I am researching employing CiviCRM for a new client that needs a CRM solution.
This is a small, local, membership based non-profit (~200 members). They have hired me to create a site that can manage their membership, including recurring membership payments, bulk email to the members and reminders to renew memberships, etc.
It looks like using CiviCRM with Webform integration is a great solution, but I'm running into concerns about hosting this. The client has a very limited budget and would like to spend less than $100/year on hosting.
But my research and comments to my post at forum.civicrm.org (http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,34564.0.html) have led me to think using CiviCRM for this client isn't possible unless they are willing to spend more on hosting.
So my question for this group:
- Have you successfully run CiviCRM in a shared hosting environment?
- Is CiviMail the main resource issue, or is any CiviCRM installation going to need VPS hosting to run without problems?
- If you have run CiviCRM well on a shared host, what hosting have you used?
- Does anyone have hosting recommendations?
Thank you.
Comments
I think the best place to
I think the best place to post this question is at http://drupal.stackexchange.com/
OK, I will...
...and thank you so much Coleman for all your help and suggestions in the discussion over at the CiviCRM forum.
I just thought I'd get some opinions over here for hosting options.
Do you have an SMTP server
Do you have an SMTP server you can run your email through? Or if it's really only 200 contacts, gmail could work.
I've found that most of my hosting issues are around bulk email -- I can run CiviCRM on a tiny digitalocean droplet ($5/mth) but that's not doing bulk messages (lists around 10,000 contacts).
I'm also trying out http://civihosting.com/ (but again, haven't done bulk email from there).
For large emails, I use civistmp.org (starts at $15/mth).
Yes, it is really only 200
Yes, it is really only 200 contacts at this point. It could grow, of course, but not to likely more than 300 over a few years.
And the bulk emails are only going to be 1 or 2 a month to that whole group. There will also likely be a few small, occasional administrative emails as well (e.g. notification of membership applications to the board of directors - under 10 members). Reminders to renew membership each December. etc.
But are you saying there is a way to use CiviCRM but use a different server than the hosting server for outgoing bulk emails? How is this done? And does it require using CiviMail but linking it to an external server? Part of the goal is to reduce administration time, so I don't want to require the email admin to manage a separate tool...
The org currently uses iContact for bulk emails to the membership, but would like to switch to a CRM based solution so both the admins and members don't have to manage their iContact subscription as well as manage their online profile on the website. Both would be updated/managed and synced by the member updating their CRM data. And they want to have nice templates for the bulk emails, etc.
I don't think they can afford to pay for something like civistmp ($15/month) on top of paying for hosting the site for $8/month.
You can set your email as a
You can set your email as a local SMTP to the hosting server, but usually is a mail server of some sort -- http://book.civicrm.org/user/current/advanced-configuration/email-system... has info about setting up gmail as your mailer.
Civi Hosting
I would recommend Omega8.cc
They run Aegir Hosting for Drupal and provide Civi-Drupal as a platform. And yes, as far as I know there is no way to run this without paying more for hosting - Drupal and CiviCRM require VPS and will not run on shared hosting. You would most likely have to run your mail separately if you are using Civimail. If you have any more questions, feel free to contact me. Best of luck! -Jen
Yes, you can run CiviCRM on
Yes, you can run CiviCRM on shared hosting but you'll need to find a decent shared host that isn't maxing out their servers.
Site5 used to be pretty decent but recently I've noted that their servers are a little slow. Hostgator seems pretty devent too. I haven't messed with Bluehost for years; they used to be terribly underpowered but I've heard they've improved. By all means stay away from cheap over-used, under-powered hosts like Go Daddy (perhaps the worst).
For a first rate overview of CiviCRM how-to recipes get the CiviCRM Cookbook: http://it-ebooks.info/book/2950/
It's the best reference for getting things going and configuring email via GMail, etc...
Also, like colemanw suggested, get this question over to http://drupal.stackexchange.com/. There are a bunch of helpful folks just itching to answer your questions there.
I haven't run CiviCRM but I
I haven't run CiviCRM but I have happily run Drupal at Digital Ocean on a $5 per month 512 MB ram "droplet" virtual server. Of course it's a virtual server, not shared hosting, so you or someone needs to know how to set it up. Ubuntu 14.04 LTS is supported until April 2019 so that is probably a good choice.
If they could possibly stretch to $10 per month then that would buy a 1 GB server at either Linode or Digital Ocean. I think both are good although my feeling is that Linode is just a little more solid and reliable. I've just finished moving multiple sites from a BlueHost reseller account to Linode.
If CiviCRM can talk to an external SMTP server (not just the local process) then I think Mandrill will do 12,000 emails per month for free. They make it easy to setup SPF and DKIM on the domain which helps you get past spam filters.