How to Find the Best HOA Website Hosting—and Build a Great Site

So what should you expect from your HOA website hosting provider? That depends on the full range of features your community expects. Before you even begin researching these providers, start with an internal research project of your own, one for which you may want to ask other community administrators, or even your entire community, to provide input.

It’s difficult to find the right HOA website provider—unless and until you narrow down the features you need so you can evaluate providers based on whether they offer what you want. You can have the most beautiful, compelling, and informative HOA website content on the internet, but if you use the wrong host provider, you may have trouble showcasing your descriptions and images. That’s because not all HOA website hosting companies offer a full range of features that combine user friendliness with the functionality that home owners associations expect.

Here’s how to evaluate these providers and find the right match for your homeowners association.

How severe? Well, imagine going to buy a new car and having to pay extra for windshield wipers, a heater, and a steering wheel. Never mind leather seats and a premium sound system: We’re talking about the basics of vehicle functionality. Those free HOA websites come with limitations that are just as stringent. If your community has more than a certain number of residents, you may need to upgrade to a paid plan to support your full membership—and you can forget about using most free HOA websites to collect online payments. Eventually, instead of figuring out what you can do with a free HOA website hosting plan, you’re stuck trying to work around constrained feature sets.

Of course, free trials are not the same thing as free HOA websites. Many providers that offer affordable but full-featured HOA website software also give you the option of a hands-on demonstration period and even a free trial. In fact, those demo periods and free trials offer you the best opportunity of all to ensure that a specific provider meets your community’s needs. While you conduct a free trial, ask the provider about software updates and new features. The last thing you want to do is to sign up with an HOA website hosting provider with outdated software that’s prohibitively difficult to update, much less enhance with new capabilities.

You’ll find two obvious sources of community website examples. Both will require some research on your part to identify, but the research will pay off in the long run.

First, look at the websites of other home owners associations. Start with communities in your own neck of the woods. Look at how they present themselves, the types of features they offer, and, perhaps most importantly, identify their HOA website provider. You’ll need to rank them based on community size, because some features may require a different implementation for a large community than for a much smaller one.

For example, smaller communities may not try to automate some aspects of community administration simply because of the small number of properties in their neighborhoods. Their HOA website hosting provider may offer these features, but they may decide not to take advantage of them. Conversely, larger communities may consider administrative automation to be a must-have feature.

By “administrative automation,” we’re talking about HOA website software that automatically sends out invoices for routine, recurring dues and fees, and that also transmits late notices as well as payment confirmations. Frankly, even smaller communities should take advantage of these types of conveniences, just because of the amount of administrative time they free up for other tasks that may not lend themselves to an automated approach.

Along with other homeowners associations’ websites, your research into HOA website examples should include the sample or demonstration websites that we’ve already mentioned from HOA website hosting providers. You can make some informed decisions about the appearance and flexibility of an HOA website hosting providers software offerings based on demonstration sites. They build these demo sites to showcase their capabilities, so you should expect to see virtually every feature they offer on display.

It’s not enough to know whether a specific HOA website hosting provider offers a particular feature. You also need to see how thoroughly they implement and integrate that feature into the rest of their software. Their demonstration sites are a great way to discover these things.

Not all neighborhood websites require every one of these features, but your criterion should be to find an HOA website hosting provider that offers more resources than you need—right now. Every community’s needs continue to grow, even HOAs that are fully built out and owner occupied. Without more options that you can add as you go, it’s tough to build community websites with the real-life ability to keep up with their communities.