Ireland-specific
Hosting for GAA clubs, societies, and small charities
Committee-run websites have a specific set of constraints that most hosting advice ignores: nobody involved is a developer, the person who set it up might roll off the committee in a year, and the budget is coming out of gate receipts or membership fees, not a business account. Here's what that actually points you toward.
What committees usually need
- Fixtures, results, and news that a non-technical volunteer can update without training.
- A membership or sponsorship contact form.
- Maybe a simple lotto or raffle page — if you're running ticket sales online, that's a bigger conversation than plain hosting (payment handling, ticket number integrity, and compliance with Irish gambling/fundraising regulations all come into play, and it's worth treating as a separate project rather than bolting onto a brochure site).
- Something that survives committee turnover — whoever takes over in two years shouldn't need to be a developer to keep the lights on.
Why WordPress usually wins here
Unlike a lot of small sites, club sites genuinely do get updated often — match reports, fixture changes, event announcements — usually by whoever has ten minutes free that week, not the same person each time. That's exactly the case where a dashboard-based CMS earns its keep over a static site: no one needs to touch code to post a result. See our WordPress vs static site guide for the fuller reasoning.
Keeping it cheap and low-maintenance
- Shared hosting is enough. Club sites rarely have the traffic to justify anything more, and unlimited-site plans let you host the main club site plus any sub-pages under one account and one bill.
- Turn on automatic backups and don't think about it again. This matters more for committee sites than any other kind, because there's no guarantee the next person to touch the site will know what they're doing.
- Write down the login details somewhere the committee can find them — sounds obvious, but "nobody knows the hosting login" is one of the most common ways club sites quietly die.
- Avoid anything that needs a developer on retainer. If a plugin or service requires ongoing technical maintenance, it's the wrong choice for a volunteer-run site, however good it looks in a demo.
On raffle and fundraising pages specifically
If the plan includes selling raffle tickets or running a fundraiser online, treat that as its own project rather than a page bolted onto the club site. It touches payment processing compliance, ticket number integrity, and — depending on how it's structured — Irish gambling and fundraising law. A simple brochure site doesn't need any of that; a ticket-selling platform does, and it's worth building or commissioning separately with those requirements in mind from the start.