If the admin is going to set the value, where will you store the value he/she has chosen? It has to be stored someplace, you can't have the admin updating your CF template. So, you can write it to a file or you can write it to the database. I think the database is the best option, the query (if using cfqueryparam) will take a nano second to fetch, you could run the query 50 times per request and not get a performance hit.