I'm considering rebuilding our church's website, but haven't worked with audio much in Drupal. The most important resource on the site will be its sermon library. Considering the fact there will be a new 30-40 minute sermon on the site every week, I was hoping that experienced church website builders could give me an idea of how audio file storage affects how you approach site hosting, performance, etc...
Our church isn't large, so there isn't much of a budget for hosting, and if site storage is going to get larger and larger due to accumulated sermon files, I'm wondering how most smaller churches afford larger hosting plans. Also, I've used Drupal on the cheaper shared hosting plans and it ran like molasses. If I have to use a VPS, that will dramatically increase the hosting cost, especially for more storage.
Any thoughts from experienced church builders would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you,
Joe
Comments
Go with a VPS
I'd appreciate it if you got back to the group once your homework is done. I spent a few minutes looking and came up with a lot of alternatives, and I'm not currently looking for a solution here.
I've got our church on a Linode VPS, which I'm very happy with. We're on the smallest plan which is $20/month and has 24GB disk space. At, say, 40MB of audio per week, you'd need 10 years to soak up that space. But you need to arrange backup youself or subscribe to their $5/month backup service. Our sermons are shorter, but in three years my total backup size is now about 2GB.
That's assuming you want to host the audio yourself, which of course you don't need to. There are lots of services available, from complete services which include audio and video streaming and embedded players, to just offsite storage... One of the simplest, which lets you start for pocket change, is Amazon S3 storage at a little less than 0.10/GB/month for the storage and 0.12/GB for transfer. So, the 24GB you get on Linode would be $2.40/month plus, say, another twelve cents to stream a gigabyte -- depending on how popular those sermons are.
We have some files on S3, and the church bookkeeper doesn't even mention those costs... way, way far down in the noise.
-yg
We had our own VPS for a long
We had our own VPS for a long time. Started on Slicehost then moved to Linode. We finally got sick of all the work of keeping the server secure, up to date, etc. We now are very happy with Omega8. Check them out.
http://omega8.cc/hosted
You'll get 10GB of file storage for $34/month. If that's not enough, I'd consider using Amazon S3 as already mentioned.
Also, it's blazing fast.
Also, it's got openchurch and lots of other pre-installed distributions.
Oh, and did I mention that you don't have to manage your own server? :)
But even if you decide you want to get a VPS, I'd recommend using Omega8's Barracuda setup. It's quite amazing. http://drupal.org/project/barracuda
-Joseph
Storing certain files on
Storing certain files on Amazon S3 is a great idea. This blog post is a good starting point: How to Use Amazon S3 to Store Your Drupal Website Public Files
alternative options
You might look into 3rd party sermon hosting options that could be free. Another possibility (as mentioned before) would be use Amazon's S3 for hosting the actual files but just referencing them in Drupal and if it was too slow you could use their Cloudfront CDN to serve the files a bit faster, but that would only help if the file is loaded more than once per 24/hr period.
Its a more difficult approach on the technical side of things, but it could be pretty cheap if you use some of Amazon's free tier services. They have a micro instance that is free for a year for new subscribers or about $20 / mo. I'm running a few low traffic drupal sites, including a church site, off of them. If you combine that with Amazon S3 for hosting the media files, that might work.
Our solution
I ran into this issue about a year ago and you sound like you are in the same scenario as a church that we were. We were running on a shared server and there were just a lot of issues to wrestle with. I came acroos a great service at www.buzzsprout.com. The essence of the arrangement is that you upload your sermon to their site and they take care of publishing it on iTunes as well as create a weg page for you. Tha web page will be under the Buzzsprout domain but you can create a cname recrod to it and then use that lin in your site so that it becomes much more transparent. What I love about them creating the page is all the time it saves me. Also, with this service, they are doing the hosting so it solves that issue as well.
They have different pricing point, we pay $12 a month and is such a huge time saver that I love it. Also, their customer service has been wonderful as well.
On a related note, since we are a small church, we don't have many technically saavy people so getting them to perform the steps to take a sermon and get it to Buzzsprout, while simple to us, it just wasn't happenning for us. So, I ended up writing a autmated process that grabs the sermon and takes care of it for them.
If you need any help please contact me directly. I would be glad to assist.
Wow, thank you for all your
Wow, thank you for all your input!
My church is currently using a service that provides a templated church website. It's decent, but it doesn't allow us to deviate too far from the template and it lacks some in its ability to share to social networks. I like the flexibility that Drupal provides, theme-wise, and I also like how it handles content, especially using views. If there is robust, flexible and affordable service out there for churches, I'll look into it for them. I'll take a look at the www.buzzsprout.com service.
I would consider offsite storage for the files, but if it's a lot of customization to get that integrated then, I'm not sure I can handle that work.
I will look into what you all have said here, thank you!
That's the beauty of it, it's
That's the beauty of it, it's very easy to itegrate. I've walked in your shoes, so if I can assist in some way, either providing input or consulting, please let me know. I know I" ahve appreciated all the insights I have gained here over the past seveal years.
Church Hosting
Consider hosting your 'videos' (can be audio only with the slides as the 'video') on YouTube or Vimeo. Then, use GoogTube (http://drupal.org/project/googtube) so you can just paste the URL in the node and it will automagically become a youtube video when viewing. Then, you can event setup an RSS feed from a view that is your iTunes Podcast URL.
As for hosting the web site, let me know if you want one for free. I would just ask that you store the media on YouTube/Vimeo/etc.
Dreamhost?
If your site is small then I know Dreamhost offers free shared hosting for registered non-profits. That might help off-set the cost.
If you do go with them, I'd recommend installing using their prebuilt solution. I'm pretty sure they install on the same server as the database to increase the site's performance. If you install it yourself this is not an option.
FYI, I checked with Dreamhost
FYI, I checked with Dreamhost on this. They no longer offer the one-click drupal install. You have to do it the old fashioned way regardless.
Thanks for all the tips and
Thanks for all the tips and suggestions - especially the free hosting :). I'm still waiting on the church staff to see how they want to move forward. They may just ask me to maintain the templated solution, but I figured I would do my due diligence.
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