scope of how we do IT (even though I’m the IT guy). Part of the tension for us is determining when it’s appropriate for us to grow beyond 1 IT-type staff person, and where we can more-effectively provide great technology tools using a 3rd party support vendor. Whichever method is used for hosting your ChMS, understanding your support strategy is key in my experience.
@joejarvis is right, Azure is an option for hosting. I’m setup with the following for my testing processes as we evaluate our next steps (we’re ~2,500/wknd and 12k in our current DB, so your needs will be less).
A2 Standard plan VM for the IIS role, S2 for the Azure SQL plan. It’s reliable, and has performed well. It looks to be realistic for a 3rd party support vendor to maintain the Azure setup also. Just make sure the plant is eligible and they can get the philanthropies credit, Office365, etc.
