The Hub is moving house - everything you need to know
The Sheldon Hub is our confidential online mutual support resource for people in ministry.
This Hub page is also posted here on the Sheldon Retreat page as the Hub will be offline for a bit - see below.
If necessary, updates on the transition will be on ourX/Twitter feed
What's happening?
We have completely rebuilt the Sheldon Hub from the ground up - "a new house". Everything from the old house will be moved over too, so although it will look and feel a bit different, we hope our Hubbing community will be able to quickly pick up where we left off.
When will the move be?
The provisional schedule is
Monday 19 October, 9am
🔒 Lock the door on the old Hub.
Monday–Wednesday
🚚 Load up the old Hub and move everything to its new home.
🧪 Test everything we can think of (and hopefully discover what we haven't thought of).
Thursday 22 October, 9am (or sooner if we're ready!)
🔓 Unlock the door on the new Hub.
🥂 Party time — drinks all round!
Why are we moving?
We couldn't afford to keep the Hub running in its old house. It was like a rambling Victorian vicarage with high ceilings and ridiculous heating costs. State of the art in its day, but no longer fit for purpose. The new house is smaller in one way but roomier in others. With modern insulation its heating costs will be just 20% of what they used to be. It also has better security locks, and because it's built with modern materials it will be cheaper to extend and repair in future.
Okay, give me the tech!
Want to know what's happening under the bonnet? (we're switching metaphors here). If you just love driving the Hub around then skip this section.
The current Hub is a bespoke site built and hosted by Webselect. They do a good job but it's been costing £10,000/year just to keep the Hub hosted and available, with high costs for even relatively modest changes to the site. Nearly 18 months ago we were pondering the future of the Hub and feeling a bit gloomy about its prospects as we couldn't keep raising the running costs for a free-to-use site. Darren has been the Hub's managing curator/editor for 8 years and he started wondering if he could re-create the site in Wordpress. WordPress is used by a huge number of online communities worldwide, and includes tools such as bbPress (forum) and BuddyPress (profile), so we wouldn't be doing this alone!
It's taken longer, harder journey than we first anticipated, and along the way Darren has become firm friends with one Claude CoWork — an AI coding assistant who has helped with writing plug-ins and documentation. Could we reproduce all the features of the original Hub? Webselect didn't think so which is why they wouldn't budge on their hosting costs.
And what about security? In a world of hackers, would it be properly secure? We paid Silvatech to spend a week trying to break into the new Hub — what's known as penetration testing. We're delighted that it passed with flying colours.
Along the way Sheldon Retreat appointed Switch Systems Ltd to support its main database and redesign its bookings application. As part of this work they have helped us introduce a new, more secure, login system. (It is using Open ID which is built on the OAuth authorisation framework.)
The new Hub will be hosted using Lightsail on Amazon's AWS platform. Again, we're choosing an established industry-standard framework for its resilience, security and cost efficiency.
What's next?
It will take a little while to get all the boxes unpacked and have the new Hub just as we like it. Everyone can be part of that by spending time in the Hub and adding broken links or anything else that doesn't work properly to Darren's list.
You may need to extend a little patience to the team as we sort out technical glitches we haven't foreseen.
After that we can think together about any changes or new features that would improve the Hub's ability to serve its community well. Darren expects to be able to respond to these suggestions much more quickly than we could afford to on the old Hub.
Hopefully all this will bring fresh energy to the Hub. Together we can re-imagine they ways in which the Hub will continue helping us to support one another doing healthy ministry together. So here's to the next decade of Hubbing — and beyond.
Particular thanks ...
- to The Henry Smith Trust whose major two year grant across 2025 and 2026 has enabled us to make the capital investment this transition needed
- to Darren for patient months and months of coding and learning
- to everyone else who has been part of building and belonging in this first decade, including other trusts and members donating regularly
Sarah Horsman 6th October 2026