Utilizing the proper audio storage for your church has to be one of the most ignored items of importance. However, if you have an online presence and are incorporating a podcast into it, this is an article that you will want to pay particular attention to.
Recently, I moved Crow Mountain Baptist Church’s website to another hosting provider. There was a lot of behind the scenes reasoning for this, however, I was not aware of exactly how large the site had become with both visual as well as audio content.
Anyone who has ever mastered down the audio from a morning worship service realizes that the size of the file can get a little large, depending on the length of the content. Furthermore, as you begin collecting a vast array of these in your database, your site’s overall size will become large and bloated very quickly.
PowerPress has become one of the all-time leading favorites for churches to use that are utilizing the power of WordPress to deliver their online content. It’s fairly straight forward to set up, as well as propagate your feed into other platforms such as iTunes and Google Play. That being said, traditionally, many just upload the audio file directly through the episode page on a per post basis.
However, over a period of time, your media library begins to swell due to the overwhelming amount of audio files that you have uploaded.
This is where you will want to utilize a separate hosting provider to handle your audio files only and, then use their connections between an RSS Feed and other tools to connect your sermon series back into your website.
There are other audio hosting providers available as well such as Libsyn, SoundCloud, and Spreaker. Each is a unique as the other, and depending upon your storage needs and monthly bandwidth requirements may be worth taking a look into each on to see who has the best package that will serve the purpose of your church’s sermon audio streaming.
However, since the PowerPress plugin is used so frequently across many WordPress installations for churches, I would strongly suggest looking into BluBrry’s hosting packages as it makes connecting to them via the plugin a little more straightforward without a lot of guesswork involved throughout the setup process. Additionally, they also cover video as well as audio.
In addition to having more freedom by using any one of the aforementioned audio hosting providers, this ensures that you will not be bogging down your site’s servers with copious amounts of audio files.
Also, bear in mind that if people are not subscribing to your podcast via one of the major streaming providers, such as iTunes or Google Play, if they choose to listen directly from your website, this will eventually have an impact upon your bandwidth allocations.
It just makes sense to let someone else handle the heavy load of the storage process and utilize their servers to deliver your audio sermons from your ministry website.
If you need additional information or assistance with this, please do not hesitate to contact me.
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